The thing I've learned is that headphones and IEMs can sound completely different to different people, just because of differences in the shape of your ears and ear canal.
I bought some custom IEMs and had the opportunity to test ~10 of the super high-end options from several different brands. I found that there was no correlation whatsoever between price or even brand and how good they sounded to me. The technician I was working with said he observed the same thing all the time in the professionals he worked with. He'd have musicians on the same instruments in the same roles in the same group come in and all walk put with completely different products.
IEMs are the most personal but even headphones have the problem.
Because of this, my recommendation is that you make purchasing decisions in one of two ways:
- Learn how to EQ to get a sound you like. Purchase based on objective measurements like frequency response curves to find products that require minimal EQ to match your preference.
- Only buy after listening, or buy, listen and return if that's an option for you.
I recommend avoiding purchases based on reviews that make subjective judgements about the sound.
If you want to learn more, I like the videos/articles/forums of Headphones.com and Crinacle.
I came to the same conclusion a while ago. You can get a lot of mileage by tweaking EQ. For me almost all headphones felt flat until I tried a bunch of studio monitors. They are not portable but I’ve been using a cheap AKG K72 pair at home and it has been great. Your experience may vary but do try a bunch of options, as suggested by parent.
1) I wouldn't 100% agree with this. It's not that speakers sound "better" than headphones, it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology (e.g. shape of their ears, ear canal) but the other things do. When you use headphones, you still use your whole ear canal but the sound is distorted by how the headphones interact with your ears, particularly the pinna. When you use IEMs, you only use part of your ear canal and skip the pinna entirely, so the sound can't sound as natural as speakers do unless you compensate to reintroduce the effect of the pinna/canal. This is all possible to varying degrees. EQ helps a lot and there are ways to measure HRTF as well.
> it's that speakers don't require any tuning to match a person's specific physiology
But they do interact with the environment. Having walls which reflect the sound can mess with the sound. Changing speakers won't help. Changing headphones can help.
It depends somewhat on the specific campaign but generally in right-leaning Swiss politics, "immigrant" includes Europeans as well. I think that's definitely the case in this initiative since the text of the initiative requires ending freedom of movement with the EU.
At 9.5M, the government has to start limiting the issuance of residence permits and start renegotiating international commitments that drive population growth.
At 10M, the government has to terminate the free movement agreement with the EU.
The right-leaning parties bring up something like this every few years. They always get shot down.
"Against the Swiss constitution" doesn't really make sense here. This is a popular initiative; if accepted, it amends the Swiss constitution. Here's the text: https://www.bk.admin.ch/ch/d/pore/vi/vis555t.html
Unless you want to argue that this violates the mandatory provisions of international law, I don't think you have an argument. The text of the amendment specifically clarifies that any of the actions it mandates on parliament have to adhere to the mandatory provisions of international law, so I don't think that's an avenue you can pursue.
You are right, I forgot how xenophobic my native Switzerland is. Unlike e.g. Germany, they don't really have something in the constitution regarding helping immigrants.
However, they do have Art. 7 (human dignity) and Art. 8 (equality before law), which applies not only to Swiss citizens, but to all humans. I don't know about you, but I would think that excluding refugees who need help because we already have 10M people in the country would be against their human dignity.
I live in Switzerland where these are available. A Cowa 58 [0] costs CHF 4692 [1] and stores up to 13.5kWh. If you're heating the water with a heat pump, that's ~6kWh of electricity, so ~CHF 782/kWh.
I'm in the process of installing a 33kWh battery and the battery + inverter cost CHF 13600 in total for just the hardware, so ~CHF 482/kWh.
If you add solar panels, the inverter does double-duty producing AC from both the battery and the panels. The battery does double-duty producing both hot water and allowing you to use solar energy outside the times when the sun is shining.
That said, having ordered a heat pump recently and being in the process of having solar + batteries installed, the amount of electrical work needed for the solar/battery install is substantially higher than was needed for the heat pump and here, the labour costs quite a lot, pushing the upfront cost difference even higher.
I think that's where these heat storage things fit in: they have a much lower upfront cost. No matter how cheap the battery, for it to be useful in a Swiss residence, it needs to output a substantial amount of 3-phase power (3-phase is standard here, even in most apartments), which means you need to spend a couple thousand Francs on an inverter and electrical work. These heat storage devices are quite cheap and don't even need someone qualified to handle refrigerants, I imagine they could be installed by a normal plumber.
That reduced upfront cost makes them far more accessible than electrical batteries, at least for now.
I don't know what it's like where you're living but here in Switzerland it's completely normal to have one heat pump that does both. Here there's a lot of floor heating, which also uses water, so you usually just run one loop to the "boiler" (a water tank with a copper loop for the water from the heat pump to circulate through) and one through the floor and have a valve to switch which is running through the heat pump.
I got it in October so most of the time I've had it has been <10C. It's produced 806.3 kWh of heating for hot water and 6587.2 kWh for the floor heating. It consumed 302.7 kWh and 1801.4 kWh respectively, for a COP of 2.66 and 3.66.
That's a different kettle of fish entirely, largely because with the heat pump water heater they're pulling the heat from the inside of your house, forcing you to move it twice when it is cold out. With a combined unit you only move it once, as the other side of the unit is outside.
That's why they're so great for warm climates though. The water heater also cools your house, especially as that heat is then lost down the drain. Everybody in the south should be jumping on these.
FWIW, the incumbent ISP in Switzerland, Swisscom, tried to roll out XGS-PON but our "Internode", Init7, fought them in court on the grounds that it was anticompetitive, since it locks every provider into a single technology. They won.
Now customers can choose. Nearly every ISP chooses the easy way and has the customer connect through Swisscom's XGS-PON but Init7 in particular has instead built out their own routers in POPs around Switzerland so that customers can have a physical fibre directly to their network. It's just plain ethernet with DHCP so you can use whatever equipment you want. It's also allowed Init7 to do something none of the other providers can do: offer 25Gbps symmetric service at no extra cost (beyond a one-off installation cost for the more expensive SFP modules).
I haven't had to find a charger or think about them in over a year. I just plug it in when I get home and I'm done.
I did a ~10000km road trip around western Europe and while I started with ABRP, I switched to just driving normally and stopping at an EV charger when I was below around 20% and happened to see a sign.
I'm not saying this is the case everywhere, I opted for an ICE engine when I visited Australia for example. "Half the utility of normal cars" is utter nonsense in my experience though.
The thing is, if you just plug in when you get home, you likely drive very few miles. Id be for a $10k brand new EV with 100 miles of realistic range (i.e not having to keep speed below x). These don't exist. You pay for higher range in even cheapest EV, so you are paying for utility that you don't use most of the time.
There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point…
And if it’s sitting at home for 14 hours per day, a normal 120V outlet will get you 70 miles of charge. That’s fine for most commutes, but if you actually need more than that, you can use a dryer outlet that gets you like 4x that charging rate (280 miles of range over that 14 hour charge). Or installing a proper wall charger will get you twice that again, but it’s really not necessary.
>There aren’t any new gas cars for sale at that price point
Yes, because a modern gas engine that makes a measly 112 hp is still a very complex piece of machinery that requires a lot of precision manufacturing and assembly.
An EV is dead simple by comparison. To make a 100 mile range ev, you don't need fancy motors. Industrial AC motors will work.
And as for charging, this requires you to be at your house every few days. If thats your average use case, you don't need high mileage EVs.
I guess, what's the general breakdown of cost between engine and the rest of the car, and the amortized R&D?
Most commuters use it mostly for commuting, but also day trips, and 100 miles is really cutting it close for day trip round trips in a lot of US metro areas.
Didn't you read the article? It's kinda hard to miss the Lenovo all through the press release.