BROWN EYED GIRL

A very interesting thing happened tonight. I was sitting in a nearby Timmy's, finishing off a novel that I'm reading (The Poet by Michael Connelly). I had Archos plugged into my ears. Despite the fact that the ear buds have rubber gaskets on them to completely seal off external sounds from going to the ear canals, I can still hear a little of what's going when I'm in the 2-3 seconds of silence between each song. On one such occasion, I heard a song piping through the in house system at Timmy's. Well, the next song that came on Archos was exactly that same one that I heard on the in house system: Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl! I had to take off the ear buds just to confirm...

Another cool thing that I've just discovered about the latest firmware for the Archos is that it has this new feature called MDP (I forget what it stands for). Basically, it's an algorithm that compensates for the limited bass responsiveness of your typical headphones/ear buds (although I'm very impressed by the Sony buds that I have right now, especially because of the bass response achieved by having the rubber gaskets). It does this by emphasizing some of the first and second harmonics of low frequency sounds, thereby tricking the brain in 'hearing' the low end bass notes because it senses the heightened harmonics. Pretty cool!