Ear buds for running

I enjoy listening to music a lot. Most times the only way achieve an undisturbed listening experience is only with ear phones of all sorts. I have and have had several pairs of open and closed phones from brands such as AKG, Sennheiser, Sony or Pioneer. Saying this I want to say that I have a lot of experience of excellent sound quality which brings up the next subject:

Can you expect good sound quality when running? Short answer: no. The long answer consists of several factors.

I tried out a properly fitting good sounding ear plug type phones for a few times. During these times it was the mechanical sound from the feet running along the chords and body translating into a thump at each foot stride. Eventually this was self eliminated By the plug coming out loose due to the movement of the chord. An additional draw back is the noise isolation which I don't want when running.

The next choice was an old pair of 90s style ear buds. With these there is no bass to speak off under 200 Hz region, other than that te sound is decent. You can hear when something or someone is approaching you from behind. The drawback with these is that they keep falling out from place as you run.

Thus the purchase of a new pair of ear buds with hangers. These are Pioneer SE-E11 open air dynamic headphones as they call them. I found hardly any reviews for these so I decided to say a couple of words on these. The good thing is that they feel comfortable to the ear and stay in place while running. These are lacking in bass as the other ear bud type of headphones most often are. The chord mad a slight thumping noise when using these under a mit. Pricewise they are on the cheap side costing 17€.

To sum it up, I am quite happy with a cheap pair of ear bud with hanger type headphones for running. I would not justify buying an expensive pair as they would block out the background noise vital in this application.

CyclePro Sinner trail bike

 

It is quite a rare bike as it was only manufacterd in 2002 to 2003 during the era when the brand was owned by the Swedish Hallman company.

Brief history of the brand can be found on the following page http://www.cykelhobby.com/cyclepro.html At the time it was labeled as a freeride bike but on todays standards with 130 mm of travel it is more of a trail bike and I dont't think it would be wise to take it in a downhill situaton

 

 

The bike is built on an aluminium frame with rear suspension. CyclePro called the suspension design as StarLink, which is very close to a Virtual Pivot design. It is realized very well with needle bearings on the upper and lower links and ball bearings on the mid link. The upper needl bearings are sealed with o-rings. The stock rear shock was a RST58, now replaced by a FOX RP23 Boost Valve. There are three travel settings on the shock link which translates to leverage ratios from 2 - 2.5 and 3. 

 

With the chosen suspension design these stress is concentated into two of the pivots. On the lower link the pivots seem to be under dimensioned which has caused the inner ring of the needle bearings to develop some wear. This is a non-standard inner ring with an inner diameter of 10 mm, outer diameter 12 mm and lenth 48 mm. The needle bearings themselves are standard units of type HK1210. After some research and luck I have found out that the identical suspension design is used in several bicycle models of Mongoose, the Teocali to name one. Mongoose owners have discovered this weakness as well one owner has put a lot of effort into designing an alternative made of a high-tech plastic material. His description can be found here http://www.fogma.co.uk/foggylog/archive/365.html This seems like a brilliant idea and my plan is to fabricate bearings out of POM.

  

The front fork is a Marzocchi Dirt Jumper 2 with 130mm travel, this model only has an adjustable pre-tension installed into a Cane Creek headset. It has a mixed groupset with Shimano XT rear derailleur, LX front derailleur and gear levers, Promax hydraulic brakes, Truvativ Husselfelt chainrings.

 

I have performed a major service by cleaning and regreasing all the pivots, changing brake fluid, and adjusting all the cables. Now I just have to wait that the snow sill melt away and the trails get rideable here in southern Finland.

 

RST58 MTB rear shock rebuild

This is a coil shock with hydraulic damping with adjustable rebound damping as well as a lockout. When I got the damper there was absolutely no compression damping, the rebound damping was fully functional. I couldn't find any information on this RST 58 damper, also tried contacting RST Europe but didn't get any response. So I searched for other damperes with a similar design to get an idea of how its put together.  Rockshox Super Deluxe seems similar in design and Vincent had dismantled one and posted a photo with all the parts, which helped me a lot: http://www.retrobike.co.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?t=178217 thanks for that!

I went on and disassembled the shock into pieces, shown in the picture below:

The root cause was obviously a broken O-ring of the upper reservoir cap. The compression side air and fluid escaped through the hole in the seal. Another problem was a worn rod bushing which caused the shaft to leak. I measured all of the installed o-rings, went on and replaced most of them. After replacing the bushing and seling rings I put the parts together and filled 5W fully synthetic shock oil through the hole where the compression damping valve screws in (note that the thread of the valve base is left-handed) I did several rounds of filling oil into the small aperture and moving the piston back and forth to purge air out. I filled as much oil as I could, now the shock works perfectly.

Alpine Musicsafe Pro vs Etymotic ER20

I have been using Etymotic ER20 plugs occasionally for over a year. I decided on these after reading numerous positive revies on them. However, the plug starts to itch in my ears after an hour of use. Last week I decided to test a pair  of Alpine Musicsafe pro plugs during a club night. I had them for nearly six hours in use and didn't feel them itching at all. The attenuation was good and it was easier to have a conversation with the plugs than it would have been without and finally the best part...no ringin ears after the night out!

mp3DirectCut

An excellent piece of software for editing mp3 recordings of a band rehearsal, a gig, or whatever live situation that you will want to edit. A lot of mp3 recorders such as the Zoom H2 is able to save the recording in mp3 format. mp3DirectCut is able to edit the mp3 file directly without the need of decoding or encoding.

Here is how it works for a recording of a band rehearsal:

1. open the mp3 file
2. remove unwanted pauses from the file by setting a beginning and an ending to an area to be deleted. Scroll the yellow dashed line to the beginning of the part to be deleted and press the "Set begin" button. Scroll the yellow dashed line to the end of the region to be deleted and press the "set end" button. Hit the delete button to remove the selected area.  Repeat this for all parts that you want to delete. Note: At this point the software will not physically delete anything, the parts only appear as deleted.
3. Scroll all the way to the beginning. Set a que flag by pressing CTRL+Q. Press "Go to next edit range button" and set the que flag. Repeat for all ranges.
4. Select save split and define a folder. mp3direct cut will now save all the parts defined with cue flags into separate mp3 files.

To equalize the audio levels of all the mp3 files select batch processing select normalize and overwrite originals.

Ear muffs for musicians

I have measured SPLs at our bands practice between 90-100dB(A) - in such level hearing protection is a must. I started of with Etyomotic plugs, but discovered that the treble was too harsh and after a few weeks of using them started to have ringing in the ears.I then moved to various foam plugs but none of them felt comfortable during a 2-hour band practice. The next step was using a pair of regular ear muffs which were much more comfortable than any of the plugs but which distorted the sounds too much.

After the search for the ultimate ear muff I found the Howard Leighting clarity C1 Muff. This muff is optimized for a equal attenuation throughout the frequency range. I definitely recommend this for band practice situations.

Zoom H2 Handy Recorder level meter vs true SPL

  The sound level meter of the Zoom can be used for a rough indication of hearing protection.
I did a quick test to determine what the real sound level is at a particular level meter reading of the Zoom H2 recorder. With the gain at M setting a reading of zoom level meter roughly equals to following  SPLs measured with a calibrated SPL meter
-18 dB on the Zoom sound level meter equals to 85 dB(A)
-12 dB equals to 96dB(A)
- 6 dB equals to 100 dB(A)
with the gain at L setting -24 dB on the Zoom sound level meter equals to 98dB(A)

 If the level meter stays at -18dB or more for a prolonged time then you should use hearing protection. Of course this is not an accurate method but it's definitely better than nothing.