Noise canceling headphones are great at blocking engine noise (or other constant, mostly low-frequency sound) but can't do anything about voices. If they are reducing the volume of voices it is only because they are isolating your ears.
For me, they are not enough. I would still go insane, even with my QC3s, if voice conversations were allowed. I think SMS/data only is the perfect compromise -- allows all those crazies who can't be without the communications teat for a couple hours to get their fix, but doesn't subject the rest of us to rage-inducing yelling.
If Y% of the market uses IE and Z% uses Firefox, Opera, etc... well, as Z grows, supporting only IE gets stupider and stupider.
True, and, further, more than Z% of the market will not use your site. Even though I have IE available to me, and even though 90% of IE-only sites render just fine if I spoof the user agent, I usually don't go back to sites that are IE-only because I assume the operator will be similarly myopic in other respects.
Consider also that non-IE users are likely to be disproportionately tech-savvy, and therefore will probably have an outsize word-of-mouth impact.
I don't know how many users feel like me, but it's got to be enough to change the "extra effort > cost of lost users" equation a bit...
Funny you should mention the 555. I demoed one in my listening room awhile back, back to back with a B&K ST-2140. I went with the B&K, although I wasn't really happy with either one; I felt they both covered up detail a little too much.
The Class D is a Sony 5000, which has some interesting technology that has ironed out a lot of the typical flaws of Class D without sacrificing the advantages (non-phase-shifted lows, very precise highs, flat frequency response). It isn't as powerful as the B&K but both my ears and my calibration discs like it better. Once it broke in, it was as if someone had cleaned out my ears, when compared to the B&K. The soundstage is deeper, I hear more details, and I hear more differences in timbre. Voices are not quite so "radiant," but I'd rather hear what's actually there.
And, don't worry, on this system (as opposed to an iPod) I'm not using lossy sources (unless I have no other choice). Sometimes I'm using my old Sony ES CD player (as a transport, obviously, since you don't want to do D/A conversion on signals feeding a Class D amp), sometimes I'm just playing losslessly compressed tracks out of iTunes through the built-in SPDIF on my PowerMac G5.
The Sony doesn't have great A/D conversion. Analog sources (radio or vinyl) sound a little strange. But the (good) digital ones rock my world.
If you want to wince when listening to this system, feed it harpsichord music compressed to 160kbps...;-) it's actually a good way to demonstrate the problems with compression to fidelity-ignorant people.
So true. Film is a useful analogy. People seem to find that black-and-white, sepia, blurry, long-exposure, etc., etc. inspire certain emotions independently of the content of the photo. I think this is exactly what goes on with vinyl and with those who prefer older recordings.
Myself, I have to confess I don't really understand why that's so desirable. The great photographers for me are not the ones who try to manipulate the emotions with effects, but the ones who show me something, already in the world, in a new way which I would never have imagined.
And just like I want to see the world in photos, I want to hear a musician on recordings. I don't want to hear an audio engineer or a technology trying to manipulate me. I want to hear a musician (or group) playing.
Thus my perhaps-too-dismissive responses to vinyl proponents. I need to step back and accept that some people *like* to hear a less faithful reproduction, and that that's OK. I should only get irritated when people claim that vinyl has higher fidelity.
You're being fooled by distortion. Your vinyl isn't even close to as accurate as your CDs.
Your CDs have slightly fucked up high frequencies that *may*, if you have golden ears, make the recording sound somewhat harsher than a live performance and screw up your soundstage a bit. They also have a signal-to-noise ratio of >100dB, huge dynamic range, high-voltage output (for minimal noise after the D/A conversion stage), and they don't require equalization from your components.
Your vinyl has a signal-to-noise ratio of 50dB if you're lucky, low-voltage output that virtually guarantees that some level of 60Hz hum will get into the signal, a shitload of equalization by your record player, and very low dynamic range. You only have any highs at all (and the soundstage they bring) if your needle and record are both perfect. The reason you think your vinyl sounds better is precisely because of these traits. You hear them as "mellow," "warm," and "not harsh." Maybe you like to be protected in a bubble from what your recordings actually sound like, and that's fine, but what you're hearing is not better or more accurate sound... it's precisely the opposite.
Absolutely right. As usual when someone posts something really smart that bucks the CW my mod points are taking a tropical vacation.
Sadly, CDs are not great either, for different reasons. Where vinyl introduces the uncontrollable variables you talk about (thermal variations, electrical noise affecting the very-low-voltage signal, never-ideal disc and needle quality, dust) CDs, because of their low sampling frequency (which should have been 96kHz from the start), mangle the waveforms at high frequencies. Still, CDs come a lot closer to delivering accurate reproduction in any form of real-world use. For starters, you just can't always keep dust away from your needle...
As for amps, it has always amazed me that people *love* the ones that introduce distortion and claim the accurate ones are "cold" and "technical." It's not the amp's job to be warm and emotional; it's the musician's. I run away from any component that advertises "warm" or "musical" sound; those are code words for distortion.
My own setup consists of various digital sources playing through a big Class D amp into speakers with poly cone woofer/midrange and planar tweeters. Everyone complains the sound is too cold. But it's dead-accurate with test signals and I can actually hear the detail in my recordings, not just "warmth" that may make me feel good but isn't there.
Beside, Mac doesn't let you run OSX under virtualization anywhere!
Apple's (not "Mac's"; a Mac is a computer, not a company) license doesn't say anything about virtualization. It requires you to run the OS on Apple hardware. If you want to run OS X on a virtual machine within Linux or Windows on your Mac, that's just fine.
Many sound cards (particularly newer ones) resample everything to 48kHz before outputting.
Wow. Just wow. I had no idea. The built-in SPDIF in my Macs doesn't do this; neither does the older Creative card in my Win/Lin box. That certainly would #*&@ everything up. If I bought a card and discovered it was sending 48 kHz PCM to my receiver when playing tracks ripped from CD I'd probably think it was set up wrong and try to reconfigure it. Thanks for setting me straight.
About the jitter, I understand that SPDIF is unclocked and that in some cases the timing could get so far off that there would be problems. But I'd expect those problems not to manifest themselves as imperceptibly worse sound, but as horrible artifacts or even just noise.
Any sound card with a SPDIF output hooked up to a reasonable quality A/V receiver (with SPDIF input) and standalone speakers. (Get the decoding and analog out of the PC and you'll be fine.) Get bigger speakers and skip the subwoofer. For the card, receiver, and speakers together you can get what you need for under $500 for perfectly clear and decent sound. (Of course, you can --not "will" -- get better sound if you spend more.)
99% of music is indistinguishable from CD in 256kbps AAC (I don't have many 256k MP3s).
But some waveforms are just too hard to compress. In particular, harpsichords, solo classical string instruments, and solo electric guitar (through some filters) start to sound strange even at 256k.
A good but not foolproof way to figure out what is going to be troublesome to compress is to compress it losslessly using FLAC or ALAC and look at the resulting mean bitrate. Most stuff that compresses to between 400-600kbps, which is most music, will be fine at 256k. Some of my music, though, exceeds 900kbps lossless, and I even have a couple tracks over 1000kbps (where uncompressed PCM = 1411kbps). In all cases this stuff sounds like crap compressed to 256k. The harpsichords, in particular, sound harsh and flat, since the exceedingly complex waveform they make just can't all fit.
For me, it doesn't matter in the end, since I rip everything losslessly and then compress it for the car or the iPod where sound quality really doesn't matter anyway. But some people may not want to use hundreds of GBs of disk space or may have more music. For them, strategic ripping is in order.
Unless you're using analog outputs, in which case you're not getting good sound at all unless you have a $10k custom sound engineering rig, IT DOESN'T MATTER.
The signal coming out the SPDIF outputs will be the same whether you're using Creative, M-Audio, or motherboard SPDIF. The only possible difference is in what formats the SPDIF output is capable of sending. And how many of us actually listen to content that isn't either 2-channel PCM, 5+1 Dolby Digital, or 5/6+1 DTS?
And please don't talk to me about "jitter." Your DAC can compensate for any jitter you'll get with this equipment. It's a pile of 1's and 0's, folks. Do you buy a $200 gold-plated Cat6 cable to improve network reliability? I didn't think so.
As an owner of one Sony and one Panasonic digital "amp" owner who is equally happy...
Just see what happens when you are sitting around eating BBQ in the backyard and you try to tell people about your kick-ass PCM-PWM converter and amplitude modulator.
(On second thought,/. readers are probably inured to the resulting reaction. Never mind.)
So just keep buying CDs. Unlike DVDs for video, they are actually good enough to do the job for 99% of all music out there (*really*-well-recorded acoustic rock/pop/etc., anything with a harpsichord, and certain chamber music being IMHO the exceptions).
If you're running a reasonable operating system, no CD has DRM.
The ubiquity of CDs is also why I don't understand TFA's concern about standard SPDIF not being able to handle multichannel at high sampling rates. It's pure pie-in-the-sky. Who actually has 8-channel 24-bit 96kHz audio content and how do they get it? My entire music collection is losslessly compressed 44.1kHz 16-bit 2-channel audio, ripped from CDs. Running a SPDIF output to a high-quality receiver (a Sony DA5000ES, incidentally, which does not do D/A conversion at all in the conventional sense) is a perfect solution for me.
Even for those mythical people with high quality content, I expect downsampling to CD-quality will always be better than trying to deal with an analog audio signal inside a box as noisy as a PC.
Usually about a month to a month and a half out, Apple announces a specific release date for the new OS. Their practice has been to announce, that same day, that anyone who buys a Mac after that day gets the OS upgrade for nominal cost (like $10). You just need to wait for that announcement, which may very well be before or in September for Leopard.
I bought a PowerBook in April 2005, about three weeks before Tiger came out. A five-minute phone call to Apple got me the new OS for ~$10. Being a cheap bastard I then also installed it on the Power Mac G5 I bought two months earlier (which was not eligible for the upgrade).
When Leopard comes out I will mend my felonious ways and buy a family pack...
Imagine if the weather was bad (instrument meteorological conditions or IMC) and you were trying to land a large passenger airliner using nothing but a small needle on the panel to align with the runway. Then, a passenger starts talking to their uncle Bill about his bypass surgery and that needle jumps even 10 degrees off position. Now, instead of aligning with a runway, you're aligning with a corn field.
On another forum, I've seen a post from a 737-400 pilot describing exactly this behavior, which ended when the flight attendants forced all passengers to demonstrate that their cellphones were off. Thankfully, it was after takeoff, not during an instrument landing. But the pilots could still lose situational awareness (i.e. not know what direction, in any of the three dimensions, they are flying) if it were cloudy or dark and there were no visual cues. And it's *not* just limited to small aircraft.
Thanks for the most informative post on this thread.
... From the "crowd control" perspective, I would pay double the fare if I could fly on flights guaranteed not to have any babies, kids under ~11, drunks, or cell phone talkers. People, it's just rude to talk on a cell phone when people around you have no way to get away. (I also think it's rude to take your little kids on flights, but that's another whole flamefest^W thread...)
Seriously, it's been so long since I had to set up a completely new account, since home directories copy so easily, that I don't know how long it would take to get a new OS X box set up my way. Since I replace most of the default apps and have every little damn thing tweaked in my apps, it would probably take a long time. Setting up Quicksilver alone took a few hours when I first did it (to get all ~200 commands in the right order).
It's a great thing I never have to do this from scratch, ever.
Now, I know that people (like my father) refuse to turn their phones off while in flight
Well, I hope they enjoy the reduced battery life as the phone switches into high-power mode over and over again when it can't find a signal or switches between cells... I accidentally left my phone on once on a 5-hour flight. It was fully charged when I drove to the airport, and dead about an hour after I got off the plane. The battery normally lasts about 4 days.
Even if there's no interference with flight systems (and I've heard what seem like persuasive anecdotes that there can be, especially on older planes such as the numerous DC-9/MD-80s and 737-300/400/500s in the US fleet), that's a good enough reason to turn it off right there. Plus, if your father actually uses his phone in flight, I and about 10 other passengers will kick his ass.
If you talk about work for half an hour on a phone that costs infinity billion dollars per minute, you get to look and feel more important.
Seriously, that's the only reason people are on the phone half the time anyway. 90% of the conversations, even business ones, could wait until the parties are not driving or in public.
I agree with the researchers' conclusions. A full conversation usually stays in the background for me. Hearing one side is very jarring and I can't ignore it. I wish cellphones would be banned on airplanes, period, even when on the ground; the key difference between an airplane and a train/a building/the street is that in an airplane you can't get away.
That works great if music for you is about making a political statement...
But the problem is that most indie "artists" are still independent because they make crap music. Yeah, there are a few really good ones in there. But good luck finding them before the labels snap them up.
I don't want to listen to caterwauling over out-of-tune guitars and drums with palpitations just so I can feel good about circumventing the mafiaa.
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Noise canceling headphones are great at blocking engine noise (or other constant, mostly low-frequency sound) but can't do anything about voices. If they are reducing the volume of voices it is only because they are isolating your ears.
For me, they are not enough. I would still go insane, even with my QC3s, if voice conversations were allowed. I think SMS/data only is the perfect compromise -- allows all those crazies who can't be without the communications teat for a couple hours to get their fix, but doesn't subject the rest of us to rage-inducing yelling.
True, and, further, more than Z% of the market will not use your site. Even though I have IE available to me, and even though 90% of IE-only sites render just fine if I spoof the user agent, I usually don't go back to sites that are IE-only because I assume the operator will be similarly myopic in other respects.
Consider also that non-IE users are likely to be disproportionately tech-savvy, and therefore will probably have an outsize word-of-mouth impact.
I don't know how many users feel like me, but it's got to be enough to change the "extra effort > cost of lost users" equation a bit...
Funny you should mention the 555. I demoed one in my listening room awhile back, back to back with a B&K ST-2140. I went with the B&K, although I wasn't really happy with either one; I felt they both covered up detail a little too much.
The Class D is a Sony 5000, which has some interesting technology that has ironed out a lot of the typical flaws of Class D without sacrificing the advantages (non-phase-shifted lows, very precise highs, flat frequency response). It isn't as powerful as the B&K but both my ears and my calibration discs like it better. Once it broke in, it was as if someone had cleaned out my ears, when compared to the B&K. The soundstage is deeper, I hear more details, and I hear more differences in timbre. Voices are not quite so "radiant," but I'd rather hear what's actually there.
And, don't worry, on this system (as opposed to an iPod) I'm not using lossy sources (unless I have no other choice). Sometimes I'm using my old Sony ES CD player (as a transport, obviously, since you don't want to do D/A conversion on signals feeding a Class D amp), sometimes I'm just playing losslessly compressed tracks out of iTunes through the built-in SPDIF on my PowerMac G5.
The Sony doesn't have great A/D conversion. Analog sources (radio or vinyl) sound a little strange. But the (good) digital ones rock my world.
If you want to wince when listening to this system, feed it harpsichord music compressed to 160kbps... ;-) it's actually a good way to demonstrate the problems with compression to fidelity-ignorant people.
So true. Film is a useful analogy. People seem to find that black-and-white, sepia, blurry, long-exposure, etc., etc. inspire certain emotions independently of the content of the photo. I think this is exactly what goes on with vinyl and with those who prefer older recordings.
Myself, I have to confess I don't really understand why that's so desirable. The great photographers for me are not the ones who try to manipulate the emotions with effects, but the ones who show me something, already in the world, in a new way which I would never have imagined.
And just like I want to see the world in photos, I want to hear a musician on recordings. I don't want to hear an audio engineer or a technology trying to manipulate me. I want to hear a musician (or group) playing.
Thus my perhaps-too-dismissive responses to vinyl proponents. I need to step back and accept that some people *like* to hear a less faithful reproduction, and that that's OK. I should only get irritated when people claim that vinyl has higher fidelity.
Case in point: I own a beloved pair of Infinity Kappa 5.1 II speakers...
What they make since the Harman takeover sounds like clock radios in comparison. It's really sad... not sure what I'll do when these wear out.
Sure. You can add distortion and noise either way.
Clearly people like the sound of distorted, noisy playback. I just for the life of me can't understand why.
You're being fooled by distortion. Your vinyl isn't even close to as accurate as your CDs.
Your CDs have slightly fucked up high frequencies that *may*, if you have golden ears, make the recording sound somewhat harsher than a live performance and screw up your soundstage a bit. They also have a signal-to-noise ratio of >100dB, huge dynamic range, high-voltage output (for minimal noise after the D/A conversion stage), and they don't require equalization from your components.
Your vinyl has a signal-to-noise ratio of 50dB if you're lucky, low-voltage output that virtually guarantees that some level of 60Hz hum will get into the signal, a shitload of equalization by your record player, and very low dynamic range. You only have any highs at all (and the soundstage they bring) if your needle and record are both perfect. The reason you think your vinyl sounds better is precisely because of these traits. You hear them as "mellow," "warm," and "not harsh." Maybe you like to be protected in a bubble from what your recordings actually sound like, and that's fine, but what you're hearing is not better or more accurate sound... it's precisely the opposite.
Copy your CD onto another CD after 10 years. Rinse and repeat. With proper error checking your bits will have an infinite life.
There is no way to do that with analog media except to digitize it.
Absolutely right. As usual when someone posts something really smart that bucks the CW my mod points are taking a tropical vacation.
Sadly, CDs are not great either, for different reasons. Where vinyl introduces the uncontrollable variables you talk about (thermal variations, electrical noise affecting the very-low-voltage signal, never-ideal disc and needle quality, dust) CDs, because of their low sampling frequency (which should have been 96kHz from the start), mangle the waveforms at high frequencies. Still, CDs come a lot closer to delivering accurate reproduction in any form of real-world use. For starters, you just can't always keep dust away from your needle...
As for amps, it has always amazed me that people *love* the ones that introduce distortion and claim the accurate ones are "cold" and "technical." It's not the amp's job to be warm and emotional; it's the musician's. I run away from any component that advertises "warm" or "musical" sound; those are code words for distortion.
My own setup consists of various digital sources playing through a big Class D amp into speakers with poly cone woofer/midrange and planar tweeters. Everyone complains the sound is too cold. But it's dead-accurate with test signals and I can actually hear the detail in my recordings, not just "warmth" that may make me feel good but isn't there.
O rly?
I would never have guessed that these guys had anything to do with the 2-3 student loan consolidation offers I get per day...
I'm sure my future, not just this article, is
from the six-soliciations-per-day dept.Goddammit, add another </quote> tag where appropriate...
Apple's (not "Mac's"; a Mac is a computer, not a company) license doesn't say anything about virtualization. It requires you to run the OS on Apple hardware. If you want to run OS X on a virtual machine within Linux or Windows on your Mac, that's just fine.
Wow. Just wow. I had no idea. The built-in SPDIF in my Macs doesn't do this; neither does the older Creative card in my Win/Lin box. That certainly would #*&@ everything up. If I bought a card and discovered it was sending 48 kHz PCM to my receiver when playing tracks ripped from CD I'd probably think it was set up wrong and try to reconfigure it. Thanks for setting me straight.
About the jitter, I understand that SPDIF is unclocked and that in some cases the timing could get so far off that there would be problems. But I'd expect those problems not to manifest themselves as imperceptibly worse sound, but as horrible artifacts or even just noise.
Any sound card with a SPDIF output hooked up to a reasonable quality A/V receiver (with SPDIF input) and standalone speakers. (Get the decoding and analog out of the PC and you'll be fine.) Get bigger speakers and skip the subwoofer. For the card, receiver, and speakers together you can get what you need for under $500 for perfectly clear and decent sound. (Of course, you can --not "will" -- get better sound if you spend more.)
99% of music is indistinguishable from CD in 256kbps AAC (I don't have many 256k MP3s).
But some waveforms are just too hard to compress. In particular, harpsichords, solo classical string instruments, and solo electric guitar (through some filters) start to sound strange even at 256k.
A good but not foolproof way to figure out what is going to be troublesome to compress is to compress it losslessly using FLAC or ALAC and look at the resulting mean bitrate. Most stuff that compresses to between 400-600kbps, which is most music, will be fine at 256k. Some of my music, though, exceeds 900kbps lossless, and I even have a couple tracks over 1000kbps (where uncompressed PCM = 1411kbps). In all cases this stuff sounds like crap compressed to 256k. The harpsichords, in particular, sound harsh and flat, since the exceedingly complex waveform they make just can't all fit.
For me, it doesn't matter in the end, since I rip everything losslessly and then compress it for the car or the iPod where sound quality really doesn't matter anyway. But some people may not want to use hundreds of GBs of disk space or may have more music. For them, strategic ripping is in order.
Unless you're using analog outputs, in which case you're not getting good sound at all unless you have a $10k custom sound engineering rig, IT DOESN'T MATTER.
The signal coming out the SPDIF outputs will be the same whether you're using Creative, M-Audio, or motherboard SPDIF. The only possible difference is in what formats the SPDIF output is capable of sending. And how many of us actually listen to content that isn't either 2-channel PCM, 5+1 Dolby Digital, or 5/6+1 DTS?
And please don't talk to me about "jitter." Your DAC can compensate for any jitter you'll get with this equipment. It's a pile of 1's and 0's, folks. Do you buy a $200 gold-plated Cat6 cable to improve network reliability? I didn't think so.
I love good sound. I hate audiophiles.
As an owner of one Sony and one Panasonic digital "amp" owner who is equally happy...
Just see what happens when you are sitting around eating BBQ in the backyard and you try to tell people about your kick-ass PCM-PWM converter and amplitude modulator.
(On second thought, /. readers are probably inured to the resulting reaction. Never mind.)
So just keep buying CDs. Unlike DVDs for video, they are actually good enough to do the job for 99% of all music out there (*really*-well-recorded acoustic rock/pop/etc., anything with a harpsichord, and certain chamber music being IMHO the exceptions).
If you're running a reasonable operating system, no CD has DRM.
The ubiquity of CDs is also why I don't understand TFA's concern about standard SPDIF not being able to handle multichannel at high sampling rates. It's pure pie-in-the-sky. Who actually has 8-channel 24-bit 96kHz audio content and how do they get it? My entire music collection is losslessly compressed 44.1kHz 16-bit 2-channel audio, ripped from CDs. Running a SPDIF output to a high-quality receiver (a Sony DA5000ES, incidentally, which does not do D/A conversion at all in the conventional sense) is a perfect solution for me.
Even for those mythical people with high quality content, I expect downsampling to CD-quality will always be better than trying to deal with an analog audio signal inside a box as noisy as a PC.
Usually about a month to a month and a half out, Apple announces a specific release date for the new OS. Their practice has been to announce, that same day, that anyone who buys a Mac after that day gets the OS upgrade for nominal cost (like $10). You just need to wait for that announcement, which may very well be before or in September for Leopard.
I bought a PowerBook in April 2005, about three weeks before Tiger came out. A five-minute phone call to Apple got me the new OS for ~$10. Being a cheap bastard I then also installed it on the Power Mac G5 I bought two months earlier (which was not eligible for the upgrade).
When Leopard comes out I will mend my felonious ways and buy a family pack...
Imagine if the weather was bad (instrument meteorological conditions or IMC) and you were trying to land a large passenger airliner using nothing but a small needle on the panel to align with the runway. Then, a passenger starts talking to their uncle Bill about his bypass surgery and that needle jumps even 10 degrees off position. Now, instead of aligning with a runway, you're aligning with a corn field.
On another forum, I've seen a post from a 737-400 pilot describing exactly this behavior, which ended when the flight attendants forced all passengers to demonstrate that their cellphones were off. Thankfully, it was after takeoff, not during an instrument landing. But the pilots could still lose situational awareness (i.e. not know what direction, in any of the three dimensions, they are flying) if it were cloudy or dark and there were no visual cues. And it's *not* just limited to small aircraft.
Thanks for the most informative post on this thread.
... From the "crowd control" perspective, I would pay double the fare if I could fly on flights guaranteed not to have any babies, kids under ~11, drunks, or cell phone talkers. People, it's just rude to talk on a cell phone when people around you have no way to get away. (I also think it's rude to take your little kids on flights, but that's another whole flamefest^W thread...)
Over time... 1.5 years?
Seriously, it's been so long since I had to set up a completely new account, since home directories copy so easily, that I don't know how long it would take to get a new OS X box set up my way. Since I replace most of the default apps and have every little damn thing tweaked in my apps, it would probably take a long time. Setting up Quicksilver alone took a few hours when I first did it (to get all ~200 commands in the right order).
It's a great thing I never have to do this from scratch, ever.
Now, I know that people (like my father) refuse to turn their phones off while in flight
Well, I hope they enjoy the reduced battery life as the phone switches into high-power mode over and over again when it can't find a signal or switches between cells... I accidentally left my phone on once on a 5-hour flight. It was fully charged when I drove to the airport, and dead about an hour after I got off the plane. The battery normally lasts about 4 days.
Even if there's no interference with flight systems (and I've heard what seem like persuasive anecdotes that there can be, especially on older planes such as the numerous DC-9/MD-80s and 737-300/400/500s in the US fleet), that's a good enough reason to turn it off right there. Plus, if your father actually uses his phone in flight, I and about 10 other passengers will kick his ass.
If you talk about work for half an hour on a phone that costs infinity billion dollars per minute, you get to look and feel more important.
Seriously, that's the only reason people are on the phone half the time anyway. 90% of the conversations, even business ones, could wait until the parties are not driving or in public.
"[H]earing only one side of a conversation makes it more noticeable and intrusive." (Sorry, no full article without paying, unless you're at an .edu with access, but the abstract pretty much sums it up.)
I agree with the researchers' conclusions. A full conversation usually stays in the background for me. Hearing one side is very jarring and I can't ignore it. I wish cellphones would be banned on airplanes, period, even when on the ground; the key difference between an airplane and a train/a building/the street is that in an airplane you can't get away.
That works great if music for you is about making a political statement...
But the problem is that most indie "artists" are still independent because they make crap music. Yeah, there are a few really good ones in there. But good luck finding them before the labels snap them up.
I don't want to listen to caterwauling over out-of-tune guitars and drums with palpitations just so I can feel good about circumventing the mafiaa.