Walkmen on trains…

My first moan. Dear to my heart, this one.

I have to honour of catching the train from Brighton to Eastbourne every day on my way to work. I’ve done it for the last 10 years. Some days I’ll read, some days I’ll do some work on the laptop, some days I’ll snooze, and some days I’ll just dreamily look out of the window at the ever changing countryside.

But every day there is some inconsiderate twat or twat-ess listening to their ‘personal stereo’. Except it’s not personal, because they have the volume up so loud that the rest of the carriage can hear it too.

I’ve done a survey. Pretty much all of the offenders are wearing white earpieces, suggesting they have got an iPod. Now Apple make some very pretty and inovative kit, but they can’t design earphones to save their lives. They are hard plastic and have holes on the outside to let the sound out. I’ve used something similar and they were as uncomfortable as hell.

One day there was one  young lad three rows way from me listening to his ‘sounds’. Very loudly. The lady across the aisle asked him to turn it down, I asked him to turn it down, the train conductor asked him to turn it down. His response was somewhat shirty, saying that if he turned to down he wouldn’t be able to hear it himself. Sorry, mate, I said to myself. Poor design of your kit isn’t reason to annoy the rest of us. Or your deafness due to listening to music that is TOO LOUD!

Occasionally I’ll listen to music too. More often than not it is a podcast downloaded from BBC Radio 4. However – my earpieces, which cost me £9.99 from Waitrose, have rubber bits that go right onto the ear canal and are very comfortable. And they don’t let any sound out to disturb my neighbours. They are so good that they keep outside sound out, so much so that I stick them in as earplugs, even if I’m not listening to anything.

So – Apple – sort yourselves out! Design some decent earwear to go with your music products.

There are audiophiles that use what we might call Proper Headphones to listen to their  music. Sometimes they can leak sound too, but less so. However, the really chunky headphones look ridiculous. It’s like having a bloody Cyberman sitting in the carriage with you!

NOTES : Walkmen? What is the plural of Walkman? Or should it be Walkmans? And I know Walkman was a tradename of Sony, but it still gets used by some as a generic term for a portable music player. These days the term MP3 is used, but MP3 is an encoding protocol – a bit of software, not hardware. And I know other manufacturers than Apple supply white earpieces these days, but they were the first and are to blame!