Drowning in a sea of Multimedia

Hey there people! It's been a while since I last paid you all a visit, but I made sure to go back and catch up on all the things I have missed. I still have yet to visit the forums though, but I'll do it after I'm done around here. This little blog is a not-so quick update (meaning it will, once again, be long) of the recent happenings in my life. Multimedia is around us, it's everywhere, and I find myself swimming in a pool of music, videos and photos. So much that I'm almost drowning! Luckily, I can swim and the department has yet to see the existence of human-hungry sharks in a literal way.



Netflix has finally arrived to Canada and offers us the possibility of Instant Streaming to Netflix-Ready devices, which consist of the PlayStation 3 and the Wii at the moment (of course, including PC and MAC). The Xbox 360 will update soon to support it, and a lot of brands are working on releasing HDTVs, Blu-Ray players and more with Netflix support built-in.

For us, Canadians, it is the first time we ever see something such as Netflix. It has been widely used in the U.S. for quite some time and we finally get our share of this little gem. While it is great news and I am becoming addicted to it already, it is unfortunate that most of Canadians are plagued with a bandwidth limit to respect. In some places, like here in Quebec, unlimited bandwidth doesn't even exist anymore, and such is the same with the majority of Provinces I believe. With an 80GB limit each month, gaming on PC through Steam and streaming with Netflix will make me spend a lot of time closely following my bandwidth usage, especially now that a lot of games consist of 10GB+ downloads, such as Star Wars: The Force Unleashed which is something around 22GB, or one I actually have, F.E.A.R. which is a ridiculous 17GB download as it includes the original game and both expansion packs.

Nonetheless, I am greatly enjoying it and have watched 2 documentaries on it. Yep, I love documentaries, whether they are about nature, animals, street gangs or body modification, I love documentaries and the service certainly has a lot of them. I will also be able to discover some new Anime as despite their lack of a several Anime, they still have some that I have never heard of before. They even have Megaman anime! But these are cheesy and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone lol. Anyway, despite all of this, unlimited streaming (limited only by our bandwidth unless you don't mind paying for the extra GB) for $7.99 CAN is a steal and beats out every other "renting" service out here, and so I expect Netflix to become widely popular over here, and even in Quebec as they did confirm that French will be added as a language for most of the movies over time, not that I care though since I watch them in English despite French being my main language. Enough with Netflix, let's move on to some of my new acquisitions.


Astro Gaming collection
Top left to right: A40 headset, Mixamp, A30 headset, Blastro long-sleeve shirt

Do you remember these bad boys? Well they are back in full force, for me anyway. While I already had the A40 system, I wanted more, but not without a reason, of course. Let's go take a look at the whole thing nonetheless.


A40 headset                                                                                 Mixamp

Most of you have seen my previous blog regarding my lovely A40 audio system consisting of an A40 headset and a mixamp. The A40 being a sweet pair of gaming headset (both sound and mic), with crystal clear sound and as comfortable as you can get with its huge ear cups going over and around the ears rather than directly on top of them. The mixamp serves as an overall volume controller for both the game sound and the voice sound with the big knob and you can eliminate either one of them or adjust the balance between game sound and voice with the smaller knob. What makes the mixamp special, however, is that it supports Dolby Digital, whether you are on PC, PS3 or X360, you can simply plug the output volume with a TOSlink cable and the mixamp will deliver 5.1 surround sound to the headset.The mixamp only supports Dolby Digital when it comes to surround sound, however, but since PS3 games and X360 games pretty much all support Dolby, it's entirely fine. For PC gaming, it can still work if you have a Dolby Digital Live enabled sound card, which takes every single 5.1 sound and converts it to Dolby Digital on the go.


A30 headset

Here we see the A30 headset, which was released early this year if I remember well. The A30's are what you could consider as the portable version of the A40's. They are smaller, does not go around the ears and can be used with the mixamp as well. This particular headset also delivers more bass power, as since they are used as an all-around type of headset, better bass is a given when it comes to music, while in video games, too much bass often drowns other sounds which can be crucial to your experience. Nonetheless, you can still use the A30 headset as a gaming headset, especially since it can also be used with the mixamp in the same manner as the A40's for the surround sound. As you can see from the picture, custom speaker tags can also be made and so I decided to order these at the same time as the headset itself. Now I can walk down the street with style. They too, have a microphone which can be removed, however, unlike the A40's, you can only have the microphone attached to the left ear cup and cannot change it sides.


Blastro long-sleeve shirt: Front


Blastro long-sleeve shirt: Back

While being at it, along with my 5 to 10 years old shirts filled with holes, I thought it would be wise to start buying new clothes. That's when I came across that beautiful shirt on Astro's store and knew right away that I wanted it. Printed with the fine Blastro robot from Astro, this would prove to be a nice addition to my clothing and would be a step in a new direction consisting of clothes that are not falling apart. You have to understand, I never buy clothes. I'll buy a new pair of jeans every winter, but usually that's only because I cut the legs of my jeans during summer to make myself some new shorts, otherwise I never buy clothes. The only new t-shirt I have had over the past years is my Blood+ t-shirt and that is solely because it came in the Blood+ box set. I now proudly wear my lovely Astro Gaming shirt and promote Astro with it in some kind of way. I have received a lot of positive feedback at work, everyone seems to really like my new acquisition.


Samsung P3

This, right here, is the reason behind the purchase of my A30 headset. Back in the days, before I moved over here and back when my job consisted of landscape gardening, I used to be very active. Not only did my job meant being in movement, walking and such for 8 hours a day, but I would top it off by taking 2 hours+ walks every night while listening to music. Upon moving here a couple years ago and finding a new job as a Quality Assurance tester in the video game industry, I became extremely lazy. Not only does my job makes me sit on a chair for 7-8 hours a day, but the city in which I love is laid back and relaxing, meaning you tend to get laid back and relaxed due to the atmosphere of the place and with such, you start being lazy. I can't even remember the last time I took a walk that lasted over 1 hour, something that was so common to me and a habit become lost somewhere during the transition from there to here.


Samsung P3 powered off

I recently took the decision that it was time for me to get back in shape and do something out of myself instead of rotting away on a chair. I am not a big fan of going to a gym, doing exercises and that kind of stuff, but I have always enjoyed a good walk. Walking may seem ridiculous for some people in terms of exercise, but until you have experienced going from walking half of your day to not walking at all during a day, you will never understand how walking is good for keeping yourself in shape. In fact, it is ridiculously good, especially that the roads over here are like a roller coaster, hills in every directions on every roads. With that decision, I was lacking two things: A decent MP3 player and a decent pair of headphones for ultimate quality. That's why I have ordered the A30 headset, knowing that they are more portable and not meant solely for gaming (unlike the A40's) and would deliver the crystal clear quality I want. Then, I had to find the perfect MP3 player suited to my tastes.

While I could have gotten a regular iPod, I wanted something fancier. I could have went with the iPod Touch, of course, after all it has tons of applications, internet, multimedia player, etc. The only problem, however, is that the audio quality of iPods is inferior to almost every other multimedia players you can find on the market, is expensive, is one of the players that supports the least formats, and I don't care for it's endless library of applications available on iTunes. Therefore I went on a quest of finding something else and only two of them struck my mind as potential devices for my liking: The Sony X-Series Walkman and the Samsung P3.


Samsung P3 powered on

The Sony X-Series Walkman quickly was eliminated after finding out that it has been discontinued and was even more expensive than the iPod Touch. Despite Sony Walkman being known for its outstanding audio quality, you don't want a device that costs you more than Apple products, which in themselves are already largely overpriced. The Samsung P3 may not have wi-fi and endless applications, but it delivers excellent audio quality, supports tons of formats including the less popular Vorbis (.OGG) which I frequently use on Linux and is one if not the least expensive touch screen portable device. The only problem was to actually find it in Canada, as pretty much every competitor of the iPod removed their products from Canada since it was an already lost competition and thus, can only be found in the U.S., so I had to order it online from B&H Photo Video, which is the only online store I found that would ship the device to Canada.

The P3 has its share of useless applications like the games or subway maps which does not include Montreal, the closest one to where I live, but with the ability to watch videos, pictures and listen to audio through an excellent quality, it was the portable player that had the most potential for me. The alarm application is quite useful for me as well, as I always need 2 or 3 alarms before waking up in the morning, so I'm using it to wake up to some of my favorite songs rather than the increasingly annoying and shocking beeping that my alarm clock does. I used to do so with my computer, but with all those blue LEDs and fans, I refuse to keep my computer turned on at night. The P3 also has a feature that I thought would be useless, but turns out as very useful: Bluetooth connectivity. I can connect my mobile phone through bluetooth and use the P3 as a phone, meaning that when I am walking outside with my headphones, my phone will ring through the headphones and I can use the headphones mixed with the P3 as my actual mobile phone. This is very useful as I tend to not notice when my phone is vibrating and I wouldn't hear it while listening to music, but now when I receive a call out there, the music stops automatically when placing a call or answering one. Of course, I could of simply used my phone as an MP3 player, but truth be told 2GB isn't enough in terms of storage for me and my phone doesn't have a jack input for headphones. Plus, the quality is mediocre at best.

That's it for today! Or is it? Of course it is lol. I will leave you on a demo video for the Samsung P3, which is of course included on my device directly, but I was able to find it on YouTube for your viewing pleasure of useless applications since these so-called useless applications seem to be the big trend among portable devices. See you all in another blog, or somewhere on the site :]