Before deafness, hear great sound

We all grow deaf, sooner or later. My ringing in the ear (tinnitus) caused by a scuba diving accident has finally healed, but with the chronic rhinitis which came on Thursday, the ear drums are back at it again - strained, and singing a high pitch strain - like a cacophony of crickets in perpetual song in the forest. Or being in Tokyo during the summer cricket chirping season. Having realised what frail biomechanical beings we are, and prone to damage and failure, these growing ailments and deterioration of the senses as I age, lend me to think that if you want to use any of your senses, try to get the best out of them - of course, within reasonable means one has. So, after accummulating thousands of songs in my Windows Player jukebox, and for the newer ones, ripped them in lossless format, I found that with with the triple armature Westone UM3X (because I liked the audio tuning best for my taste - part jazz lounge, part acoustic rock), I would easily be transported into my world apart from this world.

The iPhone 34GB has a decent memory for all my songs in compressed AAC mode, which is more energy efficient for the device, but with those earphones, you can distinctly hear LESS. Any audiophile will tell you that the human ear is really quite incredible and idiot deaf geeks might say otherwise. So with the few albums in Apple Lossless on my iPhone, the memory is all used up - more or less. After searching for a suitable MP3 player that can store gazzillion songs (my friend Ian has 6000 in his 120GB iPod Classic), I am quite happy to finally settle for the new silver iPod Classic 160GB which actually only has an allocated memory of 148GB for storage. Now, I can comfortably move my lossless music and listen to them guilt-free.

Of course, Apple geeks are warning that using Lossless means wearing out the HDD faster and using more power, because of the file size. The alternative is lugging around a stack of CDs and using a CD player, right?
Last night I went to bed with my Westone UM3X in-ear and within a few minutes was in audio heaven asleep with Matt Maher's new album brainwashing my dreams.
The new iPod Classic may be cheesey to some because of the click-wheel... but that intuitive device works very well for quick navigation and I don't tire of it. That is very important. Ultimately, it is being able to immediately access my Jukebox with all these newer additions in lossless quality. You have to listen with great earphones, and when you do, your perception is changed forever. It's like a child who has tasted sweet and never wants bland any more.