the maximinimalist

binging and purging in pursuit of the perfect products

I am not an audiophile. I’m not interested in talking about soundstages and foot-tapping rhythmicality. But I can appreciate general quality differences in headphones.

I have owned shitloads of headphones. In the over-ear world, I've had Nuraphones, Bose NC700s, Jabra 85h, Hifiman, and more in the last few years. I've also owned lots and lots of earbuds, from Jabra to B&O, Etymotics to Chi-fi. Most recently I was using the Bose 700s, so that's what I'll be comparing most against.

More importantly, I appreciate good, usable design that makes it easy to do all the common things we do with headphones nowadays.

The B&O H95s are not perfect headphones, and they are ridiculously expensive... over £700. But they have won me over. And now at around £550 on the street, I think they’re actually good value.

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If you’re not in the IT world, you probably haven’t heard of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

It’s a very simple graphical model intended to explain the typical lifecycle that a new technology passes through from innovation to maturity.

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Until 2022, I wrote a blog called ukfountainpens.com. I wrote it for five years and about 500 posts. Sitting down to write a post was easy, in one sense: I was practiced at the process, of course, but also I knew exactly what my remit was and what my (many) readers expected from me. I wrote reviews of products. In a very real sense, my ‘job’ was to buy and sell fountain pens, hunting the very best.

What ultimately drove me to give up the blog was the same thing that has driven me to deactivate my Facebook account and remove Instagram from my phone, again: the endless temptations of consumerism.

If I boil it down, my life and all my hobbies have always been about buying stuff.

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