We were invited to check out the XBA series, Sony’s newest range of balanced armature driver earphones, approximately before they hit the shelves in Singapore. Here are our first impressions of the 11 new models launched.

For more pictures of the event and the XBA-1, check out our EventStory here!

Sony Singapore’s Personal Audio division launched their range of 11 XBA balanced armature audio driver earphones and headsets. Here are shots from the event, as well as an unboxing of the XBA-1, which were given to attendees of the event. Prices within captions.

Check out our First Looks video here too!

On the 30th of June, Microsoft Singapore held an event to announce the launch of its Office 365 cloud-based productivity suite. Tech65 brings you this compilation of features presentations from each of the 6 stations, including mobile integration (WP7 Mango), collaboration (Sharepoint), security protection, live editing (Sharepoint), user networking (Lynx) and IT administration.

Microsoft Office 365 is available for businesses now, who can find out more and sign up for it at www.office365.com.sg.

Well spread the love, as they say, so we’re giving this mega-cooler away to one lucky reader who will love it and put it to optimum use!

All we ask you to do is to visit VR-Zone‘s recently revamped website, have a look around, and comment below to tell us just one thing you like about their new layout. Or if you haven’t been to VR-Zone (which is pretty hard to do, if you have a need for this cooler), tell us anything you like about the new website.

And to the dear lucky winner who will get this, you are hereby reminded to use it wisely and responsibly. We will not be held responsible if you trip your entire neighbourhood’s electricity after installing this.

Contest will end 31st May. Good luck!

Originally, having for a long time before experienced the goodness of the Creative’s signature budget earphones, the EP-630, I was going to zoom in straight for that – I wasn’t in the mood for experimenting about with funny new models this time round. But at the peripherals store I walked into, hanging tantalizingly beside the rack of 630s were the rack of Metro.fi 10o. I must confess that I am ashamed of even looking at them (and subsequently buying a pair omg?) because as an aficionado of quality music (yes, I am trying to avoid naming myself an audiophile), I have immense respect for the Ultimate Ears brand, and watched in horror as Logitech tore it apart with these cheap budget product lines after it bought the company over. But something just came over me and in a decision I am still trying to comprehend myself, I purchased both sets.

The result of all this frivolous spending is that you my dear reader finally have a good post to help you decide for a budget pair of earphones.

Specs-wise, the 100 seems to have a very slight edge over the 630. One of the most important strengths of the 100 is the fabric exterior of the wire – this I foresee helps sidestep tangling and tearing issues that often come when one is too rough on rubber-protected wires, or even the higher end twisted acrylic wires. The 100 also comes with a rather hardy case (keeping the S$49 price tag in mind), and a cord tightener (I think you call it) for more fitted usage (sports and such). You can see quite plainly from the gallery above how the casing is useful yet again for tangle prevention, and I’m pretty sure I remember a movable piece on the 630′s cord, but again, the rubber breaks after awhile so they might have just given up and removed it. Perhaps the only thing more important than anti-tangling is the ergonomics of actually wearing the earphones, which 630 breezes past with its simple and practical stemmed design, and which the 100 fails quite tremendously at with its oftentimes awkwardly worn buds. But since it’s the ear we are talking about here, I believe a lack of ergonomy won’t make much of a difference since no active muscles are involved, unlike the design of mice or keyboards for example where ergonomics play a huge role in easing strain to wrist muscles.

Sound-wise however, I knew I should have just gone with my experience, instead of trying to guess whether the 100 might compare. That said, the 100 doesn’t lag that far behind the 630, and may very well be your preferred choice if you agree with the points I’m about to share regarding its audio output.

The 630 presents what I call a Rock EQ – a valley-shaped tuning graph. The bass, which they never fail to shout about on the packaging, lends a very solid foundation to your music without being overbearing. The response to short beats like kick drums aren’t as firm and snappy as one would like it to be, but 1) at this price no one should expect it to anyway and 2) the majority of users probably won’t appreciate the effort anyway (sounds bad since I’m most probably talking about you, but if punchy bass is that important to you, go look at some 3-digit-priced earphones). The treble has clarity and yet manages to avoid (most of the time anyway) the ear-piercing sharpness that earphones of lesser quality generate. These two points are the twin pillars of strength for the 630, and remain so only because Creative managed to put them together seamlessly.

The soundstage (the virtual expanse created by the projection of sound) of the 630 is a little wide, which sometimes creates a welcome illusion of a grand performance in a great concert hall or a headbanging gig in some stadium, but also can make your music sound unnaturally distant. Again, it’s nothing that would make you fling the earphones down in disgust, but still a point to note, in case you think your unit’s faulty.

In contrast, the 100′s soundstage takes a far more no-nonsense, direct approach, piping music laterally into your ears. Some will appreciate this direct feed of sound, because it will help enhance stereo effects.

The sound quality however, doesn’t leave me quite impressed. In typical Ultimate Ears fashion, they decided to tune the drivers to push the low-mids frequency (most often generated by lower male voices and distorted/overdriven guitars), which is extremely tricky business – far more tricky than a good bass or treble compromise. Quite obviously, they failed, and fell into the age-old trap of generating slightly muddy (muffled) music instead. The bass is slightly more encompassing than the 630, but looser as well (kinda drops on you like bouncy jelly if you know what I mean), and the treble is barely acceptable.

But like I said earlier in this post, you may like such a sound signature (I did previously), and the best way to find out is not only to read, but to try it out yourself. Both the 630 and 100 should be freely available to try at Stereo Electronics, at either Compass Point or Plaza Singapura.

Creative and Ultimate Ears are very reputed brands in the consumer audio field. One built its way up from the ground and another reached down from the lofty heavens to be with mortals. In their own right, both pairs of earphones are decent. But like I advise everyone who asks me to recommend a pair of earphones, no one else can hear for you, and you have to listen for yourself to ascertain the pair that best suits you.

Or you know. You could just take a leap of faith.

The thing one should understand about Creative speakers, if you haven’t already, is that they love to color their sound heavily. For those lost in Jargon-land, it means that the speaker produces a sound different from what the signal is supposed to be. Granted, no speaker in the world is able to produce tit-for-tat what the audio signal feeds it, but in Creative’s case, they color their speakers to produce quite a characteristic Creative sound – unbelievably thick and rich midtones, highs that aren’t piercing even at louder partying volumes, and a discreet yet firm and distinct bass.

At this point, I should clarify that I am sensitive to higher frequencies, so if you have a more “accurate” or bass-inclined ear, you may find the D5 (well, most Creative speakers in general) too muddy for your liking.

Because of its relatively shallow form factor, the D5′s bass lacks the all-important oomph when projecting distinct bass beats, especially kick-drums. The speaker has an air-vent at the rear, another of Creative’s characteristics, and while such limited space can only move so much air, it is more than enough to fill the lower mids and higher basses (contra basses or electric basses) with spirit and body, creating a solid foundation to its music.

While it is hard to relate the idea of speed to audio output, some speakers (and/or circuits) are not well-constructed enough to handle complex or fast music properly, giving rise to the notion of it being “slow” and being unable to keep up with the music it is supposed to be projecting. As should be expected of any premium audio product, the D5 handles such situations with ease, and a full 50-member orchestra, 40-strong chorus, and legendary soprano, all at full volume, soars through the speaker, united yet almost individually distinguishable. Because of its nature as a long block of wood, stereo separation is severely limited, but the sheer definition of every instrument or voice present might just be able to make up for that.

Presumably because of the aforementioned coloring, vocals seem to tend to be thrown to the forefront of your listening experience. You can almost feel the singer being separated from the band and brought forward to sing in front of your nose. And while we are still on these two topics, the D5 certainly can handle most musical genres above market expectations, but its sound signature seems particularly inclined towards the classical, vocal, acoustic, pop, and rock genres. Heavier metal styles (anything with harder distortion than Linkin Park) lose out because the musical depth and weight of higher distortion levels are all but lost in the lack of a proper bass system. The more extreme high frequencies produced by sitar string whines or sliding across guitar strings are still, as said, well-defined without becoming painfully shrill, and adds a great depth to one’s music. Most excitingly and importantly for me, the D5 picks up on the sighs of piano sustain pedals, which for some reason audiophiles (including me) lust for, along with lever clicks and bow scratches. The downside of all this wonderful sensitivity is that for older recordings, especially those recorded and engineered on tapes, hiss is very easily picked up. Still, that shouldn’t be too much of a problem, since these inadvertent productions aren’t so loud that they distract the listener from their beloved music.

Along with the very convenient and detachable Bluetooth transmitter, the apt-X codec makes it possible to not only play music via Bluetooth, but high fidelity music, and even games on your iDevice, since transmitting lag time is drastically reduced to a barely noticeable lag.

Creative is asking SGD399 for this baby, and that is in the lower range of the prices of premium stereo iPod sound systems, but hefty nevertheless. Is it worth the burn on your pocket? If you aren’t fussy about bass, or are searching for a more compact speaker, this may well be the product for you. If you are an audiophile however looking to hear music the way the sound engineer meant it to be heard, you should stay away from this, and I daresay just about the whole Creative lineup. You get great music from this nifty device, but what you are definitely not getting is audiophile-grade accuracy.

A late zombie and sour coffee is in some ways (some very vague ways) a great day to start a Saturday morning, and in this episode we have long time friend of Tech65 Justin Lee join us in an all-Microsoft episode (almost all, you know there are always brief references to Mac and our BotW isn’t exclusively Windows although I’m sure its grand-daddy is hosted… but enough airtime has been spent on MS to warrant that label okay?).

Alright seriously, don’t read so much, just listen. Links after the break.

From Highlander Coffee with love (platonic)
NTT, Farinelli, Justin, Hisham, Jerrick

[4:08] Microsoft Office 2010 Tech Preview

[13:48] Adobe puts PDF creation online (and more) with Acrobat.com

[16:05] Windows 7 to RTM (?)

[19:55] Downloading IE8 on Windows 7 E

[22:00] Feynman Lectures Put Online by Bill Gates (lectures here)

[25:10] HTC Hero

[30:35] Norton 2010

[41:05] BotW: Backup My Tweets

Hey there. Farinelli here. So um, the hamsters did in fact revolt again, nearly destroyed the episode but my l33t skills saved it somehow, and I’m basically left to apologize for the volume issues in this episode. You do not want to know what happened while I was working on this episode. And even if you do want to know, I don’t want to tell you. What I will tell you though, is that this week’s episode focuses on the last, newest, and debatably the most promising of the big 4 smartphone OSs – Google Android. Zi Yong from CodeAndroid joins us in sharing with you the pros (what, what cons?) of the Android system – what it has brought to the table, what companies have done, and what will be done with it in the near future. Be sure to catch the next episode as we do a grand wrap-up of what we have discussed in the past four weeks. Guess who’s back.

WANT TO FIGHT? WANT TO FIGHT?!

Daniel, DK, Fari, w/ Zi Yong

Refresh:
[2:20] Windows 7 Upgrade Options
[5:12] Tiny SG made MP3 Player Easy on the Wallet
[7:23] Amazing UK Plug Design
[10:56] Adsense Comes to Mobile
[12:43] MJ’s Death Brings Down Several Websites

[14:40] Android Discussion + HTC Hero

[33:25] BOTW: H1N1 Mask App

Mugs and Quiches

Daniel, DK, Nicole & Farinelli

Refresh-fresh-fresh-fresh-fresh-fresh
[04:00] Palm Pre syncs with iTunes!
[04:50] Palm Pre emulating an iPod to accomplish iTunes sync?
[07:25] Nokia Ovi Store opens for business
[10:10] Microsoft launches My Phone beta
[11:00] Microsoft publishes maximum Windows 7 specs for netbooks
[13:32] Intel delays Core i5 platform debut to early September

Discussion
[15:48] Hewlett-Packard Touch the Future. Now. event

Byte of the Week
[36:00] HP Power to Change

See? It’s a nice name right? I tried to convince Daniel but he wouldn’t be. Find out why you shouldn’t dismiss the new Atom chip as only .06GHz faster. Also, the G Phone will be arriving exclusively on Singapore’s sunny-island-set-in-the-sea shores, thanks to not-so-Sink-tel’s clout. What though of the G1′s dependency on telco-pushed updates? But first, a promising fancy NAS from Linksys®byCisco, LG’s new Prada offering with its economically dubious accessory, and 6 versions of Windows 7 as compared to 7 versions for Windows Vista.

What a wonderful world.

- Daniel, DK, Farinelli, NTT and Willy

[1:22]Media Hub from Linksys® by Cisco

[13:35]LG Prada II

[17:30]The New Atom N280

[25:10]Six editions of Windows 7.

[31:10]Change in Windows Mobile team, and schedule of future releases.

[36:15]SingTel and HTC Introduce the HTC Dream in Singapore

[39:55]Google Latitude

[45:50]Yesterday.sg makes a splash!

[48:05]BarCamp Singapore 3

[52:10]Byte of the Week: Google Calendar Offline – *Post Production Note* We found out that this is only avaliable for Google Calender avaliable through Google Apps. We applogise for the misinformation.

Yes, this week the crew takes a break from our usual gig (or geek, hurhur) at Geek Terminal (or Gig Terminal hurhur… ok I’ll stop) to attend Podcamp Singapore v2.0. Daniel, Farinelli, and DK speak to a wonderful crowd of near 30 (yes I counted can?) about some of the lessons we have learnt after having been in the business for close to two years now. Crank your speakers and perk your ears up for some of the fantastic insights coming from the other side of the mic, and learn along with us. Enjoy.

D.F.DK.

We’ve had the pleasure of having Easysafe as our sponsor, and now, Daniel will show you in this episode how Easysafe works by creating and accessing a secure folder.

Learn more about Easysafe at fastnsafe.com.

In this week’s sum up of the eternal chess game between Microsoft and Apple, Microsoft is definitely overwhelmed with only the king, queen, two bishops, and a castle left, surrounded by just about the entire back row of Apple’s white pieces. Apple’s cornered the royal couple, but Microsoft turned the tables… well turned the stool around by moving the bishops smack in front, segregating the XP market from the Vista market. Fantastic move in delaying Apple’s deadly advances. In addition one of Apple’s pawns seem to have gone off his route, possibly dropping valuable hints on the successors of Apple’s queen. Both castles advancing at full speed ahead with confirmations of the iPhone in Asia in H2. Black-square knight is still negotiating with Singapore’s favorite Big Fat Green carrier, so the BFG says. White-square knight made a surprise hard right putting Apple’s eternal I into Singapore’s favorite kebaya-clad carrier (nobles only please).

To find out what the hell all of that meant, listen to this week’s episode of 65bits, brought to you by our enthusiastic listeners. Yup, including you.

Daniel the King, Jerrick the Queen, and Farinelli the Black-square PR Bishop

Microsoft’s XP for low-cost PCs defines some boundaries

Intel Exec: 2 iPhones at WWDC, larger one with Atom processor [updated]

SingTel.com – News Release

Singtel, others announce iPhone carrier deals

Singapore Airlines now let’s you connect your iPod and iPhone

BotW: random.org/dice, where we rolled a single virtual die (thanks Jian) to decide the winner of our Easysafe giveaway lucky draw. Congratulations to comment number 4 by Han Yang, you’ve won it!