Peace of mind

Another post on the same subject as the last one...

I don't tend to put classical music on the iPod. It's not as though I lack tracks from that genre; I'm not an aficionado, but the collection includes hundreds (between the movements of symphonies, fanfares, tone poems, etc., that I accumulated largely during my music appreciation classes). And it's not that I no longer care for the pieces, as though I somehow grew out of a phase. Nothing like that.

It's due to cheap headphones.

I don't mean the headphones I use to listen to the music on my device; I mean the crappy ones that others nearby use to listen to the music on their devices at volumes those headphones cannot come close to handling.

Riding the train as my commute (as I've done for nearly a decade now), I know that there will be a lot of noises that could be encountered while in the car, and most of them I do not wish to hear. Sitting through half of cell phone conversations is bad enough, but those don't tend to last too long. What's particularly bad are those instances where someone gets on and the sound of their music bleeds from their headphones so much that even from ten feet away I can hear it.

The best recourse I have found is to drown it with the music in my own headphones. I don't have to blare my volume to overwhelm it, because my music is coming from a much closer distance (it's in my ears), but the music playing needs to have a full sound; it requires an inherent "loudness." While some classical music has "loud" portions (the 1812 Overture comes to mind as an obvious example), that's not what suffices. It needs something with drums—and I don't mean timpani, or the occasional snare hit. That loudness needs to fill most of the time the song is playing. Sadly, something with the dynamics of classical pieces doesn't tend to cut it, because the softer portions open the door for the sound from the nitwit with the crappy headphones to seep in. Although there are "soft" songs from all genres (jazz, country, rock), when that external sound seeps in over a classical piece it conflicts so much worse than songs from those other ones (not that it sounds good by any stretch of the imagination with those).

And as ridiculous and pathetic as it is to admit, that has pushed the classical pieces off what gets loaded on the device.

I have been tempted, at times, to carry a cache of decent headphones with me—the ones that I use were only $15 at Best Buy, and they handle a good range of sound without letting any slip out—to hand out in such instances, but I have refrained. The inconsiderate don't appreciate considerate gestures.

Especially when it's meant to be considerate to the rest of us more than to them.

~

Talk to them? Yeah, right. They have the volume turned up that loud because they don't want to be bothered by others who might point out their inconsideration to them. It's not an accident.

They have no consideration for their own hearing; the rest of us haven't a chance of being acknowledged.

~

I know my headphones are not leaking sound, by the way. When I take them out of my ears I cannot hear anything coming from them. Unless someone has superhuman hearing, they cannot hear anything when they're up against my ears. And in such a scenario, I suspect my music bothers the superhuman less than the nitwit with the crappy headphones.

I imagine.