There's an awful lot of jumbomumbo out there about headphones and earbuds.
I like my music loud, which, played skull-thudderingly through speakers when I was young, resulted in neighbours baring their teeth at the front door with a kitchen knife in each hand.
Then I discovered headphones, which enabled me to soar off into my own aurally twisted little world, big world actually, and at even louder volume.
I could literally batter myself to death under there, and nobody cared.
They say loud music through headphones over a sustained period will damage the ears.
Bollocks.
My sustained period of headphone listening began 30 years ago, and when I went to see bands, I would stand in front of the biggest and fattest speaker all night.
My ears are fine, I can hear the drop of a pin a hundred paces distant.
Audiophiles claim a sound system is only as strong as its weakest link.
Bollocks again.
So long as I have got good headphones, the music is going to sound great, even if it is brought to me through an amplifier made from an electric toothbrush charger.
Neurologists are as wrong-headed as audiophiles.
They will tell you music is heard in the right side of the brain, which means your ability to make leaps in understanding at the same time is severely limited.
How can bollocks occur three times in one topic? All I know is, if I feed something with genuine grunt into my brain, like new local powermeisters Idiot Prayer, then my ability to understand, my ability to create, is superhuman.
Right now I am typing to Dimmer's Degrees Of Existence, whose bass line alone produced two columns in August and three in July.
My first pair of headphones were not strictly that.
It was the late 60s and I was penniless and stupid.
I was stupid enough to think stereo would make my records sound better than a radiogram with a 15in woofer.
I genuinely believed sitting in a chair as the third point of a triangle listening to a train go from one speaker to another was a fantastic thing.
And being penniless, I was forced to buy the cheapest stereo on the shelves, an HMV Stereo Two.
The Stereo Two, speakers barely bigger than capsicums, soon came up hand-wringingly short, and I chose instead to lie face down on my bed with a speaker jammed against each ear.
Not especially wonderful, but at least I was on to the principle.
Three years later, flush from overpaid freelance journalism, I bought the Stereo Ten, and the need for headphones temporarily abated.
But then I bought some Sennheiser HD-530s, which I still use today, and they were superb.
Expensive and large, but lightweight.
When iPods and mp3 players came along, we turned to earbuds.
I contemplated going out in the street with the Sennheisers plugged into my iPod, but I looked like a complete yonk.
I survived the iPod world - hospitals, long bus trips - on bad earbuds that kept falling out and needed to be pressed into my ears, thus fully deploying valuable hands, until two weeks ago, when a one-day internet sale threw up a pair of Sennheiser noise-cancelling CXL-400s.
They are magnificent, the noise cancellation makes the music part of your brain.
Huge sound, heavier bass than Southland Stadium snow, and a perfectly snug and secure fit in the ear.
I was so pleased I bought a set of lightweight PX-100 Sennheiser headphones for my wife.
She had given up on earbuds when running around Ross Creek as they fell out on every fifth stride, but these are holding tight.
And she does not look like a yonk.
"These are almost as good as mine!" I exclaimed patronisingly, trying to retain the upper hand.
I later checked the Test Freaks user site.
Hers, $10 cheaper, got a rating of 9.1, mine were just 6.6.
Numbers schmumbers, I finally have good earbuds.
Nothing else matters.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
