diversions, distractions | gear | surround mixes

deverted from…
My psychological state is steadily decaying on its own, no fear, it will heal itself soon enough. I must allow these things to take as much time as they need.

distracted with
In the mean-time, my old trusty 5-or-so year old Logitech iTouch cordless keyboard finally died. Of-cousre one would expect most keyboards to last a long time, this is true, but cordless ones are subject to slightly different wear and tare. Th iTouch I had was the first round of cordless keyboards they did in black and dark grey, I think the second cordless overall, as the first one was the horrid white/green combo. They keyboard itself could be heard to flex whenever one moved it, but it was still a pretty sweet piece of gear for its time, and I’ve had plenty of great use out of it. I imagine the flexing of the chasis also flexed the PCB inside, so there are probably some hairline cracks on the board in there, perfectly understandable and acceptable given its high-impact use, cost and now overall life.

gear
So I went out and got the Logitech DiNovo Laser keyboard and mouse, having used my brother in law’s first edition DiNovo. Mind you, that url is for the Australian corner of Logitech’s site, you might want to change your region, though I don’t imagine any of you would be foolish enough to purchase it directly from Logitech, as countless retail vendors will have it astoundingly cheaper than the RRP that Logitech will charge.
It’s absolutely brilliant.
I read a whole stack of user responses on various websites regarding this piece of gear, that setup times were long, that they had constant connection issues, but I’ve had absolutely zero issues at all. I set it up in 5 minutes, and connection is always flawless. I get the idea that many of these people haven’t dealt with such peripherals before. One thing’s for sure, don’t ever install the drivers that come with a product on CD. They’re out of date even before the first disc is pressed; always go to the manufacturer’s website and download the latest drivers. It’s also (or should be) common knowledge that you must uninstall any previous device drivers, we learnt that lesson a long time ago with Windows, it’s something you should be diligent in anyway.

The DiNovo is perfect.
While I have less initial shortcut buttons to custom assign as on the old iTouch, the DiNovo has a handy Function button that changes F1-F12 into assignable buttons, so essentially I have many more than before. Still the important ones I have on the tactile buttons, and it’s great that freedom is still provided to assign programs to be opened rather than the default uses for them, and I’m also glad that the Media button next to the media control pad can also be assigned, which I’ve pointed towards Winamp instead of whatever other dinky program that’s implemented as part of the driver-set.

First thing to mention is the build quality.
When I first used my brother in law’s 1st edition DiNovo (with the MX700 mouse, not the 1000 that comes with the laser edition), it was the keyboard that sold me on it. Accustomed to the afore mentioned flexing of my old keyboard, this thing is as rigid and braced as a sheet of metal. Certainly the durability will be signifficantly increased, and one doesn’t have to handle it with the same kind of cautiousness that the older cordless pieces needed to; not to suggest I’m going to be rough with it, but at least I know it’s a lot stronger.

The keys on the keyboard are more than perfect.
They’re low profile much like laptop keys, but being a full keyboard means they’re full-sized keys (length by width), and you don’t have the extraneous parts of the laptop in the way. They keys are fairly stiffly sprung and have hardly any lateral movement at all; this combined with the ultra low-profile nature of the keys means that your own lateral movement is never inhibited, and the sprung keys actually increase typing speed and decrease errors. The last typing test I did, I clocked in at about 80 words per minute, I imagine that I’d be up somewhere at 85 now if not more when using this keyboard.

While many complained about the keypad/controller being separated from the main keyboard, I absolutely love it. I don’t always use the keypad, and when I do it’s easily within reach, but it does reduce the size of the main keyboard by a fair bit, making it much more portable than a full-sized cordless. I actually have it sitting on the other side of the mouse, and it makes navigating and typing much easier.

The mouse is an MX1000 Laser, apparently a Bluetooth version of the MX900 Laser. I’ve used the 900 before at a friend’s place, and I’ve always like it. Perfectly contoured to the shape of the hand (sorry left-handers), and deadly accurate with the laser tracking. Heaps of functionality here too with horizontal tilting with the mouse-wheel, scan up and down buttons above and bellow the mouse wheel, a thumb button (which the old cordless mouse had), and two additional back and forward buttons on either side of the thumb button, all assignable to a wide variety of funcitons.

Many people seem to have experienced a lot of lag from the devices; while they do go to sleep after a short amount of time to conserve battery-life, I’ve never gotten any more than half a second’s lag from any device, perfectly acceptable for me as I don’t play games. I never have connection dropouts, and the range of the devices is fantastic. Being a geek, I already had several USB extension cables around, and naturally put the Bluetooth dongle on the end of one, simply because I don’t need connectivity in my cupboard where the case sits, so naturally I thought to bring the dongle out into the studio; again, just something that makes sense to me.

One slightly useless feature is the LCD screen on the number/control pad. It’s nice and novel to have new mail notifications and current track titles displayed on it, but ultimately unnecessary. I can’t help but think that even though non-backlit LCDs use very little battery, it may still signifficantly contribute to battery drain. Not to worry though, batteries are cheap enough when you buy them in bulk which of-course I do having owned cordless peripherals before, so it will be no big deal should hi-drain be the case.

finally surrounded
While I was working at the studio (a recording studio, not my studio at home) a few years ago, we messed around with surround sound, and listened to some of the then rare surround mixes that were released at the time. I must say that while it is an extremely difficult thing to do becuase of phasing issues and what-not, when done well, it’s bloody amazing. Ever so slowly, the rest of the market is catching up with surround audio, and Björk has released her albums remixed in surround sound. While I was tempted to buy up the lot, I settled with Homogenic, the most theatrical and grand of her works, being originally co-created with the wonderfully talented Marius de Vries, and mixed and engineered by the auspicious Howie B and Mark ‘Spike’ Stent. These are gods of their crafts, and collaborating with Björk was a brilliant stroke of genius. I haven’t had a chance to listen to the new surround mix yet, but it’s an exciting thing. and I imagine it will be if anything, even more grand than it was before.