AKG K702

I had the pleasure of sampling the great AKG k702 from it's box just last week (it's a hard knock life) which really put my music into context.

As for this headphone, well it certainly looked and tasted 'typical', offering both the good and the bad bits of old AKG all rolled into one. Firstly, the bad - volatility. Obviously a well structured system is the key to old fortifieds, but whether the research that went into this particular headphone were topped up regularly enough is somewhat up for contention. Simply put, it's got volatility a go-go, with treble so searing that it feels like your ear passage is melting. Ok, so it's not quite that bad, but suffice to say it's volatile.

Beyond the take-no-prisoners entry, the headphone itself is genuinely attractive, rich with chewy caramel flavours that've been intensified over the years, with the vanilla etched influences then continuing through the dry and savoury finish, ending warm and dry and with that trademark varietal tang and savouriness.

In many ways then this is a stunning fortified, showing all the caramelised richness and complexity that 40 years of intense research will deliver. Yet it still falls short of the sort of endless viscosity and mind-blowing length of the comparable RS-1 I tried last week, a notion which - when coupled with the distracting volatility - marks this as a very good, but not quite great, fortified (lovely with a pear and chocolate tart though).

8.2/10

Western Digital 2TB My Book 3 Review

There I was, searching through my junk in search of the Western Digital drive I had left over - hoping and praying it would be the one that Western Digital wanted. Each opened box, plain old Seagates had somehow manged to infest my life. Near giving up, I stumbled upon the old HP my dad had left behind. I looked skyward and nodded, opened the computer up and BEHOLD! THE WESTERN DIGITAL W80EB!

Yes, that's exactly how it went down. Western Digital Australia were running a quest to find all the old Western Digital hard drives they could. After seeing this, and knowing I had one lying around, I managed to find the 8GB one above in an old HP computer. I quickly posted it on the Western Digital Australia facebook wall, and a few weeks later, I have a nice 2TB USB 3.0 external hard drive for my efforts.

The beast in all it's glory above, running at about the same size as my 1.5TB WD external I have currently - it's a hell of a beast. Following the quick startup guide looked a bit boring, so I got to looking around through the box.

Because this uses the new USB 3.0 standard, most motherboards wont actually support this external hard drive in it's superspeed form. Western Digital appear to have covered for that and a small little PCI-E adapter is included in the box, photographed above. It uses the NEC D7202 USB3 chipset, the same as my gigabyte motherboard.

The installation of something like this is trivial - the quick start guide is mostly useless, as it shows a computer with PCI slots and shows the PCI-E card going into that. For non-seasoned users, your local family computer whiz should be able to install that fine.

The back of the WD 2TB My Book 3 consists of a power button, a kensington lock port, a mini-USB3 port (photographed below) and a 12v@1.5A DC power jack connector.

While we're on the topic of the power jack connector, actually, we'll take a quick look at what was provided in the box (presumably because it was chinese stock):

Yes, that's a chinese power brick. Annoying. Luckily I have this 1.5TB WD to steal the power supply from, for testing purposes.

The Testing

A program called "HD Tune Pro" was used to do the testing on the hard drive. I've compared the external to both my internal Seagate 500GB and my 1.5TB USB 2.0 external Western Digital drive (pictured below because I love it <3).

The Western Digital 2TB My Book 3 Hard Drive

Yes, that shows read speeds of 120 MB/s and write speeds of 100 MB/s.

The 2TB My Book 3 performed incredibly well in the file access speed test, where an increasingly large file is placed onto the drive and then read back off, to gauge the speed. We can see it starts off slowly, but very quickly extends out at the 16 mark on the x-axis.

Western Digital 1.5TB USB 2 External Hard Drive

This graph is less nice to look at, with read/write speeds maxing out at 25-30 MB/s, almost 3 times slower than the My Book 3 drive. While I used to think this pretty good, I've quickly become infatuated with the My Book 3 speeds.

Seagate 500GB Internal Drive

This right here was initially intended as more of a joke - I didn't actually realise that the USB 3.0 drive would be quite as much in front as it is. This 500GB drive wouldn't be more than 2 years old, and to see write speeds doubled with an external drive standard compared to an internal drive in under 2 years is just incredible.

Summary

Well, it appears as though to summarise, it would have to be that I should be using my external drive as my main drive. It's fast, very easy to use (just plug 2 cables in and go) and not a complete eyesore like so many external hard drives right now.

The new USB 3.0 spec is so much faster, the evidence is right here, in a general day-to-day usage test, the speed was 3 times as fast as the old USB 2.0 spec external hard drive. It's certainly making me glad I paid the bit extra for a USB 3 motherboard as this hard drive is definitely a keeper.

A big thanks to Western Digital for running such an awesome competition, helping out regular people!