The Demo Site

The Short Version: Definitely the best sounding consumer-grade in-ear headphones I’ve ever listened to. The price tag matches the sound quality however. If you want good audio fidelity on your phone headset, you’ll be hard pressed to find something better than these. Just be prepared to shell out some serious cash.

Features:

Review: In-ear headphones usually sacrifice sound quality for small size and portability. It isn’t until you start spending upwards of a thousand bucks for professional in-ear monitors that you get good sound. But Klipsch has brought good sound to the consumer-range, albiet the upper upper end of the consumer range. The X10i have pretty even response across the audio spectrum, including decent bass levels.

There is an inherent danger with in-ear headphones. Being so close to your ear drum, is it very easy to cause permanent damage to your hearing with any in-ear design. I was happy to see that Klipsch actually included this information in the user manual, complete with a chart of the length of time you can safely listen to various decibel levels.

The form factor of the units are almost identical to the Image X5, meaning yes, they are a bit weird looking. I personally didn’t like they way they sat in my ears. Nothing that I couldn’t get used to, I just prefer the more traditional monitor style more.

The X10i comes with 5 different sizes of tips. They range from small, medium, and large in a single flange design, to small and large in a double flange configuration. A good seal inside your ear is critical to bass response, as well as eliminating outside noise and that stethoscope effect. The best option for in-ears is to get a custom mold taken of your ear, and have the headphones made accordingly. But this is definitely the next best thing. The small, single flange was plenty big for me. I wore these things all afternoon without my ears getting sore, all the while making the screeching of the subway bearable.

The call quality from the mic keeps up with the rest of the unit. My test partner on the other end of the line was able to hear me clearly with minimal background noise as I walked down Broadway. It’s hard enough to hear yourself on that street, much less conduct a phone call.

The specifications claim that the headset is capable of reproducing tones as low as 5 Hz. I’m not sure I believe that for two reasons. First is that 5 Hz is below the human range of hearing, making it a sort of useless effort. That also means I can’t really test for frequencies that low. Second is that low frequency waves have the most energy and the longest wavelengths. This means a 5 Hz wave won’t even complete a full cycle before reaching your eardrum, and you could be blasting your eardrums with all sorts of pressure you can’t even hear. Not the safest thing.

There are three buttons on the remote, volume up, down, and a multi-purpose in the middle. Depending on the number of times you press it, it will pause, play, and go to the next or previous songs. Unfortunately, this functionality only works on the iPhone 3GS. I tested a few other Android phones with various degrees of success, but nothing reliable. The volume controls do work on a Macbook Pro, if anyone’s interested.

I’m slightly amused that Klipsch warns you against using the X10i to listen to low-quality audio. From their FAQ section:

So these headphones are hi-fi enough to show the degradation of MP3 encoding, yet they are specifically designed to be used with the iPhone, where I’m sure most people don’t keep lossless files.

These headphones have a very narrow application window, but if you have an iPhone, want a fantastic sounding headset, and don’t mind dropping $350, go for it.

Short version: The Aurora ALX is quite possibly the fastest computer I’ve ever used. It is in a word, amazing. The water cooling, thermally reactive venting system, and lighting combine to make a system that runs great, looks amazing, and has some innovative features that make you go “duh. why didn’t I think of that?” Of course performance has its price, and you will have to pay a premium price for this system.

Full review: The Aurora ALX is unabashedly a gamer’s PC. It’s main focus in life is to run the latest software, and run it as fast as possible. The case makes no apologies about this, it doesn’t try to disguise itself as a business product, you can tell by looking at the case that it’s designed to go fast. The front of the case is smooth, with the alienhead logo prominently displayed at the top. When you push on the head, the front panel drops exposing the Blu-ray drive, gently lit by white LEDs. The bottom of the front gapes open, allowing air to flow through as quickly as possible. The top of the case is covered by a row of thermostatically controlled louvers, which open to allow more air flow as needed. It’s actually hard to get the louvers to open, since the factory installed liquid cooling system is so efficient. The side of the case are actually restrained. There’s a small window, lit from behind via multicolor LEDs (which you can control from in Windows). The whole design of the case is remarkably restrained, considering Alienware’s reputation for, shall we say, extreme design. One interesting feature is the addition of a small, pressure sensitive button on the back of the computer near the card slots. If you push this button (regardless of if the computer is on or not), several small LEDs light up and show you the area where you plug in the video, sound, and network connections. This is frankly brilliant, I don’t know how many times I’ve been crawling under a desk wishing for a flashlight while plugging everything in to get the thing up and running. These little LEDs are in other places as well. Taking the side of the case off reveals not just the extremely well routed wires and hoses, but also another one of these small buttons. Pushing on that button lights up the entire inside of the case, making it incredibly easy to see what you are doing while hooking up and routing said wires, connectors, and hoses. Again, a brilliant inclusion in design, that I wish more PC makers would use. After mentioning how much I liked these lights to my contact at Alienware, I was told that both sets of lights run off of a rechargeable battery.

Hardware configuration:
Intel Core i7 975 Extreme (3.33GHz, 8MB Cache)
Dual ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB video cards
6GB of RAM
2x 1TB Hard drives, running in a RAID0 configuration
Cosmic Black ALX case, with 875 watt power supply

You can see why this system is so fast after looking at the specs. To give you some hard numbers, running at 1680×1050 @ 120Hz, AAx8, and Ultra High on all options, the average FPS in the Far Cry 2 “Ranch Long” benchmark was 63 FPS. It peaked out at 139 FPS, and dipped down to 25 FPS at the slowest point. Crysis averaged 35 FPS during the “Island Time-demo”. Very respectable. From a purely organic viewpoint, I’m happy to report that any game I threw at the ALX ran perfectly, and incredibly smoothly.

The Good: the Aurora ALX is a great machine. It’s a gamers dream, and it’ll run anything you throw at it with no problem. The water cooling keeps the temps down while running quiet, and the thermal venting is really cool. The LED lights are cool, but you can shut them off if you are so inclined.

The Bad: The price. Let’s be honest, not a whole lot of people have $4500 to drop on something like a PC, particularly these days. If you do though, this is the machine to get. It’s also really really heavy. Liquid cooling and an 875 watt power supply do not make for a light weight computer. I also noticed that because it is liquid cooled, it seems to pull in more dust and fibers then an air cooled system.

Bottom line: if you can afford it, buy it. The Aurora ALX is a great machine. I’ve really enjoyed my time “reviewing” it (meaing playing Far Cry 2, Crysis, and Borderlands) and will be sad to see it go back to Alienware. Particularly because my wife will expect me to help out around the house again since I’m not busy doing work.

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