Last week I became the proud owner of a set of Creative Aurvana In-Ear2 earphones which retail for £89.99. And these are the proverbial “bee’s knees” – oxygen-free copper cabling and gold plated connections. They are also really quite light and compact.

Now, I’m not the kind of person who gets excited about unboxing, but the packaging for these headphones is superb. Considering the contents the box is not overly large and a window on the front shows off the earpieces. Open up the box and slide out the plastic surround and you will come across a small, neatly folded black cardboard box – this contains an assortment of eartips (2 pair of small, 1 pair of medium and 2 pair of large – the other medium pair are already on the earphones), aircraft adapter, cleaning device and some tiny manuals. Back in the main box there is a handy case which the earphones can be wound into.

Below are 3 photos I took showing the box contents (click on them for a larger view).

My usual headphones of choice are a relatively cheap (£20-£30) pair of foam-pad earphones. The Aurvana’s, in comparison, come with rubber eartips and fit snugly in your ear canal. As a result up to 95% of sound is blocked. Like sticking fingers in your ears, though, you end up hearing your own breathing a lot louder – none-the-less it does provide a much quieter listening experience without the background noise.

There is some sound leakage from them but it’s not excessive.

I’ve tried the earphones with a selection of music from Will Young to The Prodigy and all sounded clear and detailed. I love the soundtrack to the recent Star Trek movie, so that had an airing – the chimes in the opening number, for instance, I’d never heard before. Nor had I heard the musicians making various noises in the background. I also tried them with a BBC audio Podcast and it was immediately obvious the improvement in sound as I heard every rustle of script paper and could tell where all the edit points were.

Now, I’ll admit, I’m no audiophile. But, thankfully, a friend is so I asked him to try them. He stores all his recorded music uncompressed and uses earphones that cost many hundreds of pounds (and this isn’t including the £100+ it cost to have some custom eartips made). He thought the Aurvanas were excellent for the money and particularly liked their small size. He found them comparable to Shure SE210 earphones, which have a price of £125 (and they are a lot bulkier in size).

I think these really are excellent – they look and sound brilliant and are extremely well presented. It’s such a shame that, thanks to breaking my last MP3 player, I’m reduced to using them on my mobile phone!

Now updated to include Corel VideoStudio Pro X3.

It was my youngest daughters 1st birthday recently and I took the opportunity to record various videos during the day. What I now need to do is to splice them together and make some basic enhancements (one of the videos, for instance, was recorded in low light so I’d like to improve that). Oh, and it’s in MOV format. That latter fact rules out my usual video editor of choice – Windows Movie Maker.

Like, I suspect, most people I don’t need anything too fancy when editing videos. Yet, that’s precisely what most provide – they’re either incredibly basic (Windows Movie Maker) or incredibly overly complex for the average home user.

So, I needed something that would perform this task but not be so basic that as soon as I want to create another video, with slightly different requirements, that I’m looking for another editor again. What I wanted was something with the capabilities but simple enough for basic, home use.

After much searching, I downloaded and tested 4 trials – Adobe Premiere Elements 8, Pinnacle Studio 14, CyberLink PowerDirector 8 and Corel VideoStudio Pro X3.

Now, this isn’t an exhaustive review – like many of my reviews, I’m going to cut to the chase and give you the conclusions

Adobe Premiere Elements 8

A huge download which also runs extremely sluggishly on my PC. I own a copy of Photoshop Elements and I must be the only person who doesn’t like it – I find it over complex (swapping between different applications for browsing, editing, etc) and confusing. Premiere Elements is exactly the same.

I quickly found the option to improve the low-light video but I was given so many options that I was overwhelmed and upon trying to modify them later became very confused as to exactly how to do it. Just importing the videos in the first place was a chore.

Now, most of these trials restrict use for so many days and add watermarks to the videos. Which is fair enough – it lets you try out the editor without affecting its use. Except Adobe feel the need to splash a band across the video display in the editor, showing the fact that this is a trial, so watching your created video is made rather difficult.

Pinnacle Studio 14

An even bigger download and, well, I failed to be able to work out how to do even basic changes, such as the low light enhancements. The help file only refers to “brightness” in relation to editing it when capturing and what the word actually means.

After deciding against this product I tried to uninstall it, but the plugins refuse to.

CyberLink Power Director 8

A much more reasonable download size and, I think, the easiest to use. I was able to make the changes I wanted quickly and easily. The power appears to be there – indeed, one review of this product states it to be more for the professional than the other two (I’d disagree!). On top of all this, it’s the cheapest product to buy – just £32.99 (non-oem). That’s not to say all was roses – upon first run the updater program crashed and I never saw it run again.

Uninstalling it later was simple – just a single program to uninstall (it had installed something else at the time, and asked me if I wanted to remove that as well) with no files (that I could see) left behind.

Corel VideoStudio Pro X3

Again, a reasonable download size but it took an age to install (and uninstall) and was generally sluggish in use. I was able to do what I needed reasonable easily but struggled, once I’d applied a brightness filter, to work out how to change the settings. Also, I had no audio – it appears you have to import the audio seperately to the video (each come from the same file though but its a seperate process).

More worryingly, my video appeared to run a little quickly, even though VideoStudio insisted I was running it at normal speed – my camera takes picture in the NTSC format, rather than PAL, and I wonder if this had something to do with it.

Conclusion

CyberLink won out and I’ve purchased a copy – I’ll let you know how I get on.

However, I was disappointed at just how difficult these popular products are to get started with. There’s a definitely a gap in the market here – we seem to go straight from basic to professional video editors, with nothing in-between. Ok, some of these try with “wizards”, but most people don’t want some automated process creating a video for them – they want to drag and drop, trim, and make enhancements themselves. But they want this to be simple and don’t want it hidden behind an array of buttons and more advanced options.

Or have I missed a product on the market?

I’d just like to add one thing – getting hold of these trials. The Pinnacle one wasn’t easy to find and I had to do a trawl through Google to get there.  Both Pinnacle and Abobe, possibly due to the size of their downloads (both over 1GB – Pinnacle was near 2GB), use a Java downloader. Adobe insist you have an account with them – I do, but before proceeding needed to know my home address. Not sure why, but why not? Except the country was down as the US and I wasn’t able to change it. So I just told them I live in Beverly Hills 90210. That worked.

I’ve had my ZyXEL NAS now for a couple of months, so I thought it was only fair that I should review it

The device itself was a lot smaller than I was expecting, being not bigger than the hard drive that goes in it. It’s made robustly of metal, with the exception of the plastic front panel. It has rubber feet underneath, but is more sturdily mounted on a the provided plastic cradle – this is a useful addition but cheaply made.

The front panel consists of a number of status lights, a power and sync button and a USB socket.  All other connections are on the back  – SATA, eSATA, Gigabyte Ethernet,  and another USB port.

I had also purchased a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Green – not the quickest, but energy conscious and quiet. Putting the drive in is a case of undoing a screw on the underneath of the front panel, lifting the panel away and then pushing the drive into place.

You turn the NAS on and it takes a few minutes to initialise. First time you use it, however, you have to install the provided (or downloaded) firmware, which you do from your PC. After this is done you access the NAS via a web-based admin. panel.

The administration section is detailed and includes many useful options. A media server is included allowing you access to your videos and music anywhere on the network. Additionally, there are options to set up downloads to your NAS, allowing you, for instance, to kick off a large download at night and turn your PC off.  This includes Torrent options. You can also set up feeds, such as Podcasts, which will download automatically.

To access the NAS data you can map the drive to your PC or access it via a network shortcut. Additional access options available include FTP and  a web publishing feature that allows you to access data from a browser.

The NAS can also be set up with timing options allowing you to dictate times when it will turn itself on and off, and also reboot itself.

Connect a printer to the USB port and configure it via the admin menu and you have a simple, but useful, network printer.

And if all these options aren’t enough, you can download and install, from the admin menu, further tools including WordPress, MySQL and Gallery.

So, what’s it like in use? Excellent. I use few of the more advanced features, I’ll admit. I use my NAS, primarily, as a backup device. A good external hard drive isn’t much less, so I went for a NAS for the networking options that it does give me. Also, because it comes diskless, I know that the disk can be easily replaced – many others come with a disk and firmware built in – you may be able to replace the drive but, often, adding the firmware back on is difficult or even impossible. That’s not the case here – in the case of a drive failure, I simply slot a new one in and re-install the firmware.

PC Pro tests mentioned that it was quite slow, but I’ve not noticed in comparison to my previous Maxtor model. That was particularly slow when trying to access the data, something the ZyXEL doesn’t have a problem with. And that, above basic transfer speed, makes it feel a lot quicker in use.

It’s tucked away, next to my printer and is quiet and efficient in use. For home users it’s ideal.