“The iPod experience is a smooth ride, as sleek and impervious as the minicomputer itself-set it to shuffle and you’re sealed up in a dream machine, a twinkling drift through your own forgotten highlights. But for the Gen X-ers among us there’s a problem. The signal squeezed through an iPod’s white earbuds is not the warm and spacious headphone mindblow of old; to me it sounds bruisingly compressed, stripped of nuance, all bunched up in the midrange. Increasing the volume only distorts the bass and produces a nasty precipitation of treble, as if the drummer is flogging his cymbals with bicycle chains.”