My wife got a Pearl recently and wanted to use the MP3 player capabilities. As we found out fairly quickly, the Pearl is somewhat lacking in power output and also has no volume control.
We were using a pair of Koss headphones picked up at Mall Wart, they were not only too quiet but they were also quite uncomfortable. Using a 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapter from Verizon I bought allowed us to use any 3.5mm iPod headphones we wished to try, it also brought a volume control into the picture as one is built into the adapter.
Verizon adapter:
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After considerable time researching I found some headphones that were both reasonably priced and very efficient (ie, lots of sound for little power input).
Panasonic RP HJE50 canal phones turned out to be the optimum choice, low price, good sound, high efficiency and quite comfortable. These phones go in the ear like a very soft earplug, they are tiny, about the size as the tip of your little finger and come with three different sizes of tips to fit the ears.
Amazon.com: Panasonic High Quality Earbuds (RP-HJE50): Electronics
The only real problem now was that the Panasonic canal phones lacked deep bass.
Solution? Turn up the bass in the MP3s themselves.
First I used MP3Gain, a PC freeware which normalizes and sets all the song loudnesses nearly the same in batch mode. MP3Gain, unlike many normalizers, attempts to set the gain so that all the songs sound nearly equally loud to the human ear.
MP3Gain /
The nice thing about MP3Gain is that all changes it makes to volume are reversible without any losses at all in the sound quality of the file.
Next I use Wavosaur, a freeware audio editor for the PC
Wavosaur free audio editor with VST and ASIO support /
Along with Wavosaur I use two freeware VST plugins which Wavosaur accepts. The first plugin is Edge.dll, a subharmonic synthesizer module which generates deep bass by synthesizing subharmonics of low frequencies in the original tune.
KVR: Fat-Ass EDGE - Virtual Effect
Just a touch of subharmonic synthesis is needed and then only on a song to song basis, I leave Edge turned off most of the time. When used judiciously, the subharmonic synthesizer can produce bass that is just amazing coming from such tiny headphones.
The next plugin I use is 31BandEQ.dll, as the name implies it is a thirty one band equalizer.
Free VST plugins and effects: Uncut Plugins - 31 Band 1/3 Octave Master EQ (VST Effects)
With the equalizer I boost the bass frequencies by about 4 to 9 dB in the lower four to six ranges of the EQ to make up for the deficiencies in my wife's headphones. You can do this boosting as you listen to the headphones plugged into your soundcard because Wavosaur does real time processing of the signal, you can hear the processed signal while you tweak the EQ sliders and the subharmonic synthesizer settings.
You can also correct deficiencies in the mid and treble ranges, although my wife's headphones didn't require any EQ changes there since they were already quite flat to start with.
Once I have a setting on which some favorite tunes sound really good over the headphones, I then put Wavosaur in batch mode and convert a hundred or so tunes at one time in the background while I surf the tubes or whatever else I might have going at the time. Be aware that Wavosaur doesn't give you much indication that anything is happening in batch mode, it is best to open a window on the folder to which Wavosaur is outputting and keep an eye on the process that way.
Wavosaur only outputs .WAV files so I then need to convert the .WAV files to MP3's, I use the freeware CDex for this as it has a batch convert utility which allows the conversion to go on in the background, it also has a plethora of MP3 encoder settings, I just leave it on 128 kBps constant bitrate and high quality. If you really want to cram a lot of songs into your Pearl, then encode at 96 kBps or even 64 kBps with a slight loss of quality.
CDex /
While all this sounds like a lot of work, the results are worth it to the perfectionist, my MP3s play with deep bass and with plenty of volume on my wife's Blackberry Pearl, where before the tweaking and the 'phones upgrade they were thin and tinny sounding.
Finding and familiarizing myself with the programs was most of the work, once I had that figured out actually processing the files was an easy matter.
Most of the processing goes on in the background, as I type this CDex is working on converting file # 86 out of 134 back to MP3 format.
If anyone is interested in this process, I'd be happy to help. Either post here or send me an email and I'll do what I can.
Getting the most from your Pearl as an MP3 player
) I don't have issues with volume either. I use the adapters from Seidio and some Sony Ericcson Walkman phone headsets.
