Purchase Power

My Sony headphones gave up the ghost on Friday. They're not that old but the iPod is in and out of my bag a lot and I wind them around the iPod to keep them neat. I was listening with one ear in when I changed to the other ear it had stopped working. Of course nothing these days is made to be fixed and I couldn't take the ear phone apart with out breaking it. One of the wires inside had dropped off the solder. Anyhow I decided to do a tiny bit of research on getting some decent replacement ones.

The What Hi-Fi website recommended Sennheiser CX 300 IIs as their 'budget buy'. Play.com listed them at £30 which, for in ear headphones, is pretty high end in my books! Still the post can take ages to get here so I decided to have a wander to HMV. There are many nice things about living on a small-ish island.. Retail choice isn't one of them. So imagine my surprise when HMV not only had them in a choice of colours (I got white cos it's kind of an "I've got an iPod" colour even though my iPod is a black and grey classic.) they also had £5 off matching Play.com's price. Sold!

I also wanted Hatful of Hollow by The Smiths having found out that a lot of the well known songs on there weren't the traditional single version but live BBC archive versions. They also had that! (Again a rarity in non-chart stuff) but it was in a 2 for £10 offer. Of course I would then be spending an extra £4 to save a £1 but I can rarely resist a 2 for £10 offer on CDs. Still, lunch time was nearly over.. I was in the S section and I spied a Steely Dan Best of Double CD which seemed like good value. The kind of thing that I probably wouldn't want to listen to in it's entirety but I hope will enrich my iPod shuffle experiences.

All in all one of my better local shopping experiences.