The Cardinal Bin

Denon is the Porsche of the music production world.

Or that's what I thought anyway when as a still-zitty 20-something I plonked down, in hard cash, because that's how old I am, the equivalent of more than half of my rent at the time, for a pair of Denon AH-D5000 headphones.

I knew everything about nothing but I eyed up the cans perched on the shoulders of Ricardo Hams as we sat next to each other smelling like that fine club stew of marinated beer and smoke on the tour bus in the leggy days of the end of the last millennium.

Mind you I wasn't able to afford his model number, I am, after all, at best, a dollar store version of his excellency, the one and onely, Sir Effects Bin.

Let me just cut the pace because my oats are getting cold and it's time to take my meds but I'm out.

The headphones sounded amazing. They still do. It's like wearing a pair of... god, I dunno... imagine buying a luxury car, hold on, I don't know why we turn to cars for examples, I actually think cars are an abomination, a prime example of evolutionary failure of humanity that the world isn't rammed with free and sustainable mass transit, oh wait, it probably is, just not in the West, so you know what let's not do the car thing, to hell with cars.

You know what, to hell with trying to relate this in some dumb simplified way. You all know what I'm talking about.

My feeling right now is anger, because despite all the money I spent and all the craftsmanship and engineering that went into these otherwise exquisite headphones, some absolute dick of a human made the choice to use the cheapest material for the ear pads so that after a few years these pads began to disintegrate in a way that made you look like you just came back from the mines because your ears were covered in these fine black particles, and when I say fine I mean small and difficult to remove, not fine as in you look fine because I sure as hell didn't after wearing these headphones.

Our capitalist lives are littered with these car crashes of bad choices. No doubt one or two examples are springing to your mind as you read this.

Something otherwise fabulous gets totally derailed by some really dumb oversight or bad choice. I'm looking at another one as I stare down at the floor looking for a word when I spot the IKEA Lillhult USB cable that lasted 4 weeks and as I write this and had to flip between tabs 5 times to write down the name of the product it occurred to me that maybe IKEA does that with their names to make it harder for people to leave bad reviews and then as my eyes travel up I spot the Keith McMillen K-Mix mixer which I'm trying to figure out what to do with because I'm trying to declutter my life, another thing which has so much great thought put into it but then someone thought it'd be fine to completely wrap in some kind of weird new untested material that after a few years feels like your fingers after you badly peel an orange, you know, like when you can't get your fingers in between the segments properly and end up piercing the skin and you just give up in frustration and just end up tearing it up like you're stranded on an island and don't care anymore and it's messy but you realise you need to just calm down because we live in a civilised world where you have access to a sink and running water, it will be fine.

But you know what it will not be fine because years later you accrue all this stuff that sits in your drawers and you don't know what to do with it because it's kinda sorta still useful and usable but it needs some work and maybe if I just buy a pair of sheepskin replacement ear pads (no, really, it's a thing) for 45€ it's better than dumping it in the bin and of course it's better than dumping it in the bin but maybe if Denon and Keith McMillen (R.I.P.) had flipping made a better choice to begin with I wouldn't be in this position 20 years later.

Stop being cheap, assholes. No disrespect, Keith.

I live in one of those places where there's a centralised place to dispose of garbage - there's a spot where the paper goes in one bin, the plastic and metal in another, and the rest in another. You see some strange things after you've done this routine a thousand times, VCR tapes, strangely preserved manuals for some outdated managerial training course from a completely different country, cassette tapes, books, weights, and so on. I often wonder about what people long into the future, and I mean like thousands of years, will think of when they find this stuff. Who were we, what were our priorities, and why, they will wonder in disbelief and exceptionalism, is there so much stuff, there has to be mountain loads worth of stuff buried in the ground.

It's like when you're walking to get your meds and on the way down your eyes catch a headline in some dinosaur newspaper about how they've just discovered some new roman (lowercase, because I have no respect, another story for another time) tiles while digging to make way for a new subway line. You don't make the time to read the paper cuz traditional news has failed us plus the clock is ticking on getting those meds in on schedule but you allow your head to imagine who walked on those tiles ... actually, no, I don't think about who walked on those tiles at all, I don't really care, but I do wonder how incredible it is that the tiles are still there, buried for millennia. Meanwhile, Denon and Keith McMillen (R.I.P.) and fill in the blank with your own company and product can't make a thing last for 20 flipping years.