Rest in peace, moonwalker.

On the day when an iconic part of music died, I dug out Off The Wall and Thriller from my record stash, cued them up and listened for hours – something I had not done for years.

And I marveled at the purity and joy of the music created and delivered by young Michael Jackson back then.

Those were exuberant days for MJ. His music blended R&B hooks, clever pop, daring rhythms, emotional and extraordinarily beautiful singing, funk, disco and rock, and yet all of that delivered free of schmaltz.

Me inside the chic Sennheiser demo room

What do you gain by upgrading from a pair of $100 earphones, say my trusty Sony MDR EX85LP, to a pair of cans worth some $2,200, like the Sennheiser HD800? To picky ears, things to watch out for are many, including such aural qualities as warmth, punchiness, frequency extension, detail, soundstaging and, well, you name it, the audiophile lexicon is a very large one.

To me though, there are two crucial qualities, and they are – if you allow me to indulge in more audiophile jargon – timbre reproduction and air.

Having the right timbre, simply put, means sounding right. For instance, the percussive tap of each grand piano key ringing true with sumptuous overtones. Or the singing human voice having body, bite and breath. Of course, naturalness does not tend to excite, and hence top-end headphones may be underwhelming at first. But they reward with an unfatiguing sound and long-term listening pleasure.

We are one year old!

This tech blog, hatched from an innocuous discussion between a few of us grumpy tech scribes bitching about life over a Bishan Junction 8 Crystal Jade dim sum lunch, has ticked into its second year this month and we are still loving every minute of it.

Its been a terrific learning experience for all of us, and frankly, we have been astonished by the spritely life Techgoondu has taken, the fun – and angst – we’ve had blogging through this platform, and the heartening responses from you readers who have obliged us invaluable eyeballing time and thoughtful comments over the past 12 months.

Thank you all!!

Turning one is as much a thrill as it is a time to reflect. To blog about matters that are close to our geek hearts has been our biggest thrill. Writing on a platform that’s a distinctly alternative one to what our day job presents has been equally rewarding.

Philips GoGear Opus

Philips may not be on many portable gear head’s shortlists of brands when it comes to buying a new portable music player, but its new model’s support for FLAC could swing a few votes its way.

The GoGear Opus is one of a slew of new releases by the Dutch electronics giant in Singapore today, and the only one in that bunch – as well as one of the few in the market – to supprt Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), an open source lossless compression standard that more than a few discerning listeners have told me is sonically a tad better than rival codecs like Apple Lossless and WMA lossless (although I can’t really discern those differences – all lossless codecs sound as good to me).

A rival to Apple’s Nano in terms of features and price, the decidedly chunkier Opus has a larger screen real estate compared to the Nano (2.8 diagonal inches vs 2.0-inch) but also costs slightly more ($339 vs $328 for the 16GB version; $299 vs $248 for an 8GB version).

First, there were the Apple iTunes Store and Amazon.com’s MP3 downloading service. Then mobile phone giants like Nokia and Sony Ericsson waded into the online music selling fray. Now, search engine vendors Yahoo and Google are gate-crashing this ever-burgeoning party – with a bang.

On Monday, Yahoo announced it has refreshed its music service to encompass a bigger ecosystem with external online music providers like Apple, collecting a fee with every referral, according to Reuters.

New York Times over the weekend reported (screenshot above from the article) that EMI, Warner Music, Universal Music and other big wig record labels will be working with Google to offer free downloads of music in China.

There are 4GB worth of reasons to love Apple’s new and very small iPod Shuffle. But there is one reason why I don’t – lack of controls on the player.

In making the new Shuffle so small, Apple’s designers decided to ship some of the heft to the earphones – smart, really. The new Shuffle relegates crucial controls like volume, song selection and play functions to a captive control strip attached to Apple’s earphones.

So you are pretty much stuck, unless other earphone makers start making earphones with Shuffle controls (Monster has already said it will roll out a series).

Check out Musicgoondu, a purely fun-seeking project by two Business Times scribes – Christopher Lim and me – and joined by our close circle of music-mad friends, including one who readers of Techgoondu will be familiar with: limbeer, aka Roland Lim. It is a blog on music, gear and musings. Believe it or not, Singapore has its own music scene, so this is also a place to rant and rave about what’s going on in this tiny island we call home. Check us out. We love to hear your comments.

I have written about this pair of Japanese-branded headphones before, but after a particularly draining jogging session yesterday, which I must have sweated buckets over 2 hours and thoroughly drenched the ‘phones, I feel I must give it another round of props for being one of the toughest and better sounding headphones for those who like to run. I’ve never have a pair of headphones able to take quite as much abuse or serve the runner as well: the Audio Technica “ONTO” ATH-ON3 fits like crazy glue around my ears, has a fab wire head band that is unobtrusive and feels lightweight enough for marathons. Sweat attack? Just dry the earpieces with kitchen paper towels and the headphones are good to go for your next run. Let’s hope Audio Technica won’t discontinue it anytime soon.

This piece of disclosure by StarHub CEO Terry Clontz, which I wrote about in an article in the Business Times on StarHub’s fourth quarter results earlier this month, seems to have gone unnoticed, so I am hoisting it up again: Google G2 phones – the qwerty keypad-less guise of Google’s open source operating system-based phone – could be in Singapore by June.

Besides StarHub, MobileOne is also thinking second-generation when it comes to Google’s shiny new toy. Earlier this month, the Straits Times reported that M1 was talking with HTC about bringing in the vendor’s G2 phones “soon”. That phone might well be the HTC Magic (pictured above), which the Taiwanese smartphone vendor unwrapped at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this month.

There is no news yet from SingTel, which launched the G1 HTC Dream phone in a glitzy affair here last week, on its G2 phone launch schedule.

My beloved and well-worn Nokia E71 now has a pair of bigger and smaller siblings. The Finnish phone maker yesterday did a glitzy catwalk launch of the E75 (left in the picture above) and E55 (right), which also saw the unveiling of other new phones, at the swanky club Zirca (the former Ministry of Sound). Nokia held the Singapore launch in conjunction with its new product unveiling at the Mobile World Congress 2009 in Barcelona this week.

Here are my 2 cents on both models after a hurried hands-on session at the event:

Heavier and chunkier, though smaller in girth, than the E71, the E75 is comfortably one of the sveltest slider smartphones phones in the market. What I like: the 3.5-mm headphones jack, the motion-sensitive screen that pivots when you turn the phone’s orientation between landscape and portrait, and the fact that it is essentially an E71 on steroids.

What didn’t float my boat was keeping the screen size the same – 2.4-inch, 240×320 pixels – as the E71 despite the bulking up. Really, Nokia, why? Okay, you get a more spacious keyboard, but the E71 is already dandy in that department. So the payback for the extra bulk is for the numeric keypad and traditional phone styling.

The skinny E55, on the other hand, comes with the same screen size as the E71, as well as a 3.5-mm headphones jack, despite losing weight and being smaller.