Even his friends find the tinniness of his electoral ear mysterious.

Canned laughter is a natural accompaniment to the tinniness of the undertaking.

And after the tinniness provides its amusements, Kreidler's ingenuity takes over.

The undesirable 'tinniness' of the horn was tamed by wrapping adhesive tape round it.

The tinniness of the late-eighties CDs are gone.

It's still lacking bass and at full blast a softer song had some tinniness to it, but again, the quality is overly impressive for the size."

And compared with the muffled tinniness of its competitors, the built-in speaker sounds like James Earl Jones with a megaphone.

All the extras in the world won't help if a pervading sense of tinniness reminds you, with every turn of the wheel, that you're driving a bargain-bucket brand.

We tested them against the MacBook Air, whose speakers are no prize either, and found the Zenbook's speakers to be slightly worse in the tinniness department, but not by much.

Also, the Wall's quadraphonic format never translated well to soundboard tapes made during the period, as the sound was compressed into an unnatural stereo format and suffered from a pronounced tinniness.

"That's a bad word, sailing," Mr. Rice said, friendly in the special way of City Islanders, with an outerborough tinniness of tone and a heartiness worthy of New England.

That tinniness, alas, is the aural common denominator of the sound of synthesizer-based instrumentation in theaters around Manhattan, unless extra care and expense are taken in the mixing and placement of speakers.

On her vocals, he said, "Her voice tends toward tinniness and lacks depth, yet she's obviously proficient and can hit some very big notes when required - and unlike many of her backing-track-assisted contemporaries, Minogue's vocals seemed to be entirely live."

The tinniness of Michael Hirst's screenplay ("It's older than time and just as mysterious") hardly helps bring this material to life, any more than Mr. Brosnan's unconvincing and (despite several episodes in which he proves himself capable of violent killing) rather passive performance.