[petdog]

Actually, map is still faster:

    In [24]: timeit ''.join(map(chr, ll))
    100000 loops, best of 3: 3.91 us per loop

    In [25]: timeit ''.join([chr(i) for i in ll])
    100000 loops, best of 3: 5.85 us per loop

    In [26]: timeit ''.join(chr(i) for i in ll)
    100000 loops, best of 3: 7.79 us per loop