Sander Wolf

There’s nothing I like about basketball. When I was a kid my semi-famous Aunt gave me a nice one and 20 years later, it has yet to hit pavement. Needless to say, I’m terrible at H-O-R-S-E. I’ve seen two games in my life. One was somewhat interesting because I’d never seen a basketball game before. The other was cool because I had box seats and free hotdogs and beer. My complaints against the sport are endless: I don’t appreciate the grandstanding. It seems like more of an individual sport than a team sport. The score is way too high (better than soccer in that respect, I guess). The rules are odd (I still don’t quite understand how fouls add up both for the individual player and the team). I don’t understand how any pro basketball player could miss a free-throw. The list goes on…

But now I have a new 42″ LCD TV, the Dallas Mavericks are in the playoffs, and TNT is broadcasting in clear, bright HD. And suddenly, I care. I’m not sure whether it’s just the fair-weather fan in me coming out or if I’m just drawn to how great my new TV can look. (I did catch myself watching a Discovery Channel HD feature about these mean starfish that attack coral reefs, so maybe it’s the latter.) Either way, I’m impressed. So, not sure if I’m “rowdy, loud, and proud,” but I’m at least interested. Now football, that might be a different story. We’ll see in a few months.

So, I’m still on the fence about whether or not to keep the new TV. It’s big and pretty when it’s all lit up, but for something so expensive I expect it to be perfect all the time. I know that if it was there’d be no need for the model that cost two thousand dollars more, but it’s still frustrating when the TV shows its weaknesses. Like the other day when playing a Playstation2 game for the first time. Karaoke Revolution scrolls lyrics across the bottom of the screen which you have to sing in time and in tune or a virtual audience will humiliate you off of the stage. On my screen the text blurs. Not so much that it’s unreadable, but it’s definitely noticeable.

Then we watched The Aviator last night. Not a terrible movie, but definitely too long for a biopic that doesn’t even cover the guy’s entire life. Looked pretty good on the screen until they got to the golfing scene and all the grass looked blue. Turns out it’s one of Scorsese’s special effects, but I didn’t know it at the time and figured it was the TV. I blew away my calibration of the screen by adjusting every single config. I could trying to turn the blue to green, but still couldn’t manage to do it. Then I figured it must be a loose cable. I disconnected and reconnected the Playstation2 (which is doubling as my DVD player until I hear a good explanation of why it shouldn’t). No change. I pulled out each component connection from the back of the amplifier. No red. No blue. No picture at all. Wait…

…no picture at all? Is sync carried on the green component cable? I thought that idea went away about fifteen years ago. Guess not because when I yanked the cable (on either end) the picture dropped.

After a twenty minute delay we resumed the movie. Turns out the next scene is completely green, so I should have just been a little more patient. Played the DVD on the laptop later just to double-check that it was the way it was supposed to be. Freakin’ Scorsese. Maybe I should listen to the director’s commentary.

The Dish receiver arrived today. After unpacking it I realized that I need to buy YAC (Yet Another Cable). Actually, make that two. The first cable is HDMI –> HDMI. That goes from the Dish receiver to the TV and carries digital sound and video. It didn’t come in the box with the receiver which gives me an idea of how much it costs. The odd part is that I’ll only be using half of the cable. I won’t be using the audio part because I use a separate amplifier to connect to the speakers. So I need YAC for the sound part. That one’s a standard optical cable (though I may buy one that comes with the tips to fit into a headphone-type jack because I broke one of them off accidently the other day on the cable from the Airport Express to the amplifier and had to use the spare). Had I spent another $300 on a receiver that had an HDMI input, I could save a couple bucks now. I think I made a good choice — the cable is less than $30.

I attempted to install the Dish receiver myself. The official Dish Guy doesn’t arrive for two more weeks, but they went ahead and shipped the receiver early. And how am I not supposed to try installing it with that kind of wait? A few problems though. The most obvious is that I’m missing all the cables that I need to make the fancy connections. I tried using the ones they included (3 x RCA — R, L, Video) and got an image. But when I connected what I thought was the feed from the satellite dish, I ended up with what was probably a huge ground loop. It made my subwoofer hum and the video image shake. Not pretty. So, after searching for signal twice, I gave up. Besides, with two weeks to spare, maybe I can save a couple bucks and order the cables over the internet.

No More Pussy

One of the more boring things I’ve written, but maybe the headline (which I didn’t write) evens things out.

The stereo receiver can now be calibrated since I can hook it up to the TV to see what’s going on (and, well, I really don’t have much else to look at on the TV since Dish guy is still three weeks out). I ran the auto-calibration thing and noticed all kinds of weird stuff I was just blissfully living with before. First of all, the rear speakers were backwards (right was left and left was right). Second, the receiver seems to think that one or both of the rears is also wired out-of-phase. You’d think I’d be able to hear that, but then I missed the far more obvious right/left mix-up. You’d also think that the guys I hired to run my rear speaker cables would know right from left. Hell, they even labeled the wires wrong.

So, do I bother trying to fix it? And more importantly, how would I know if I did?

Got the TV delivered this morning. Sure looks a lot bigger when it’s actually in the house. Maybe the 37″ would have been big enough. Did I just say that out loud?

aberdeen city
new pornographers
the brother kite
jules shear
the acoustic trio after jules shear (Matt …)
maritime

You can look at audio spec sheets all day long and never really learn anything. Ninety percent of speakers, amplifiers, headphones, microphones, and other sound producing or receiving devices list their range as 20 Hz - 20 kHz without much explanation or clarification. That range is generally described as the limits of human hearing. I’ve been to too many concerts to hear anything quite that high, but now that I wear earplugs at loud concerts or when I’m vacuuming or mowing the lawn, it’s hopefully not getting dramatically worse. Except that as you age you tend to lose some hearing anyway. That’s why you always have to speak up around Grandpa.

What the specs don’t usually specify is what the drop-off is in volume as you get to the extremes of the frequency spectrum. When it’s listed, it’s usually done as something like 75 Hz-20 kHz +/-3 dB. That +/- part is the fudge factor and can make the range specified relatively meaningless. So when you’re buying speakers you have to actually listen to them first. This is hard to do at Fry’s. Or really any other store for that matter. Even then, assuming a perfectly quiet listening room with no echos, what would you listen for? Any decent speaker will spew out sounds that are beyond my range of hearing so there’s got to be more than that. I usually try to listen to the highs and the lows just to get an idea of the range of the speaker first. The clarity of the cymbals and the boom of a kick drum or bass are good reference points, but like with the Bose Wave radio, that can sometimes be misleading. I’ll then concentrate on the middle of the sound. Can I distinctly hear the vocal against the guitar or do they kind of blend together? Does it sound like the speaker is at the end of a tunnel? If so, that’s a bad sign even though that’s pretty much what I hear when I listen to those little cube surround speakers that usually come in “home theater in a box” sets. The problem is that speaker makers price their speakers, for the most part, according to how good they sound. Which, I guess, is what they’re supposed to do.

Every year I rehash the dilemma of how much money to donate to SXSW. This year badges cost $575 and wristbands are completely sold out. The SXSW website doesn’t even mention that wristbands even exist as far as I can tell. The best way to get a wristband would probably be eBay if you’re willing — bidding starts around $250. And that doesn’t include beer or lodging.

The badge cost would have been much more bearable if I had acted earlier. Committing to SXSW before the end of September would have saved a couple hundred dollars per badge, but it’s two weeks away and I still don’t know if it’s worth going — how was I supposed to know way back then? At least Annette was prescient enough to reserve a couple hotel rooms just after SXSW 2005, so we’re set there. Maybe we should sub-lease the spare room to cover the cost of the badges…

Or we could risk going down to Austin without any credentials at all and just squeeze our way into the millions of parties and free showcases. Last year that’s pretty much all we did anyway. It would severely limit evening showcase hopping — we’d probably just have to pick one club for each night and get there early enough for them to let us in for a cover charge — but it might work. Besides, I think the new measure of music industry indie-cool might be to spend a week in Austin seeing music every night, downing mini-quesidillas and drinking margaritas on someone else’s promo budget, and having a good time without a badge. Or maybe that’s a groupie?

Now, if I sound bitter, it’s because I am. SXSW is usually a lot of fun, but with so many bands, industry-folk, showcases, sponsored events, and out-of-towners it can get kind of complicated. Plus the SXSW organization charges more than it should be able to get away with. And it’s unavoidable, but no matter what I end up seeing or doing every year I always feel like there was something I completely missed so I end up coming back home feeling awkward. I’ll know that I didn’t fully take advantage of whatever opportunities there were at SXSW. I didn’t discover the newest, coolest band. I didn’t schmooze the right foreign distributer. I didn’t end up at that late night party trading shots with Michael Penn. I didn’t drink enough free beer.

I’ve only got about a week to make the final decision. Guess I should have started saving up a little sooner.

There are a lot of decisions to make when putting together a home theater. Everything from the mundane to the technical is a complicated mess. What color should the walls be? Where does the couch go? What type of TV should I buy? How many watts should the amplifier provide? Do I really need 1080p?

But, as difficult as all those decisions are to make, the hardest two by far are where to place the surround speakers and how to route the wires to them. The problem of where and how to position the surrounds is what has kept me from installing a home theater until now. I’ve even seen people with all four speakers lined up at the front of the room just to avoid the trouble of running the wires. The speaker industry is well aware of the problem and has come up with some semi-ingenius ways to attempt to solve it. Polk has the SurroundBAR which carries the tag-line “Five channels. One speaker. Zero clutter.” Sony has a home theater system that uses infrared signals to feed the surround speakers eliminating wires altogether.

Not wanting to try either of those solutions because I think they both have serious sound quality trade-offs, I really only have two options (or some combination of the two): run the wires along the floorboards from the amplifier to the surrounds and tie them down along the way with cable clips or run the wires into the wall, up to the attic, across the attic floor, then back down again where the speakers are mounted. Either way can be challenging to make look nice and those that are good at it can (and do) make a nice living.

And that is why, for now, you need to watch your step in the home theater room — I’ve got cables running everywhere.