Sound sound
Dec. 22nd, 2004 07:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rscSo, to follow up on the state of our sound system, we did go to Best Buy and acquire a new receiver. (Oh, boy, we got to go the mall on December 21!)¹ And, many many wire-pluggings later, it all works.²
Of course, nothing is completely straightforward, so it took a little bit of maneuvering (I won't bore you with the details) to get the subwoofer back to doing its proper subwoofing, but we got it all done before supper, and thus were all set to watch the extended Return of the King after supper.
Wow. It was worth spending the money and the time. Even in our not-overly-large living room, it's just really better with surround sound and serious bass. (Actually, the first thing we did after starting the movie was to turn the subwoofer down a few notches so we could hear the treble. Even so, it felt like the mûmakil were there in the room with us.)
I'm looking forward to hearing what Jackson et al. have to say, but my initial take is that the story hangs together better with the additional material, and I think it's regrettable that they didn't just shorten some of the interminable battle scenes and leave the other stuff in.
So at some point I still have to install the old receiver downstairs, but that can wait.
¹In preparation for going to the mall, my brain decided that I should say "One Ring to rule The Mall". I sometimes think that my brain is also due for an upgrade.
²Well, except for the fact that raw TV output doesn't seem to get to the speakers, which is puzzling, but not something we're likely to care about often.
Of course, nothing is completely straightforward, so it took a little bit of maneuvering (I won't bore you with the details) to get the subwoofer back to doing its proper subwoofing, but we got it all done before supper, and thus were all set to watch the extended Return of the King after supper.
Wow. It was worth spending the money and the time. Even in our not-overly-large living room, it's just really better with surround sound and serious bass. (Actually, the first thing we did after starting the movie was to turn the subwoofer down a few notches so we could hear the treble. Even so, it felt like the mûmakil were there in the room with us.)
I'm looking forward to hearing what Jackson et al. have to say, but my initial take is that the story hangs together better with the additional material, and I think it's regrettable that they didn't just shorten some of the interminable battle scenes and leave the other stuff in.
So at some point I still have to install the old receiver downstairs, but that can wait.
¹In preparation for going to the mall, my brain decided that I should say "One Ring to rule The Mall". I sometimes think that my brain is also due for an upgrade.
²Well, except for the fact that raw TV output doesn't seem to get to the speakers, which is puzzling, but not something we're likely to care about often.
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Date: 2004-12-23 08:20 am (UTC)And, of course, we weren't quite as finished as I thought. We had the center speaker sort of provisionally placed, but it was not as near to the TV set as it should be, so John decided to mount it on brackets underneath the TV -- whereupon he discovered that the cable to the speaker was about 4" too short. The longest spare cable we had was even shorter, so he ended up cutting a foot or so off a shorter piece and splicing it onto the existing cable -- not elegant, but it works.
This is the more annoying because he bought new cables for the rear speakers and wanted to make sure we didn't run into this kind of problem, with the result that those cables are 10-15 feet longer than they need to be.