January 11, 2007 - Imagine that you've wandered into a Best Buy or Circuit City - one that covers 35 football fields, with 65 miles of carpeted aisles, jammed with 140,000 customers and 4,500 news reporters. Every conceivable, and often inconceivable, new product is there, ranging from 108-inch LCD TVs to tiny microchips to implant in your dog.
The ingenuity of loudspeaker designers never ceases to amaze me. It seems like a simple enough proposition - mount a speaker in a box, then field as many boxes as you have channels. Simple, but 6.1 = 7 is a lot of boxes, even for the most fanatical audiophile's spouse.
Someday you'll tell the grandkids about the old days when TV sets were thick. There was something called a "cathode-ray tube," and it stuck out from the wall and had a tiny screen. Then, along about 2008 or so, people pretty much stopped buying CRTs.
Not too long ago, you could measure a person's love for music by the square footage of their CD shelf space. Today, however, an audiophile's passion may be hidden away on a hard drive.
Parrots, hooks, peg legs, pieces of eight, the Spanish Main: Everybody loves pirates! Surely you know that September 19 is annual Talk Like a Pirate Day (I'm not making this up). Instead of your actual name, like "Kenneth" or "Colonel Sanders," wouldn't you prefer to be called "Cap'n Slappy"? Everybody loves pirates.
Choosing a good loudspeaker is pretty much the same as choosing a good woman. Obviously, they come in all shapes and sizes, and you want the model that's perfect for you. Looking for a speaker that's rich, or perhaps a woman with a wood-grain finish? Don't forget to consider the size of the woofers (or whether, in fact, they are tweeters).
Point the finger almost anywhere you want. After all, there's plenty of blame to go around. Cable companies didn't really support it. TV manufacturers charged extra for it. The people who designed it left out a few things. And the federal government - it started the whole mess.
