You Know What Rocks? Surround Sound.
The time is 9 a.m. and I am sitting here rocking out to some Nine Inch Nails. Not just any Nine Inch Nails. This is an album that I probably invested over $400 dollars in because when it came out I said to myself, “I have to invest in a surround sound amplifier, now! I just have to. There’s no two ways about it. It is my destiny.” When NIN released their 5.1 dolby digital remix of The Downward Spiral, I started researching audio amplifiers and had one goal: To find one that could do at least 5.1 surround and be able to fit in my desk. And I found exactly what I was looking for: The Panasonic SA-XR50.
This puppy is slim, loud and does 6.1 surround sound. I’m sure there are others out there which can handle more channels than that, but it was more than what I was looking for and has held up for the last few years with no problems, even with the confined space it sits in.
And I wasn’t about to plug it into a handful of tiny 2 inch wide satellite speakers. If you’re serious about music and the quality of the audio coming out of your PC, you don’t just spend 99 dollars on a set of tiny speakers plus one crappy sub-woofer. I have a pair of headphones that are worth more than that. I even spent more than that just for the center channel speaker. Really, do yourself a favor and invest in quality audio. It’s money well spent and your ears will thank you later (so long as you don’t deafen yourself). Listening to surround sound music is a very satisfying; you almost have to smoke a cigarette afterwards.
In an unrelated note… During the last 5 years or so, I’ve made upgrades to my computer for only one of two reasons: Either Nine Inch Nails released a new album that contained audio tracks my hardware couldn’t handle, or id Software released Doom III. And it’s been a while since Doom III came out so you can imagine how old my PCs hardware is. The case isn’t that old, but the guts inside are. Still, it doesn’t feel old. It doesn’t feel like a slow computer… probably because I stopped using Windows and did away with all of that hard drive fragmentation, spyware, antivirus nonsense. It sounds like a joke but you really do have to put more money into a computer in order to stave off the stress that comes with having to deal with all that crap, and all you end up with is delaying the inevitable system meltdown. But I digress.
My computer is my primary entertainment device, and even though it’s attached to a 35″ TV with an S-Video cable, I don’t think that counts as “watching TV”. I hate watching TV.
Okay, this post is going no where, which means I probably woke up too early. But before I end this, I can think of one other thing that rocks besides surround sound:
