Testing, one, two... is this thing on?

[lance_sibley]

I may have a working stereo by this time next week - I finally called up Bay/Bloor Radio today, and talked for a few minutes to someone in their service department. He had me pop the front off of my speakers (I didn't know you could do that) and push on the woofers. He said that if they recede slightly, the problem is likely with the receiver. Since they did, I put my receiver into a cloth bag and schlepped down to the store to have him look at it in person (which was much easier than schlepping my speakers downtown would have been). He plugged it in, and apparently there's supposed to be a click about five seconds after you turn it on, when the capacitors are charged (something else I didn't know), and lo and behold, there was nothing. So I left it there to be fixed, and I should have it back in a week or so.

Crawling around on the floor for an hour unplugging everything and plugging everything in to my computer's speakers to find the fault wasn't exactly fun, however. Unfortunately, I couldn't plug my stereo speakers into anything else to test them because they don't have RCA jacks - they have something called "stranded wire" which connects to post terminals (I'm just reading the manual here, so don't ask any questions ;) ), and I don't have anything else that has that kind of input terminal. Similarly, I couldn't plug my computer's speakers into the back of the receiver, so I'm trusting that a 30-second diagnosis by the guy in the service department was accurate. (They're pretty good at Bay/Bloor, mind you. They're expensive, but since that's where I got the stereo in the first place, it made sense to me to take it back there.)

I don't know what I was thinking when I set my system up the way it is - the electrical outlet is barely reachable behind the entertainment unit if I'm lying on my back in front of the unit and reaching through the smallish hole in the back without actually being able to see what I'm doing. (At least the hole is low enough that it's more-or-less right in front of the outlet.) I'm thinking that when I set it up, I didn't have quite the amount of weight on the attached bookcases and just moved the whole unit slightly away from the wall... but I wouldn't dare do that now.

While I was at the store, I browsed at LCD flatscreen TVs and iPods as well, but I didn't buy anything as I wanted to compare Future Shop's and Best Buy's prices. (FS and BB's TVs seem to be slightly cheaper, but their iPods are more expensive.) I also need to measure the TV shelf to make sure that a 32" flatscreen TV will fit (my current TV is 26", but a 26" flatscreen's picture looks small, probably because it's 16x9 instead of 4x3). I think there should be no problem, given the size of the footprint.

The guy at Bay/Bloor had a theory that my TV's colour has gone off because of the proximity of my stereo speakers - the magnets may have killed one or more of the colour guns. It's possible, I suppose, though one would think it would take less than ten years to die if that were the case... but there's another argument in favour of getting an LCD TV. Apparently they're not affected by magnetic fields.

But it will be nice to be able to watch DVDs in stereo again, not to mention to be able to listen to music on something better than my computer's speakers (which aren't bad, but they're not the same quality at all).

Oh, and memo to self... stop buying books until you've read the ones you have. There's an Indigo next door to Bay/Bloor Radio, and they were having a "buy three, get one free" paperback sale. I ended up getting another Dresden Files book (I still haven't read the one I bought last year), an omnibus edition of the first two Blood books by andpuff, and antipope's Iron Sunrise (I thought I already had Singularity Sky, but when I got home, I didn't see it on the shelf). Oh, and I did pick up Rosalie's book while I was in there, so I can stop into the bridge club some time this week and get her to sign it. However, once my stereo is fixed and I can watch DVDs again, when will I find the time to get all that reading done? I must have twenty or thirty books that I haven't gotten to yet... I may have to cancel my Globe subscription and start reading books on the bus instead.

Comments

[hoskie.livejournal.com]

Just a random memory that may or may not be interesting:

I bought my iPod at Bay/Bloor Radio and since then I have avoided that store like the plague.

The sales guy I happened to get that day was really awkwardly friendly to the point where I was about to leave the store without buying anything (even though I was pretty determined to get a nano that day and it was the closest place). He was the type that reads your name off your credit card and then refers to you by that name like, "Hey [name], do you want the extended warantee?"

A few months later, I was passing by and I saw him taking a cigarette break and I went out of my way to avoid eye contact because he's the type that would say, "Heyyyyyyy how that's iPod workin' out for you, [name]?"

... or that could just be my weird social paranoias talking. *laughs*

Oh, and also... I'm the king of buying books and not reading the ones I have. I'm so bad with that. I'm assembling a vast library and I haven't even read half of my collection. It's pretty pathetic. But I usually get burnt out on reading after all the stuff I have to do during the school year, and by the time the summer rolls around I just want to watch movies. :P

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

Hm, that guy at the Bay/Bloor iPod counter wouldn't be about 25, with long blond hair, by any chance? I thought he was kind of hot, myself. ;)

[hoskie.livejournal.com]

Oh my god. I hope we're not talking about the same guy.

From what I can recall, he had shoulder length blond hair and was rather on the short side. Certainly no taller than 5'6"... probably closer to my height.

[alpinemaps.livejournal.com]

About the books thing - I have a strict policy now that I'm only allowed to have one book in the queue. I have to finish reading my current book before I'm allowed to buy anymore.

It's tough, but it's better. No sense in spending the money for something that you can't use yet. (Sorry friends that are authors...at least I'm eventually putting money in your pocket)

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

That's probably not a bad policy to have, actually. I just find that I'm powerless to resist bookstores, and I find it somewhat painful to force myself to put a book back on the shelf if I've decided I want it, but don't feel I can afford to spend the money. (Or maybe I'm just weird. ;) )

I think I was much worse when I was working at CDS and Manulife, when I had about two-thirds more disposable income than I do now. Then, I thought nothing about walking into a bookstore and dropping a hundred bucks on paperbacks, or into Future Shop and dropping five hundred on DVDs. (I went a little crazy when I first got my DVD player. It didn't help that TNG and X-Files boxsets were well over $100 each at the time, either.)

[gurudata.livejournal.com]

Hiho,

The guy at Bay/Bloor had a theory that my TV's colour has gone off because of the proximity of my stereo speakers - the magnets may have killed one or more of the colour guns.

We have the same problem, except we suspect it's our receiver in our case, not our speakers. Stephen and Megan had the same problem, and they found some doohickey to degauss the tv and the problem went away. We haven't found a doohickey to try that on ourse though.

Cu,
Andrew

Cu,
Andrew

[boywhocantsayno.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting thought - degaussing the TV never occurred to me. I'll have to ask them about it when I go in to pick up my stereo. (Of course, it's in their best interests to just sell me a brand new TV, but I think that a store with as large a service department as they do would understand the desire to fix the old one, too.)

Alternatively, I guess one of us could always ask Stephen and Megan where they got theirs. ;)

[pann-da-bear.livejournal.com]

lemme borrow some bookS !love to read dresden ones or re-read blood ties ones (just read 1st again a while back!)