I spent most of Thanksgiving Day at my sister-in-law's house. The dinner was good and we generally had a good time - I can't complain about any of that. But as an opinionated audioholic, my wacky and misguided brother-in-law caused me to write this further installment in "What grinds my gears".
My brother-in-law is loves sports and watches almost any televised sports obsessively (more about that later). He is or was a very good tennis player, and his competitive juices are always flowing. Trying to be the good in-law on a Thanksgiving visit, I tried to keep my responses polite, and ignored his competitive jabs.
He was showing off his new TV (a Samsung 58" plasma TV), and I smiled and nodded my approval. I thought (to myself) that it seemed too large and overwhelmed the rest of the room, but that's not what others think. He had the TV on a very large stand with lower shelves that held six other black or silver boxes. I could see one of them looked like a Yamaha AV receiver, but the others were obscure in the dim light. So far so good. But I was wondering where the speakers were hidden. So, I asked him to tell me more.
Of the five remaining boxes, one box was a Blu-Ray/DVD player, two (?) were from Direct TV, and the last two were VCRs!!! He explained the Direct TV boxes were tuners with TIVO-type DVR functions that allowed him to record
three programs simultaneously. That did seem excessive, but I reminded myself that I’ve long known that he is obsessive-compulsive about TV sports. But I had to ask, why three programs at once? He answered that he’d rather watch a football game later that he had recorded so he can skip all the commercials and huddles. It saves a lot of time, claiming that he can watch a game in less than 2 hours instead of the 3+ hours it takes when it’s a live broadcast.
So I said (still trying to be polite), lets see some football, who is playing today? "Oh, no, we can't watch now while the game is live" he responded, "I don't want to know who won before I watch the recorded game later tonight". WTF??? I thought to myself.
Note that I still haven't yet explained the VCRs. They are for old tennis matches that he had recorded years ago on videotape. He sometimes re-watches them
. By that time, I thought I would leave well enough alone and not ask why one VCR wasn't sufficient for this. Fortunately, dinner was almost on the table, and I found a way to end this embarrassing conversation.
Later that evening, we actually did watch the TV. We gathered and watched the animated movie Up. It was a Blu-Ray version and looked great on the large plasma screen. But I was stunned that we listened to the entire movie over the piss-poor sounding TV speakers
! The sound lacked any dynamics, and voice clarity was absent. If you turned the volume up to hear the dialog better, the speakers were overdriven and sounded horribly noisy. By this time, I must have had steam coming out of my ears. Eventually I asked, what about your Yamaha AVR and surround sound? My brother-in-law's answer, "Oh that's way too complicated to hook up. I have the speakers in the basement, so they won’t take up room here."
By that time I realized that anything I said would fall on deaf ears and a closed mind. So I said nothing. But this morning, I’m letting off the excess steam for all of you. Thanks for reading
.
