Quadraphonic silence
Grandad January 9th, 2011
I have a loud-speaker system.
I’m not sure where exactly I got it from. It may have accidentally slipped into my pocket when I left work, or I may have bought it. It doesn’t really matter where it came from – the fact is that it exists.
Originally I hooked it up to a computer, which is what it is designed for, but the computer blew up shortly after. I hope that was just a coincidence. Leastwise, the speakers have been sitting there doing nothing for the last ten years or so. It is a complicated thing with a dirty great sub-woofer, a tiny tweeter, and four weird looking satellite speakers.
I’m not sure where the idea came from, but yesterday, I decided to see what would happen if I hooked the speaker system up to my television.
I dusted it off, untangled all the wires and set it up. I plugged it in. Nothing happened. The television sounded exactly like it did before. And then I remembered a tiny volume control on one of the satellite speakers. I turned it up, and damn near blew my eardrums in. I adjusted the volume.
As experiments go, I think I can mark that one down as an unqualified success. The sound is quite remarkable, and I spent last night listening to Classic FM off the satellite.
One of the great things about the new sound system is that when I mute advertisements, I can listen to the resulting silence in full glorious surround-sound, which as everybody knows, is far preferable to stereo silence.
I am looking forward to the evening news tomorrow. I shall be wrapped up in the all enveloping silky tones of my Sharon in glorious, full spectrum quadraphonic sound.
It should even make the news tolerable for a change.
- Around the house
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This development is far better than getting hearing aids.
Now you have to get a 3D TV. Just think about watching Sharon in 3D.
Willie – It would more than likely give cause for a hearing aid. There should be a danger notice on the volume control.
Brianf – Wouldn’t I then have to wear a daft pair of spectacles? Forget it!
Sharon. ”Here’s me tits the news is coming.”
Don’t be rude about my Sharon. Jealousy is not nice.
O.K but she was a lousy shag.
If you want to avoid a possible explosive blowout of sound next time you potter around with stereophonic attachments to your TV set, here is a YouTube and some other versions of John Cage’s mind-blowing but not ear-shattering musical composition called 4’33″
http://interglacial.com/~sburke/stuff/cage_433.html
Did you ever listen to it on Classical FM or Lyric FM? Maybe you found Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence more moving?
TT – “she was a lousy shag“ Definitely a different lass.
Gerry – I have heard of that one all right. I believe it’s very popular in juke-boxes? I know I would pay to listen to it in a pub….
And if you’re into literature, a scholar discovered an unpublished manuscript by Samuel Beckett when searching through the archives a few years ago. It consisted of five plain untyped A4 sheets. It is possible that John Cage set the words of this manuscript to music. An American professor is believed to be writing a book about it, but the scholarly footnotes will be invisible.
Am snowed in here. Just watched the Donner Party trudge by.