audio stuff again.

So it's baseball season again - Julian's first practice is Saturday. Which meant a trip to the local Goodwill to try to find some cleats that he'll wear for two months, trash and outgrow. So after finding him some and while Katie perused the clothes looking for a good find or two, J and I wandered around the aisles mostly just for fun - like, to make fun of the circ saw that someone had spliced a plug onto the cable and then wrapped with electrical tape. Yeah - I trust that thing won't short out and kill me.

But amongst the 19" CRT televisions and CD changers circa 1998 I saw a Klipsch subwoofer. $39.99. There was an outlet nearby so I plugged it in and turned it on - worked. Well, at least it turned on. But both speaker surrounds were good (it has an 8" woofer coupled with a 10" passive radiator on the back) so I hemmed and hawed - then finally plunked down the forty bucks and took it home to see if it would actually work.

Well - it did.

Downloaded the manual (although hooking it up to my Pioneer receiver with it's dedicated subwoofer-out was a no-brainer) and then took it for a spin. Put in some Loreena McKennitt with some standard hard-hitting, deep bass drum hits and flipped the phase switch back and forth. Then some Muse. Pretty cool, especially for forty bucks.

But what I really am thinking of doing is heaving it over to the studio and plugging it into the G5 Mac and then plugging the M-Audio BX4A's into the sub (taking advantage of its 80Hz high-pass filter on the line-level input to weed out low frequencies from those little 4" drivers) so I can hear some real bass while mixing (especially since my home audio speakers have 10" woofers and put out a lot of bass on their own). That may just suffice for the studio needs rather than plunking down $300-400 for a pair of 8" monitors. Or so goes my thinking ... we'll see.

Or ... we'll have some serious bass for our music and movie soundtracks.