IraqiGeek's Blog

My babies are back

December 1, 2006 on 11:09 pm | In Miscellaneous, Technology | No Comments

Ever since leaving Iraq, there aren’t that many joys left in my life, and one of the main joys I have left here is listening to music.

Don’t get me wrong, I thank God every day for not being in all that mess going on in Iraq now. Still, a heaven without people is no heaven at all (which is a translation of the Iraqi saying “Janna bala awadem matinrad”).

Being a geek, and to some extent an audiophile, good enough audio quality doesn’t cut it for me. Listening to quality audio means I MUST have a sophisticated setup that tries to push the physical limits of reproducing a digital audio signal, but I also have to do that without breaking the bank.

So, a little over two years ago I set myself a budget of $200 (about 150 euros), and spent a couple of months researching and evaluationg my options, and settled on a setup that mainlycomprised of:
• a Creative Sound Blaster Extigy USB sound card to do the actual signal decoding and provide a wide array of digital and analogue signal inputs and outputs,

• and a set of TEAC PowerMax 2000 active 5.1 acoustic speaker system.

To keep my signal clean, and not have half a dozen cables running between my sound card and speakers set, I decided to linkthe two by a fiber optic cable

The sound card was bought refurbished from ebay, and the speakers set was bought on sale brand new from an electronics shop here in Portugal. This setup ended costing me about $180 (~140 euros), which was less than the maximum I set for myself. And if you think about it, it’s not a substantial amount of money if you consider the quality of the audio I am getting, as well as the comprehensible array of inputs I get from this setup. I have available optical and coaxial 5.1 digital surround inputs and outputs, MIDI input and output, mono and stereo mic inputs, stereo headphone output, analogue 5.1 line output, and three selectable sources of 5.1 surround sound input, most of those inputs and outputs have gold plated connectors.

This setup has been serving me very well for about two years, until a little over two months ago, when all of a sudden, my speakers set decided to stop accepting signal from both the optical and coaxial digital inputs it has.

Understandably, I was quite upset by this unfortunate event. My first impulse was to act as a responsible EU resident and comply with the EU regulations which state that every consumer product purchased in the euro zone is covered by at least two years of warranty even if the warranty card included with the product states a shorter warranty term. So, I took my precious babies to the electronics shop where I had purchased them from. Initially, it took the technicians they have at the shop three weeks to reach my same conclusion, that the speakers didn’t accept any sound signal through their digital inputs. However, me and the shop manager disagreed about how to proceed next. They thought that my babies were out of warranty. I, naturally, disagreed, and thought they are still covered by warranty in compliance with the EU regulations. It took another week for them to reach my same conclusion, then three weeks to repair the speakers, then another week to find the speakers remote control which was “lost” the speakers were being repaired.

Today, almost two months after I took the speakers back to the shop where I bought them from, today finally I got my babies back, and now I can go back to enjoying listening to music.