Flutterby™! : Computer Speakers 2002-10-20 14:07:44+00

Computer Speakers

2002-10-20 14:07:44+00 by meuon 18 comments

OK.. I admit, the techo/rave music thing hit me at Burning Man. I had forgotten how much fun it was to just DANCE to the MUSIC just letting yourself go.. and yes.. I made a complete and utter wonderful fool of myself, just like everyone else there. The local dance clubs are just not there. I went to 'Drink' which had a great dance floor and sound system.. and for two hours the only thing on the dance floor was some grubby (not grungy) guy in a baseball cap (looked like a drunk trucker) working on BOTH of his dance moves and this was AFTER MIDNIGHT on a Friday night. Lots of people, lots of drinking, but NO DANCING. I went to Christophers, which has a TINY dance floor (but good sound) at it was elbow room only. 15-18 people dancing.. the rest packed in drinking.. no room to dance unless you call standing still and swaying dancing.

The Altec Lansing speekers on my desktop are good.. and my Sony 5:1 DVD Player is better.. but I no longer have a 'stereo' system.. that kind of sound system requirement died from my life (I used to water cool monolithic amp chips and heat sinks and build my own tower speakers). Dancing with headphones is OK, except they get in the way.. so I went looking for some Powered computer speakers... My computer speakers are now Fender's and they run off of either 110 AC, or 12volt DC.. (250 Watts / 125 per channel) and they make you want to Dance... I dumped a bunch of MP3's on my laptop... techno.. blues... trance.. rock and roll.. Patched XMMS on RedHat 8.0 to play MP3's.. and Wow. I blew the 'ghetto cruisers' on E. Main and Central away.

Anyone else want to Dance? I feel a Halloween party coming on.. and the immobile truck has it's future sound system.

Oooooh, yes! I'll bet it sounds terrific, and feels even better! Too bad we're near opposite coasts... That 15-year-old I have living with me saved up and bought himself a Klipsch 5.1 system for his desktop machine, and since his room is directly above the kitchen, we get throbbing techno at most times of the day. Dancing is the best! (The Teenager is generally Not Amused, however, when The Mom dances around his room, sigh...)

Oh, I do - god how I want to. But travel is prohibitively costly for me right now :-(

Diane, I knew the feeling. I had wondered what would happen if Annie (My 21 year old daughter) had found her Step-Dad dancing to the beat. I've been told I'm a decent dance partner.. but that was for square dancing.. Would she leave in disgust, or would she dance with me? Still, it's a simple joy that just a little alcohol keeps my old joints from hurting and I want to do it more.

Jason79, The answer to all your questions is: Yes and No. I do know that the Burning Man I experienced was mine. It was relativily drug free, had lots of casual nudity, no sex (darn!), and was an absolute blast. Your experience would be different. Seek it there, and you will find it. Do not seek it there.. and you will only experience it on the fringes if your mind is open enough to see it at all.

Jason, as Meuon said, Burning Man is a big bonfire out in the desert with lots of drugs. It's also an incredible art exhibit and scheduled AA meetings. It's amazing performance with respectful audiences, and it's some of the harshest hecklers you'll ever see take down someone on stage. It's a naked drunken orgy, if you seek such things out, but it's also a kid friendly environment (if the kids aren't offended by nudity; most aren't). Lots of gay and lesbian folks too, but I've felt a lot more cruised in other places.

Basically, it's a lot of people being themselves, they're just the sort of people who have to leave behind many of the trappings of the standard society to do so.

If the notion of drugs offends you, don't go, but if you just don't indulge you'll find plenty of other people who don't either. I've no aversion to various substances, and I got offered all sorts of interesting substances, but this year I had enough stuff going on that I only had two or three mixed drinks. Don't think I even got a toke off a joint. And the folks heavily into E make some of the coolest chill-down spaces you'll ever experience, even if you go into them stone sober.

And the folks heavily into E make some of the coolest chill-down spaces you'll ever experience, even if you go into them stone sober. I have not done E, but enjoyed their company.. and the spaces. The part that hit me was the 'I can be Me' whatever that is at that moment and that moment is not infringing on someone else being themselves. That is a LOT of latitude.

Thanks lbergstr, I ended up at Christophers last night, a local nice club owned by an ex-dot-commer who got out at the peak. Not rave material, but a few hours of dancing in front of a good redneck party band is still fun. A group of Friday Night Party Nurses from Erlanger Hospital made it even better... they were there just to have fun, like I was. Locally the dance scene seems to be a pick-up medium, not fun in of itself and the local people are WAY to self-conscious of who they are dancing with or why. At Burning Man, and the clubs I stopped at on the way back, people are able to just get up an dance for the joy of it. Much more fun. On the good side, I met a couple of great free-spirits that were also out there just having fun.

Meuon, there are too many Baptist around Chattanooga for there to be much of a dance scene. My step sisters were visiting this past summer from Guatemala and were asking about dancing, it's what people do in Latin America. There mother was explaining the Baptist thing to them. I had never connected the lack of dancing with the abundance of Baptist before that. It made a lot of sense, though.

Follow up notes: When you play Quake with the Fender amp/speakers, even at 1/3 power, you FEEL the shotgun blast and your blue jeans shake when you fire the rocket launcher. Oh Yeah..

El-Wire found a home in Chattanooga. Alan Gold's, technically a 'gay' bar although on a Friday night as maybe 40-50% heterosexual.. also plays almost nothing but techno and has a nice party crowd out for a good time. Unfortunately, it's also just about 9 blocks away.. and as it is close, it may be my new 'home' bar. Nice intelligent sociable people, even if they know you are straight.

It's kinda weird. I figured "The Bardex / Bard Medical Enema Sex Digression" would really get hit with some oddball external links. but this one seems to have hit it big. (Oh. did that just make it worse?)

On topic: Anyone know an external USB hard drive system that works on Linux and Windows so I can move music from my desktop to my laptop easily? As the music selection gets bigger and bigger and I have a couple of interesting parties coming up, I'd like to have an easy way to carry LOTS of MP3's.. say 80gb or more.

Does the laptop have Firewire? Maybe it's just 'cause I'm using it to talk to Compact Flash, but USB is freakin' sloooooooow. And Firewire drives are actually affordable.

The laptop does, I can add it to the desktop. Hmm.. my first search found 120gb for $279.. looking further.. just buying a case for $69 that has both firewire and USB and takes standard 2.5" drives. Thank you for hitting me with the Firewire clue-by-four, I had not used it, so I had forgotten about it.

When I first got this Dell, I ordered their "one notch up from cheap" speaker system as part of the package because I was tired of the computer not sounding as good as the $150 CD player next to it in the office. (I don't actually play CDs on my computer because I generally need the drive for something else.) The new speaker system came with a powered subwoofer. I said something along the lines of "what a crock," because unless you have a massive Dolby 5.1 system designed for surround audio in a living room, a subwoofer struck me as a waste of space. But you couldn't plug in the speakers without using the sub as as well. So I did. And I was amazed to find what a difference it made when playing games, especially shooters. And this is just ambient sounds and effects, you understand! (Since those games always seem to choose music tracks that sound like bad renditions of Nine Inch Nails, I always turn the music off.)

I was discussing dancing in clubs just last night. The problem with club dancing for me, Meuon, is that I'm too self-aware or vain or whatever, and I can't just go make a fool of myself. Everyone I see dancing in a club is either a much better dancer than I will ever be (I am not at ease in my body), or looks like an utter spaz - and I can't compete with the first group and I don't want to be in the second group.

I do love techno, though, when it's not too tedious. Bad techno is tedious. My wife hates it even when it's not tedious, so clearly it ain't for everybody.

No picture online, but I bought a Portable CDR w/MP3 capabilities.. and LINE OUT as well as HEADPHONES. the difference in the quality of the sound out of the Line Out jack when plugged into the Fender speakers is amazing. The headphone jack amp obviosly over-amps the bass for better sound on headphones. Why.. Uhh.. its even too embarassing for Flutterby... but I'm being asked to provide tunes for several private parties over the next month... ranging from background Christmas tunes, to top 40.. and a couple people that WANT techno/trance stuff.. and having a second sound source besides the laptop is handy. Looking at the referer links below, does anyone use anything BUT Google?