My family jewels..........

There's no doubt they're important to us, and thus we give them meticulous care. Even during times when they're not in use, we keep them clean, so that when it is time we need them to perform, they would do a good job to bring us pleasure, maybe even suprise us a little.

Once every little while, just like a car, we need to start it's engine and let it run for awhile, just to make sure it's still functioning well, and similar to a car's engine, if it is left unattended and unused for too long a period of a time, it might not function well the next time you start it.

All men in my family has this itch. Actually, it's more like a universal men 'thing'. We get excited and squeal like little girls whenever we see a set of high quality goods. Ever so often, we are tempted to part with a month or twos salary for a little upgrade on our own set.

But that will only cure the itch for a certain period of time. Eventually, when an upgrade do not seem to do the job of maximising the performance of the whole system, we go for a completely new set.

Let me show you what I'm talking about in case you're still wondering, or in case you wanted to write me an email to ask me "Can I really upgrade my family jewels?! How? Where?"..........

This is what I'm talking about. Our AV system (as in audio visual, not adult video).

Let me just explain about the photograph in case you're still confused even after looking at it.
In addition to the existing system, my father just bought a pair of 10" Dynamax karaoke speakers (placed on the floor). And when he's testing it by hooking it up to our old Marantz amp and his faithful karaoke decoder, I decided to take a photo cause it was such a sight!

The photograph above might not be so clear, there's actually 7 speakers in there. 8 if you take the subwoofer into account. There's also a pair of rear surround speakers not in the photograph. So in all, there's a total of 10 speakers in my living room that day.
Holy macaroni!! 10 effing speakers!!

The pair of Dynamax (a cheap cheap brand) speakers is now in my parents room. My dad has practically turned his room into a mini karaoke. It finally dawned on us that having so many speakers blasting away in one room is not a very good idea when my mom and I had to go for surgery to fix our ruptured eardrums. We are ok now. My dad on the other hand, has to use a hearing device for the rest of his life, and my sis is gonna kill me when she sees what I just wrote :p

Overkill would be an understatement

The mountain of AV products (audio visual, audio visual, OK!) you see in the photograph is a collection which started with a modest lineup of a Marantz intergrated amp, Pioneer LD/VCD player, a 34" Sony TV, and a pair of JBL bookshelf speakers. We used to have a Telefunken cd player for our music cravings too. It was quite an awesome system and it did well in music and stereo movies for us back then.

After that, my bro brought a whole set of Sony AV system back from Uk including a video cassatte player (which is now absolete, but we still leave it there just to fill the rack and make people visiting us go "Wow!"), a DVD player (which is now officially retired, means broken. and replaced by a cheaper Tagwood DVD player which also plays almost every kind of disk known to man), and the STR DB930 surround reciever. Along with this system, he also managed to smuggle a set of BOSE 'Lifestyle 10' surround speakers back to Malaysia.

Having a compatible DVD player with digital output, a decent amp to decode digital signals and a complete 5.1 set of speakers, I was all ready to experience Dolby Digital (also known as AC3) and DTS sounds, with just one final problem that needs solving, to look for a digital interconnect that tranfers datas from the DVD player to the amp. It took quite a while before I found one because a lot of AV equipment shops don't even know what kind of cable would work. There are actually 2 types of digital cables: optical cables and coaxial cables. The first time we put in an AC3 DVD to test the system was a pretty breathtaking experience. We did literally go "Wow!".

By the standard today, this system is pretty out of date. With new formats like Dolby Prologic 2, Dolby Digital EX and DTS-ES being the standard for almost all new players and amps, the only choice would be for a total replacement, though it's not gonna happen anytime soon, cause now, unfortunately, I'm still poor.

Anyone wanna donate so I can get a new system? ANYONE?

Guess not.