by frans on January 28, 2010
In February 4th, I will be doing a lecture visit to Potsdam, who are running an interesting Digarec lecture series. My title is “The Dual Structure: Experiencing Digital Games in the Intersection of Gameplay and Media” and you can find an abstract of it from here:
http://www.digarec.de/2010/01/25/digarec-lecture-february-4-2010-with-frans-mayra/#more-911
There should be materials and even a video recording or transcript available online later, so check it out some time after the lecture. [Edit: fixed couple of typos in 6th of February, 2010.]
by frans on January 16, 2010
I have been using my old trusty JBL LX2 speakers in my home theater and continue to be happy — the soundscape and overall quality of sound they produce is nice. I have a identical second pair that I have been using as the rear speakers, bolted to the concrete walls using a Vogel’s mounting system. All well, except that LX2 is a rather large and heavy speaker to be fixed in a small cellar room — and the old walls appear to have rather soft material in places so the bolts stated to give up. I had to take LX2s down and use some epoxy style padding to fix the wall (yikes!) and then hammer drill the wall mounts back into place. After that, I was too tired to do much searching for the actual speakers (nice prioritization, isn’t it?), so I just walked to a local Musta Pörssi and bought the first pair that looked like the size, weight and design that I — and my old walls — could handle. I walked out with a shiny white pair of Tangent EVO E4, which was not perhaps not such a bad choice after all. There are not too many speakers in the same form factor and price range (this was c. 150 euros per pair) that can deliver much better sound — or at least that is my impression after some googling around now. My amplifier is an old Yamaha (RX-V630RDS) which can handle DTS and Dolby Digital 5.1 so mostly the rear speakers are only used for the effects channel in movies. I have a small collection of Super Audio CDs among which even smaller number make use of the multichannel surround feature. I have now been testing the E4s with LX2s with Peter Gabriel’s UP as a surround Super Audio CD version, and while it is clear that they do not pack the punch that my wall mounted, rear LXs were capable of, I should be able to live with this arrangement. They deliver rather crispy, clear audio and the bass area is not as direction sensitive in any case as the treble area. — And an added plus: I am no longer in similar danger of hitting my head to a massive rear channel speaker while writing these blog notes. :-)
