Latest Acquisition

The wet weather has cleared leaving us with sunny days and top temperatures in the high 20's.  The sea breeze meanders in again around early afternoon allowing us to throw the house wide open and let the sea breeze through the place.  The pool was around 26 degrees this morning after I had returned from my 13k bike ride. Most likely the pool will be up to the high 20's later today

Computer Club yesterday was plain sailing and I helped a couple of people out, generally with problems relating to emails.  There are a few Android mobile phone users now looking for advice and help as well.

When I had my big party for my 60th birthday down in Melbourne almost 7 years ago, I was given lots of vouchers for JB HiFi Gift Cards.  I wanted to buy myself a new AV Receiver. I bought a Yamaha which had the older style component video and optical audio connectors.

You plug all your entertainment equipment into an AV Receiver (your DVD player, media player, Pay TV etc) and the audio then goes through your speaker system while the picture passes through older style analog component cables to your TV.  Nowadays everything connects via HDMI!  HDMI is digital and carries both audio and video in the one cable.

I could work around it with the old Yamaha but there were wires everywhere and every now and again there would be audi-sync problems where people's mouths would move out of sync with what they are saying.  On top of that I needed another whole set of separate connections for our analog headphones.

I could still use my expensive Bose speakers but it took some messing around.  I often drooled over replacing my older Yamaha but couldn't justify the expense.

Then along came the good old internet and JB Hi Fi's 30% off sale which ends today (Sunday).  One of their specials is a Yamaha RX-V373 with 4 HDMI in and 1 HDMI out.  It usually sells from JB at a $487 but here it was on sale for $200-20.

I hummed and haa'd over it all Friday afternoon and then thought, "Well I have these expensive speakers which I can hardly use, a $200 investment would see me using them again!"  I was sold!

I picked it up yesterday around lunch time and had it setup later in the afternoon.  Not only does it do everything I wanted, it also sends an audio signal on to the TV as well which means my headphones all work perfectly off the TV as well.  The digital audio signal is converted by the TV back to stereo so it would work on the TV's speakers.  But this also means it is in stereo on my headphones as well so it works perfectly.

The local JB Hi Fi had a stack of these units for sale but there wasn't a sale price on them.  The first sales guy who tried to help me said each unit was $487 each.  After I told him they were on special at $200-20 he confirmed the sale price and went to buy one for himself!

It was great watching the Big Bash cricket last night with the theatre like sound of the crowd cheering the players on.  I even put away my headphones, put my hearing aids back in and enjoyed being a part of the crowd at the cricket!