I’m still recovering from my escapades during the trip to kovalam.Suffice to say that I was relatively less dressed in Kovalam, Veli and in between. Today I got to do a bit of what is, nowadays, called consultancy service. From my understanding of it, consultancy stands for the classic phrase “why do something when someone else can do it for you!” put into practice. Unfortunately, Sloth seems to be in vague these days and Indian consultancy companies are reaping the benefits.

Mine consultancy is of a different nature. Having owned and bought and made several ranges of equipment and as well as possessing a fetish for audio equipment, I’m a full fledged audio geek :>

Well all this would have been perfectly useless had I had friends who cared only for pipelines and cores and shader model 3.0 :| But there are people who do care if the sound coming out of their orators sounds like it came from a Tiffin box with two (or worse, one) speaker(s) inside it. My friend Siddharth is one of them .Even though he already had a labtec 2.1 pair, he felt that the sound was seriously lacking. He wanted to go a little louder. First to get considered was the creative inspire 2.1 series at Rs 1.6 K It was natural of him to think so. It is among the more affordable ones. The Altec Lansing ATP3 was at a good idea till we found out that it costs more than 3K:(The basic problem with satellite speakers is that they cannot defy the laws of physics which, simply put, say that a big speaker will be better than a smaller one. The only way to get around it is to use a more powerful amp which naturally pushes up the costs.

Sid was stuck in a dilemma between cost and sound. Then the Idea came! Stereo full range speakers! I had quite forgotten about them since I had gotten Ashok a pair to go with the amp I made for him. Sid was invited to his house and was duly blown away. Today we finally set out to grab Sid an amp and a pair of speakers. The first shop has a variety of boxes with no speakers in them .The guy at the shop claims to be able to get a pair of speakers ready at moments notice. I do believe him; after all, all it takes is to screw a pair of drivers onto a box. But the moment I rattle off the specs, (BOLTON/DAINTY brand woofers and a dome tweeter) he does some math in the air and comes up with a magic figure of approx 2k (for the speakers alone…) we jumped shop and went in search of ashok who was waiting where We had originally bought his setup. Turns out , they have not only his model (the mark III ) but its bigger and badder successor as well. The mark IV turns out to be the mark III with a bigger woofer (8” as opposed to 6”) and a correspondingly bigger cabinet. We try both models. Using a 60+60 RMS amplifier, the mark III distorts near the max, but not much serious bass is forthcoming. We try the Mark IV which also distorts but the nature of the distortion is different. It is evident in the dimming of the amp indicator lights that the amp is getting overloaded. We present Sid with a choice of systems. One in which the speaker is the limiting factor and one in which the amp is .Sid chose wisely. Soon we were on our way to Sid’s house with a pair of 8” monsters. Sid was unfortunately, still skeptical. There were a few initial hiccups –for instance, when I switched on the PC, the monitor was a lovely shade of purple! Damn magnetic fields….thank god Sid’s monitor had a built in degausserJIf not…he would have been screwed then and there. It was only when I played Richard Marx’s “Right here waiting “ and got the windows to dance that I saw that smile on Sid’s face .He is now one very happy dude! And he has reason to be with 120W RMS and TWO 8” woofers , he is better off than with ANY creative sub-sat combo…Personally I feel that the sub sat combo is a conspiracy by manufacturers to sell us less and make us pay more for it .It’s so obvious. But then again there are those countless hassled audiophiles whose better halves won’t let them beautify their living rooms with eight or six large boxes. For them I guess the sub sat combo is the only alternative. But for everyone else who thinks of only satellite speakers when it comes to PC audio, DON’T! Good sound is cheaper than you think!