Since the house move we've dumped a lot of stuff that had gathered around us in the last ten or twenty years, three tv sets were given away to people poorer than ourselves in order to bestow a warm glow of charity upon our heads, as was various setees and chairs and some furniture - other stuff that was postable was flogged off on eBay.
All of this was an attempt to make the move from a large house to an average sized house more manageable but infact as mentioned previously we still have around 40 boxes of unpacked stuff in the garage - but thats for another day - a day far off in the future yet.
One of the things that went for a walk was my big stereo system. Thats the big stereo system as opposed to the small stereo system, the small stereo system is at work now but the big stereo system harks from a day when stereo systems were the object of attention in your living room and were presented as a bank of dials and switches behind a smoke glass cabinet.
Mine was/is an Aiwa system with something like six seperate component parts plus a turntable that i added later to play my ancient collection of 1970's albums, it cost me something like £800 a long time ago and was the first thing that I had seen with something called surround sound, prior to that we had had "quadrophonic sound" which wasn't a Who album but the clever addition of an extra pair of speakers to add to your listening experience - I've still got those extra Wharfedale speakers in the garage at the new house - I throw nothing away me.
So the big Aiwa system was flogged off yesterday for £50 and I cried.
But I took solace in the fact that as we now have no stereo system in the house at all I now have the opportunity to spend some dosh on a new one despite the fact that I manage quite well by using my laptop for my musical delectation now with a combination of an extra hard drive full of MP3's and Napster - I have made it clear to the one who holds the wallet that we really do need a new stereo system though.
Imagine my suprise then when during a trip to our local Comet a few weeks ago she saw the item pictured above and fell in love with it - her not me. I couldn't believe my luck and I asked her if she knew what it was, no she replied but it would look nice in the dining room and it was then that I realised that the fact that it was a wireless multi-room MP3 system cut no ice with her, it just looked nice what with it being a flat glass panel and all and having no seperate speakers or cables it wouldn't make her rooms look untidy - that will do for me and I instantly agreed with her that we should have one.
The big unit in the picture has an 80gig hard drive built into it and is used like a glorified iPod, sound quality is excellent from its inbuilt speakers and woofer (what the fook is a woofer for gods sake ?) but its party trick is that you can locate the other unit (or up to four of them) anywhere in the house and it will wirelessly trasmit music to that one as well - you can set it to play the same track in every room or everyone in the house can select their own music in different rooms - its just the sort of toy that I covet and for £599 it will be my new present to myself - soon.
Or will it ?
You see I got to thinking yesterday that you could almost create exactly the same thing by having a real iPod stood in one of those docking stations with speakers, ok you won't have the wireless transmission capability but being honest, its not going to get that much use anyway.
It wasn't long before I'd got the price nearly up to £500 for the iPod option, sure you can get cheap docking stations but I'd want a Bose one if i did it and, erm, they're not cheap.
I presented my idea to the one with the wallet and she sulked and argued that her idea was much better as the Phillips glass panel thing would look much nicer in her new dining room - I agreed immediately and threw away the Argos catalogue.
I can't believe that for once she is driving the technology aquisition in the house.
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