Saturday, 10/12/2019
I spent a lot of screen hours this day, frittering away time on one or the other computer for various reasons. Around noon I went to FOPAL because it is sale weekend, and I like to tidy up the computer section, which buyers always make a mess of.
From there I meandered down to Best Buy and purchased a new sound bar system, a Polk Audio mini. Unlike the previous bar, which was cumbersomely large and hard to fit onto my media cabinet, this has a lunch-box-size midrange unit that sits neatly under the TV, and a separate small woofer. It sounds better than the old one, and I succeeded in pairing it with the XFinity remote so I can mute or change the volume from the one controller.
In the evening I went to a concert at Menlo-Atherton High. Not a high school concert, but a jazz concert that I learned about from a post on the house bulletin board, a recreation of Charley Parker’s “Bird With Strings” concerts of the 1940s. It could have been good but I was instantly put off by the sound quality. I don’t know if it was the room, the amplification, or a combination of the two, but all high notes were rough and discordant to my ears, really unpleasant. When the violins hit a crescendo it was discordant and really made me wince. I left at the intermission.
Codgerville 