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World is flat again

Having recently purchased a WHA home, my wife and I are in the process of buying furniture to fill it – right now we have next to nothing. That shopping list includes some necessary home electronics.
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Having recently purchased a WHA home, my wife and I are in the process of buying furniture to fill it – right now we have next to nothing.

That shopping list includes some necessary home electronics.

In the suite we’re currently living in all of our stuff pretty much sits in the living room – television, computer, and sound system so it was relatively easy to hook everything up. When we move, things will get a lot more complicated.

The main issue that we’ll soon have a spare room to use as an office where we’ll most likely put the computer. But since our computer is also our music player, and we’ll definitely want that music in our new living room, we’re going to have to come up with a new system.

There’s also talk of upgrading our AV experience and getting with the times by purchasing a flat screen high definition television.

Before I spend a cent on anything these days I always like to research my options online to understand exactly what I’m buying. Value is important, but I also like to make sure my purchases will last and do everything I expect.

I also have a conditioned mistrust of salespeople – especially when they’re on commission and it’s nearing lunchtime. I want to know as much as they do about a product or technology when it comes time to talk turkey.

Lastly, I do research because it’s always hard to make that final decision. I can’t really afford the highest of the high end of anything, where there are only a handful of products to choose from and the middle is crowded with brands and options. The array of divergent features available can be confusing as hell.

For music, there are several options for my new place.

Because I have most of my music collection on my computer these days and like using iTunes I can’t see myself going back to disks anytime soon. So I’ve already ruled out buying a new CD player to go with our existing 5.1 surround sound system which we also use for movies, video games, and music – and will be using for television once we upgrade to HDTV. One option is to dock an iPod or some other kind of portable player with our existing system. But since we don’t have an iPod (I’m waiting to see what the next generation looks like before spending that kind of money), that’s an expensive fix for our problem. The iPod will also have to be in the room in order to have music, which basically negates the whole point of buying a portable player.

The next option I’ve looked into is buying a MacMini, Apple’s cheaper but somewhat inadequate answer to a media centre PC. It can store music, home movies, and has a few other nice features (www.apple.ca).

That would be nice, but also expensive – the cheapest MacMini is about $650 and a small LCD screen will add another $150-$200 to the cost. Maybe in the future that will be an option but right now I can think of about 50 things I need before I buy what is essentially another computer – and underpowered computer at that.

Option three is the cheapest and probably best solution, and involves connecting to the computer in the office using a wireless device. Apple ( www.apple.ca ) makes the AirPort Express Base Station with Air Tunes, which lets you broadcast iTunes wirelessly through your speaker system. Our computer will need a wireless card (or external hub), which can cost as little as $100, and we can purchase the Base Station for about $150.

The main drawback is that we’ll still be separated from our iTunes by a set of stairs, which will make it impossible to program music on the fly. That means we’ll have to spend more time organizing our music libraries to make sure Pantera doesn’t suddenly come on during a quiet dinner.

The final option is to wait for the PS3 to come out this fall, and use the internal hard drive on the console to store and play music. But before I would go this route I’d first wait to see how loud the console is going to be – if it hums like my PS2, or like an Xbox 360, that’s just not going to work for me.

When it comes to buying the flat screen television, Future Shop has a good explanation of product specifications at www.futureshop.ca , as well as a comparison between the different kinds of high definition televisions available.

After looking at the technical differences, and reading all the articles that popped up when I typed "LCD versus Plasma" into the Google search window, I decided that LCD is probably the best option. That was confirmed after walking through a few AV stores and comparing the quality of picture between different models in our price range.

The next step is to research the televisions we can afford, and then check out user reviews on the web to see what’s best.

Websites of the Week

If you have any home projects ahead of you, or are just curious to know how things work check out eHow www.ehow.com, www.howstuffworks.com.