The speakers...
A while back, my wife and I went for a week way out in the sticks. We live in Oregon, and our favorite place is out in the Ochoco high desert National Forest. And nothing works there. I mean nothing except for AM radio late at night.[1]
After a few days, our hearing settles back to what is supposed to be normal. City life is loud and our hearing system compensates in various ways that reduce our ability to really appreciate sound.
After hearing that our ability to listen has relaxed into high potential mode, we decided to get the MacBook out and watch a movie. We had been saving this experience for a good time and it all came together nicely!
We were blown away![0]
Seriously. The amount and quality, fidelity of sound coming out of that MacBook was insane! Of course it all was soft on the low end. Not too much we could do about that because physics, but otherwise the whole experience was a real treat!
I find it difficult to communicate the impact. Here we are, gentle noises from our camp fire a modest distance away, various crackles, pops, hisses and an equally gentle breeze and our own bodies were the only sounds present outside of the movie sound track.
Mixed in nicely with all that was our movie. Actually a couple of them because we repeated the experience a couple times. It was so damn good!
All I can really say here is you should definitely give this a try!
So much engineering, better materials, better software, and it all adds right the fuck up. I really did not expect what I heard at all. Very highly recommended.
------
[0] And to be clear, I am talking about all that we did hear when we did not expect to. Truth is, we were camping with a MacBook. The sound we heard wea respectable, despite it being small speakers and all that goes mobile devices.
It seemed sci-fi like to us. The tech advances, engineering all add up. And that's the blown away part. Experiencing a sum like that, rather than incrementally. The context really helped raise the impact.
[1] And that is a great experience! Any radio will be fun, but if you can get hold of a 70's maybe 80's era one with multiple frequency bands, say short wave, broadcast, and any others, the isolation means getting to connect to the world old school tuning stuff in from all over the place!
AM, on a good radio, is an interesting experience and again on a good radio optimized for what the tech actually does, will sound better than you think. And how it colors the material is something I crave. Comes from growing up listening to a fine Zenith "Trans Oceanic" radio with almost god like performance, but I digress...