Don't worry dear ones............I'm not talking about a precious child here, just my Phillips bookshelf sound system. I bought it about ten years ago, because I needed a separate sound system from my big system in the great room, for my computer room, where I spend a lot of time. It just happened to catch my fancy one day, while browsing the shelves at Best Buy. A nice compact unit, with an AM/FM tuner, two cassette players, and a 3 CD changer. It has two detachable speaker cabinets, with seven inch woofers, a two and three quarter inch mid range, and couple of two inch tweeters. For a plastic bookshelf unit, it has remarkably good power and fidelity.
A couple of nights ago, after ten years of faithful service, the CD player went kaput. It had been giving me signals that something was wrong for quite a while, by eliciting the occasional skip when playing a CD. A few nights ago, the occasional skip became a chronic skip, making it impossible to listen to CD's.
I had to scramble to find a temporary fix. I had an old Sony boom box, so I simply substituted that for the first night, but I couldn't plug my TV audio into it, so another solution had to be found. Giving the house the once over, I discovered a portable Sony AM/FM/CD player that I hadn't used in years. It had a CD OUT jack on it, so I thought, well.......... Why can't I use this as my CD player, since the rest of the Phillips unit works fine?
I plugged the portable Sony CD player into the Phillips unit, set the controls to Axillary input, and put a CD in the Sony player. Then I pushed the Play button on the Sony CD player, and absolutely nothing happened! My batteries were dead. A quick replacement of just two AA batteries, and the CD player was off and running! The axillary amplifier on the Phillips unit instantly recognized the CD player's input, and I had my favorite sounds again! The only trouble is the Sony unit is just a single CD player, and I cannot stop and start it with the remote. So........it looks like I'm going to have to bite the bullet shortly, and buy a new bookshelf unit.
We got a merciful break from the extreme heat today. It only made it up to 93°F, or 33.8°C! Tomorrow, and especially on Sunday, the insufferable heat is expected to return in earnest! 95°F/35° tomorrow, and 98°F/36°C on Sunday! I know I prayed for warm weather during our previous miserably cold stormy winter, but I guess I forgot the old adage, "be careful what you ask for".
I hope you are all staying cool! Speaking of cool, I know that the Alan Parsons Project is an acquired taste, but here is a cut from the Alan Parsons Project album, I Robot. I don't think I have profiled this particular tune before, but if I have, please forgive me.
And here's another, The Voice
Melissa XX
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8 comments:
I know the feeling. I bought a Sony mini-hifi about 15 years ago. I think I bought it because I liked the way the knob on the unit spun round when you increased the volume from the remote!
First it sat there in the pride of place in the living room for a while. Then I fed my cable TV and video sound through it. This was a revelation, once you listen to your TV through a hifi you can never go back to your TV's speakers.
About 7 years ago the cassette failed but I never listened to them any more anyway. Then the CD went but who when cares I could listen to them from the DVD player. So it ended the last 5 years of its days being nothing much more than a dusty amp but still doing sterling work.
When its remote started to play up I replaced it with this DENON DM37DAB ...
Here's a picture...
http://i.pgcdn.com/pi/7/69/35/76935912_640.jpg
Just right for my small cottage an sounds amazing.
Rachel XXX
10 years isn't a bad run at all. I've had many similar pieces of equipment that haven't survived that long. And I believe we got up to 106 yesterday. The highest temp here in two weeks, at least. I loved it! (I know, I'm crazy.) I haven't heard those Alan Parsons songs, but "Don't Answer Me" and "Eye in the Sky" are some all-time favorites of mine. Good stuff, and I've always loved his voice. :)
It's the mechanical stuff the goes, or in this case maybe the laser. I still have a Kenwood amplifier and tuner and a pair of bookshelf speakers that a guy used to build in his garage that I bought when I worked for a hifi store in 1976. They're antiques! But they still work. The much newer CD player is not in as good shape.
More and more of our music is on our hard drives now.
@ Rachel
Yes, I've been feeding my TV sound through my stereo system for years. It sound sounds so much better!
Rachel, you have a lovely blog, and I've been wanting to leave comments, but my internet service isn't compatible with the embedded comment box on Blogger. In your blog settings, there is a control that you can set, to enable the pop up window for comments. If you turn that on, I will be able to leave comments on your blog. I was going to email you to tell you this, but you didn't have an email address in you Blogger profile. I've had to ask a number of people to do this for me, so I could leave comments on their blogs. I've had this problem ever since I switched to wireless service. When I was on dial up, I could comment in either format.
@ Amy
106°F, and you love it? Well, at least it's dry heat. Be sure to stay hydrated, or you turn into a prune! ;-)
@ Veronica
Not sure if it's the CD drive or the laser. It probably didn't help that I kept four stacks of CD's sitting on top of it all the time. That probably interfered with it's heat dissipation.
Those older sound systems were great. On my system in the great room, I'm still using the Pioneer 80 watt, 5 way speakers that I got 40 years ago! They have 15" woofers! I've never heard a better sounding speaker. I have replaced the tuner/amplifier a couple of times, but not because it stopped working. It's just that the old amps had wire wound rheostats for the volume, treble, and bass controls, and the humid air around here in the summer time eventually corroded the windings, so when you turned them, you would get a crackling noise.
Melissa XX
Hi Melissa
Fixed .. Now have pop-up comments.
Rachel XXX
Melissa, I don't have the pop-up comments box, but you comment on my blog. Mine is the most old-fashioned kind of comment thing on Blogger, I think.
@ Rachel
Thanks, dear!
@ Veronica
When I comment on your blog, a whole new window opens up for the comment to be submitted on. The format that I have trouble with, is the one where there is a comment box embedded at the bottom of the post, and you leave your comments on the same page as the post. I can never get those to work.
OK, I know what you mean. I used to have trouble with those too. Then the trouble stopped. I have no idea why!
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