Thanks to Electronics Boutique’s sale that just ended (plus Shane’s staff discount) I decided that I could afford a nice new set of Logitech X-230 speakers. They’re not shiny high-end audiophile gear (apparently this is “entry level” … at $100 RRP!) but they seem to do a decent job, being perfectly suited to games. They even do a decent job of playing music, too!

Unfortunately it seems they were designed by someone who is hard of hearing in the low frequency ranges. Even with the bass dial at its lowest setting, everyone seems to agree that they pump out insane levels of bass — it’s worse than what the average car stereo sounds like from the next lane at the traffic lights. On the upside, if you crank up the bass dial, place it near a wall, and have a wood-framed house, people three streets away will be complaining about that house with the obnoxious music!

An update to my whinge from last night: now AOL are getting all self-congratulatory for their coverage even though the article doesn’t quote one word from the “critics” that its headline refers to! If you had any doubt that AOL sucks as much now as it did in 1997, let it be dispelled now.

(In fairness to them, their servers did hold up much better than most other sites would have under a load of 150k simultaneous clients, but then Google or Akamai would barely blink with those numbers. Also, the American TV broadcast was apparently even worse.)