I'm not what you'd call an audiophile, but I do like surround sound when I'm watching a movie. I've had a Dolby Pro Logic setup in both the family room and the bedroom since not too long after I moved in here. Now, the receiver I'm using upstairs is the older of the two and must be more than 10 years old, so I suppose it wasn't too great a surprise when the surround sound just stopped working the other day. I checked the speakers and wiring on another system and determined that the amp wasn't amping on those channels any more.

A sensible person (say, for instance, Gretchen) would say, "Well, we can live without surround sound in the bedroom." I went web browsing instead and found a nice amp/receiver from Yamaha and headed off to Tweeter, where I used my 10% off coupon that I'd gotten in the mail and bought a new system with Dolby Pro Logic II, DTS decoder, support for six speakers (one more than I have) and a subwoofer (which I don't and won't have any time soon), and a boatload of bells and whistles.

I brought it home, discovered that the easiest way to wire it would be using banana plugs, and set out looking for plugs at a reasonable price. These don't exist. Radio Shack should have cheap plugs, but they're out of stock. They'll sell you ones that cost more than twice as much instead. Thanks, no. Other stores have even more expensive gold plated plugs. I finally decided to wire it without the plugs.

Of course, the new receiver goes in the family room, and then the older receiver goes to the bedroom, and... There's lots of wiring fun ahead. :) But when I hooked it up, it sounded much better than the old receiver. Obviously, there've been some improvements made.

The one sad thing is that this modern technological marvel doesn't have a place to plug in a turntable. *sigh*