What about a product can irritate you?

Gunbei, that's exactly the trick. The guy who showed it to me was a clerk at one of those mini-CD stores in the New Orleans airport. I bought a CD and he claimed he had a trick and was going to try to get into Guiness as the guy who could open the most CDs in the shortest time (or something equally useful...). So anyway, told him to open mine. Probably took him less than 5 seconds, unwrapped, untaped, clean, quick, no fuss, no muss. Now, I'm certainly not as fast, but it definitiely does the job.

Ok, I’ve moaned about this before, but it bugs me enough to moan about it again. My single greatest cause of endless consternation with any of this audio stuff stems from the fact that the remote codes for my preamp and for my HT receiver have some “unfortunate overlaps,” let’s say. Background-wise, I’m running a dedicated 2-channel system with a HT add-on, for lack of a better word. The 2-channel stuff is nicer, while the HT stuff feeds into the pre-amp from the HT pre-outs and there you go. So, when watching movies, everybody is on and working. My former pre-amp had a HT bypass loop, which was nice. The new one doesn’t. Normally, this would be fine, simply dial in the pre-amp at zero gain (more or less), balance the channel levels at the receiver at that benchmark, and it’s done. HOWEVER, the remote volume control code on the pre-amp is the same as the one for the HT receiver (like to get my hands on the genius that came up with that one…). As if that’s not enough, dimming the display on the HT receiver mutes the pre-amp; standby on the pre-amp turns on the HT receiver; etc. . . .

Imagine if you will – lights are dimmed, it’s movie time! Wonder of wonders, it occurs to me to dim the display on the receiver and, VIOLA, the pre-amp is muted. Mains? You wanted to listen to the main speakers, too? Nope. Wanna turn down the volume? Joke’s on you (well, me) – try and do it from the remote and it changes the volume on both the receiver and the pre-amp and all that careful channel balancing is out the window. Ok, so you’ve had enough of the movies and just want to turn on the pre-amp – but no, you get the HT receiver, too. Right, so you learn to turn on the pre-amp by hand, that’s fine, but don’t make the mistake of thinking you can use the remote to turn it off because, that’s right, it’ll only turn the receiver on. Mercy.

Moral of the story is: Plinius and Marantz, two great tastes that don’t go great together. Bastards.