A year ago last fall, we got a plasma TV for high-def; 90% of the time it’s on, it’s tuned to a sports event. So sound quality, even for a confirmed audio weenie like me, just wasn’t a big deal, and I plugged in a pair of excellent little PSB Alpha speakers, $299 or so if I recall correctly, and they were plenty good enough. The only problem was, where the TV’s sitting there’s hardly any room to spare either side of the screen, and the PSBs stuck out in an ugly and awkward way. So I dropped by the Boxing Day sale at Sound Plus, my friendly local high-end salon, and picked up a couple of decent little KEF mini-speakers that fit in beside the screen and sound perfectly decent if you don’t ask them to play any low notes, which I left to a MiniVee subwoofer from Velodyne and I have to say, it’s a honey. Rather than using the specialized subwoofer feed, I ran the preamp-out line-level signals from the nice old NAD integrated amp through the Velodyne and back to the power-in, which has the useful side-effect of rolling off the signal at 80Hz, so the little KEFs don’t have to waste energy trying to go where they can’t. The Velodyne has a clever circuit where it powers down and wakes up when it sees an input signal. It sounds good; not close to the Totem Forests on the big music-only system; but for the price, remarkable. I’m sitting here typing this listening to the Ambient channel from Galaxie (that’d be channel 904 if you’re on the Star Choice satellite), and while admittedly it’s brain goo not music, it’s very silky-sounding goo that’s also giving me a friendly kidney massage on the low notes.
