My LVD 2 DVD Transfer Station.

My "secret" to getting  solid Transfers 
from the old Laser 2 DVD.
                      

             
1st, lets get something straight, a good recorder is a must have. Don't expect the Wal-mart $98 dollar el-cheapo to do the trick. ( Better would be to have a Video capture card for your PC.) 

I have a Pioneer Elite. It will allow me to record in the HQ Super-bit mapped XP 1 hour record mode, and will record 2 channel LPCM. So this thing can copy the LD soundtrack perfectly, ok. None of that low end DD 192kbps sound is to be had here.

A HQ burner is a must !

Second of all, and this seams fairly simple and straight forward, you will also need a 1st rate Laserdisc player. It seems to me like Laserdisc fans understand that.

Here is the real trick. Instead of putting the machines on top of one another, put them BACK TO BACK. Also, if you can, set them each on their own isolation tables. That way, none of the vibrations from the Laserdisc player will be picked up by the burner. Then,and here's the really big secret, get rid of the video cable all together by directly connecting the machines together with a pair of couplers  ( in this case I used some of old Radio Shack's Gold series male/female plug to plug 75 ohm couplers) This way there is as little loss or change to the video signal that you can have, since all a cable can do is harm.

Video Direct Out

Set the video recorder's input mode to "dark" if that option is available. This helps prevent the disc from looking washed out during normal playback. I use an older high end JVC monitor because it has enough connections in the back to get the job done.
You are now set to Transfer your LD Title to DVD. Set the burner to the correct input, select the 1 hour record mode, and off you go. Note: I also use 1st rate audio cables that are very short in length for great sound.               

I then run the audio out of the tv, which allows me to listen to the sound on my "monitoring station"

The whole thing is plugged into a power supply which is run through a Tripp-Lite Isobar.

And that's the way I do it. 



























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Speaking of Prequels ...

Did you ever read this book when you were young?

The Girl Who Owned a City,

By O.T. Nelson.

It’s about the aftermath of a plague that kills off everyone over the age of twelve. Sound familiar? Can anyone who’s ever watched the Season One Episode, “Miri” of Star Trek: TOS say “prequel"?

 I must admit, I really never even thought about that possibility until just recently. The events depicted in this book, which is aimed at young teenagers, could have easily happened before those seen in “Miri.”

The book was written in the mid-seventies, long after “Miri” had 1^st aired, but still when “Trek” was in reruns. The focus is not on how the plague itself began at all. No, in fact, very little backstory is given (unlike, “Miri”). 

I never considered "Girl" a Sci-fi story, but  Dystopian works are often classified generically as science fiction, because a fictional universe has to be constructed, and a selectively told backstory of some past disaster is often introduced early in the book, because “the story” typically depicts events that take place "in the future."

This story, is mostly about how a society might evolve after a catastrophe,  one in which the young are forced to form a society “from scratch”,  by looting and building a militia, armed with guns, Molotov cocktails, and primitive weapons. 

( In TOS's “Miri” we see a City that is in a complete state of decay and ruins.)

 According to an article written for teachers by Jennifer Kemper at Yahoo, it mostly deal’s with mankind's inherent characteristics and how different individuals will react to conflict ( or approach a chaotic situation) when authority is not present and highlights different viewpoints on the overall nature of man.  I personally thought this is a “slice of life” story,  as the “ending” drops off without any real resolution at all, and since a cure to “the plague” was Never addressed, nor a solution found, ALL the character’s introduced in this story, regardless of what they did or did not do, are all bound to have very short lives anyway.  Right?   Or do they?

Could this story really have taken place on another world - a world Kirk and crew would discover some 200 years or so later? 

Nelson himself has stated that his intent in writing the novel was to translate the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand ( a Russian-American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter, turned philosopher) into terms children could understand.  Dear God - WHY? 

True to her extreme left of center roots  - Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge & flat out rejected ANY and All forms of faith and religion. Rand's fiction was poorly received by many literary critics, and academia generally ignored or rejected her philosophy. I wonder why?

 Atlas Shrugged, published in 1957, was Rand's magnum opus.   The plot involves a dystopian United States in which the most creative industrialists, scientists, and artists go on strike and retreat into the mountains and hideaway there, in order to illustrate that without the efforts of the rational and productive, the economy would collapse and society would fall apart. This advocates the core of her philosophy’s and is the basis on which this book was based upon. 

Makes one wonder........

I'm with Dr. McCoy. Dear God man, please don't beam me up.

 Mission Log: A Roddenberry Star Trek Podcast - hosted each week by John Champion and Ken Ray Gun  is a show where in it's sole purpose is to explore the Star Trek universe one episode at a time.  

Episode Six:  made me stop and really think about cloning Transporters . That's right. I said cloning Transporters.         By now I guess that you are thinking -"say what?"

You see - in an early episode of Trek - Kirk and the rest of the entire crew of the Starship Enterprise, including Mr. Spock, in what has got to be one of the worst brain farts ever ( due to lack of money,  poor script writing, and/ or props, and or a combination of all three - because you see Timmy, the models weren't finished being built yet) because they just simply forgot about all them there shuttle craft that should be parked on the hunger deck, that could have been used at any time, to rescue a stranded "Away Party" from sub freezing temperatures and possible death on the surface of the planet below, in -

 
Star Trek: "The Enemy Within" Your soul.

Question?

Do you remember the world's 1st ( ok, not for real, but fictional) matter Transporter device? No? Well, I do. 
It was dubbed "The Disintegrator / Integrator" and was seen nearly a decade before the one seen in the Original Series Star Trek.  

In Trek, the Transporter (originally dubbed, "The Materializer",) was a subspace device capable of almost instantaneously moving an objects or persons from one location to another, able to “dematerialize”, or convert said objects or persons to energy,  then transmit ( or “ beam” ) that energy to a destination, and then reassemble and reconstitute (or Kirk's case, "Re-integrate")  those objects/persons back into matter. My real problem with “The Transporter” as seen in Star Trek, besides that fact it’s just simply used as a plot device in this episode ( and God, I hate plot devices) is the way in which it operates.
 Let me explain.

For me, this type of tech could only work if there was both a Transmitter and a Receiver teleport device on the other end, just like, or as with, any TV or radio system. On one end you have a transmitting device that beams that signal, and on the other end you have a receiver that captures that signal. With cell phone service, the phones on both ends are both transmitter and receivers, and the “transmitter” is a 3^rd party network device that is utilized to send the signal both ways.

In order for this thing to work, there should have to be a transporter at both ends. TOS attempted to reinstall this idea (the way that it should be) back into the film series beginning with “The Motion Picture”.  When Kirk needed to get to the ship, he beams up from Earth to a nearby Space Station, because the Enterprise Transporter’s are not yet operational. 
When they later 1^st test them, sure enough, death occurs. So Kirk couldn’t just beam on to the ship any where he wanted, he had to arrive in the transporter room or take a shuttle.  In the original series, beaming to and from a transporter chamber was a necessity when beaming “ship to ship.”  This was explained in the episode "Day of the Dove". Spock and Scotty had said that doing a site-to-site transport  on board the ship could be risky. They could "beam into a deck" or into an inanimate object and get stuck there.  Is this the reason why we always saw the Crew materializing on a transporter pad when beaming ship to ship like at Space Station K7, in “The Trouble with Them There Little Tribbles”? But I guess that a planet is a big enough stationary target that they don’t need a receiving Transporter to beam up or down?

Anyway, since the laws of physics state that matter can not be created or destroyed, it simply changes forms, how then, is it possible, that the little old transporter can create not one, but two “copies” of a person, as the device was shown to do during this episode "The Enemy Within"? Would that not be creating double the amount of matter? That’s one hell of a cloning machine they have there! Did both copies have half as many atoms? Since your “DNA pattern” is stored in the ships computer, heck, if you die,  shouldn't they just be able to stop and visit the Transporter Room and order up another copy of you? 

Something like this happened years later in the ST:TNG episode “Second Chances”, when attempting to transport Lt. Riker through an unstable atmosphere, the beam 'reflects' and split into two identical beams, creating an exact physical duplicate where he remained undiscovered on the planet's surface for eight years.

In the Voyager episode "Tuvix", much like in the movie “The Fly”, another transporter accident combines both the physical and behavioral aspects of Lt. Tuvok, and Neelix, into a single being.
                                   

Voyager LD Back Cover from Japan

What about what happened to Scotty when he was brought back to "life" in TNG's "Relics."? He was stuck and survived in storage as a mere "Ghost in the Machine" in the cyberspace world that was known only by it's label, "The Pattern Buffer" for 75 Years!  OK. Yeah, right. 
                                       

( This theme would later be addressed in other Sci-Fi movies and shows like "The X-Files", "Robocop", The LawnMower Man, and "The Matrix".)   The "other" guy that stepped into the transporter with Scotty simple beamed out of existence, because they were unable to retrieve his pattern out of the data storage unit intact. Damn. Hey, come to think of it, didn't something like this happen in another early 80's movie called Tron?

My real problem is that the transporter doesn’t address the issue of the human soul.  Hell, even if you don’t “believe” in a “soul life” and you believe that death is death, I don’t believe that a Transporter could never copy a “living being”, much less do what it does in this episode, when it splits a man’s subconscious self into two halves. Oh, ok, I’ve got to give credit to where credit is due. Yes, Shatner does an awesome job of making you believe that it can.  But Captain James T. Kirk is not a flying Buzz Light-year Toy, ok.  A device such as this should not be utilized to beam up the living, but should only work for and on "things", like boxes that are clearly marked "Classified: Do not open" (which also just so happens to be big enough to allow a crazy inmate to stow away in and thereby go both undetected and then unnoticed by the ship's red-shirted Transporter operator only a couple of episodes later.)

Here we are now to believe, due to some “malfunction” caused by “ore dust”, that now this thing can reprogram the way the human mind works when it reassembles someone.  Could you imagine the endless possibilities that could occur if you could reprogram the mind of your clone, or clones? 

The movie, Multiplicity, comes to mind. In that film, they clone-a-clone, and his personality defects issues are because of that. Those defects more pronounced when this is done, demonstrating how a copy of a copy may not be as 'sharp' as the original.

If either the Enterprise, or any other Starship Transporter's  had those type of capabilities, then I believe this device would have been used to “cure” the criminally insane, like those found at both the Penal Colony on Tantalus V ( as seen in the Episode “Dagger of the Mind”)  and on Elba II, an asylum for the insane, as seen in the Season 3 episode “Whom Gods Destroy” (in which Dr. Adam’s rode is the same as the one wore by the staff at Tantalus V). 
Why then would Starfleet or any "prison" even need drugs or a “ Neutral Neutralizer” when you could use the one of those  “Mind-Altering Cloning Transporters”?
          Now that would be a real house of horrors indeed.

STARDATES used in Star Trek: TOS

                                                               

The Original 1980 VHS Rental Store Cassette Cover

 
              My personal take on 
            Stardates used during
    Star Trek: The Original Series

Now, according to both Phil Farrand,
 author of "The Nitpicker's Guides" 
and my very own deductive reasoning skills, I have come to accept that every 1000 Stardate Units is = One "Star Year". 

Each Stardate is an 8-hour work shift and three shifts are equal to a 24-hour "day".  Despite all the crap ever written about this subject - 
 I promise If you will stick with me on this - THIS Works. 

Yes, I know there are certain episodes where the
 Stardate given during Kirk's voiced over Log entry does NOT allow for enough passage of time for those events during some of the episodes to occur.

 However, I think this is due to a post-production problems that occurred in the timing of the ADR, ( and IF you allow for that - it all works) 

Point of Interest:
 Stardates had yet to be introduced when 
 Captain Pike had command.

 After further research and study, 
I believe that one must not look at the episodes in production order, and or by broadcast order, but rather by the "Stardate order" in order to get the correct intended order of the episodes.  

 This is how it Should work. 

                                    

 The CBS /  C.H. Video Library" 

Season One -

 Episodes 1-6, 10, and 14, take place 
 during the 1st year of the 5-year mission. 
 Episode 17, "The Squire of Gothos" ,
 Stardate 2124.5 "happens" at the beginning of the second year of the mission, while episodes 7-9, 13, and 16, ( by air date order) take place during end of year two, based on the Star Date's given of 2712 - 2947. The rest of "Season One" takes place at the start of Year Three of the mission and covers through Star Date: 3417.

I'll give you one example:
I'd like to point out that the Stardate given for the Season One Episode "The Menagerie Parts One & Two" is 3012.4, which would put those events at the very start of the crew just beginning their 3rd Year together, which means this episode takes place after the events seen in ""The Galileo Seven" and "Court Martial"  
        
                                       

That would be about right based on the fact that Kirk stated he took over Command of the Enterprise from Capt. Pike & Spock states he served with Pike for "Eleven years, four months, and five days". Later during his hearing Spock states that the events from "The Cage" took place "thirteen years ago." 

So, that begs the question-
Did Pike command not One, 
but rather Two - Five-year missions with a year in between them in order for the ship to get a refit? 
 Could Spock have been under Pike's command before the Enterprise 1st launched for it's 1st 5-year mission under Pike?  Sure, why not?
We know that Pike took over the Enterprise from Capt. Robert April ( the 1st to Captain the Enterprise) after April's Original Shakedown cruise and the ship's very 1st 5 year mission under him that followed. 

 This all works. Thirteen years - less eleven equals Two full years that Kirk has been in Command! 

This is the reason why Kirk and McCoy both know and trust Spock so well at this point in the show. Even though the Menagerie Parts One and Two are only the 11th & 12th episodes to air, (the 16th produced) what is more important here is the Stardates. 

Gene knew that there would be production delays & that episodes would be aired out of production order.

 When there were problems, like with say, 
 "Assignment: Earth", "they" would simply not assign a Stardate to that episode. That way the episode could "fit in" anywhere, since all of the episodes are "stand-alone" episodes that don't really depend on one another.

If  "Where No Man" takes place in 2265, ( Stardate: 1312) then Menagerie takes place at the beginning of 2267. Subtracting thirteen years would place "The Cage" near the very end of 2254. By then the Enterprise herself was almost ten years old, since she was built in 2245.

Season 2 actually begins during Year Three, and contains some nine episodes from Year Four of the 5-Year Mission, starting with "Bread and Circuses" (Star Date 4040.7) and should end with "Return to Tomorrow" ( Stardate 4768 - the highest Stardate number in Season Two.)

Finally, that brings us to Season Three,
 which really takes place through the end of the last Year of the mission, ending with Stardate of 5943.7
 w/ "All our Yesterdays", the "Zarabeth" episode. (as the events seen in "Turnabout" "happened" before this episode.)

 It's my Personal Belief that it was THOSE EVENTS that happened to Spock in THAT Episode that served as the Main reason as to WHY he went to Vulcan to purge all of those emotions when Enterprise was being refitted through Stardate 7411 at the beginning of  "The Motion Picture".

Note: Trek's last Episode to be produce and that aired, "Turnabout" had a Star Date of 5928.5.

 This helps to explain how we can have an episode like "Elaan of Troyius" (Stardate 4372.5) between two episodes like "Wink of an Eye"  (Stardate 5710) and "Whom Gods Destroy" (Stardate 5718.3)  It means those events in "Elann" took place during the 4th Year of the Mission, while the events in the other two episodes "happened" during the 5th Year of the ship's mission.
And that is my take. 

The 4th and 5th year are not really "missing". The stories that were NOT told really would have taken place during a large chunk of Year Two  (Stardates 2130-2700) and some during Year Three ( Stardates 3800-4400).

What do you think?

Interview with Ben Burtt, Super 8 Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Editor

Interview with Ben Burtt, Super 8 Sound Designer and Supervising Sound Editor

Found Posted on CG Terminal :
From : SoundWorks Collection
 Ben Burtt is a Legend and two-time Oscar Winner and was the Head Sound Designer for 1st "Sprocket Systems" and then "Skywalker Sound" for Lucasfilm Ltd, having produced the sound effects for both the entire Star Wars and Indiana Jones film series. He would later join Pixar to produce "WALL-E." His latest work was on the film "Red Tails." Here he is discussing his joy of the Blu-Ray version of the "Super 8" Dolby HD 7.1 soundtrack. As many of you know, I loved this film. The fact that Ben was the main sound designer was the cherry on top. I just love this type of "ear-candy". Thanks Ben.

Retail Giant hhgreg's little known dirty tricks

            After Rex TV closed it's door's in 2009, I went to work for a Grand Opening event with hhgreg. Turns out, that event was the only reason why I was hired, because "they" way over hired like 22 of us sales guys (mostly leftovers from Circuit City, which had also just closed in the not so distant past) when "they" really only need 6 people to do the job, and fired 16 of us in a one day "mass lay-off event" because we had not made the company enough money in our little 60 day stay in an underdeveloped new mall that very few people even knew existed in the middle of an economic recession.  This company taught me a that there is no such thing as company commitment in Corp. America today. Never mind that my former boss and I were driving 48miles each way though one of the worst construction zones in the entire US at the time, and we were never late, nor missed even a shift, not once, and they still let us go.
          Why? Well, because, you see, "they" are all about how much profit margin ANY product has in it, and "they" pressure their sales staff to "force" certain products that have the highest mark-up, on to a customer. I shit you not.  Let me just state right now, in all my years of selling with both Rex and now with Sears, I've never been forced to do this. It was enough to make me sick. This ought to be illegal.
         As a matter of fact, at Sears, we discuss getting the right product for the customer's needs, weather it be the right size or type of  TV, or if the product needs to fit within certain restrictions. I've never had a question of ethics while being with the company. But at hhgreg, no, that's not how it worked.
         Let me fill you in on the real 411. Before we would open, we would have the morning meeting, in which one of the floor manages would walk through the Tv dept with the day's sales staff and discuss the "profit margin" on each TV. Now the reason why he did this is because the sales guys don't really make much of a sales commission on the selling dollar amount of the product. No, see hhgreg only really pays their salesmen on the "profit margin" on a piece. (hence, the incentive to shove a customer into a certain product, and spend more time talking about how much better the more expensive Tv really is.) So let's take, for example, if the salesman gets 1% of the volume, and 5% of the "profit margin" on ANY TV. (Not always true, but close enough for Government work.)
          TV A.) Plain 50in 1080p Panasonic Plasma w/ internet. A great TV. Nothing wrong with the set. Will meet a customers needs for the room Tv is going into.   Retail price: $899.99 on Sale for $799. Cost is $719. ( If they are lucky )Mark-up $81 Comm: $8 bucks on the "volume", plus $3 bucks on the "profit" for a total of comm of $11.
           TV B) Samsung 55in LED, 3-D, Smart 1080p HDTV.  Retail $3199.99 Now on sale for $2499.99. Save $700. There cost $1889. Mark-up $610 . Comm: $ 25 on the "Volume" and $ 30 on the "profit" for a total comm of $ 55. Plus, Samsung if offering a "Spiff" of $100. So here, the salesman stands to make $155 dollars. Now, there is nothing wrong in that (the way they pay their people) in and of or by itself.
            But when management instructs them to only sell this or that TV based solely on how much money both the company and the salesman stand to make over another product, how much time do you think you are going to get then to talk about those other products that don't do them so well, regard less if the other product is just as good or not?  Now,  to make matter even worse, they would then take it one step further, and this is really where this becomes a "consumer beware" issue.
            They would (and yes, I'm sad to say, I watched in horror, but said nothing) set all the TV's that had a nice mark-up in them to the "Vivid, or max" settings, and everything else was toned down to "standard" or worse. some of the "loss leader's" (Tv's they advertize at really stupid low prices in order to bring people in the door, are displayed on endcaps with only a DVD playing on them, instead of the Blu-ray HD signal the sets on the back wall are being sent.  They even take the time to really make those top set's shine on. Does the average Joe or Mom and Pa know this or even have a clue? Are you kidding? I'm still shocked today by how many Senior citizens walk up to me in Sears and ask me, "Just what the differences are between Plasma, LCD, and LED?" Half the time I think to myself , "Where have you people been? Have you been hiding under a rock that long?"
            It's really shocking how under educated people STILL are when it comes to TV's. If these people go into an hhgreg, they don't stand a chance. No one coming in the door today knows what ARC (audio return channel) is or have even heard of it. 50% ( Yes, I said 50%,) of our senior population here in the United States have NO IDEA what  BLU-RAY is.!!!  I'd dare say 8 out of 10 don't know the difference between GUI and OSD or even how to change any of the setting in the TV's menu's. As a matter of fact, they are often afraid to adjust anything on the set, out of fear. Do they know any better? NO.
            More than likely they will just get confused or simply buy the TV that to them looks better to their eyes in the store because they have been so manipulated by just some of the unfair selling practices uses by this company.  Are you starting to see the Big Picture? Do you think any of the "Salesmen" at hhgreg even know what a Laserdisc is, or anything at all about what TV set's are better with lower resolution analog signals? NO WAY.  He just knows "sell this TV, add a matching Blu-ray player, & an expensive HDMI cable and stand or mount."
              That's all the company wants him to know. Let's not even talk about "delivery", "set-up" and or the "Extended Service Contracts." Oh, by the way, did you want to buy a bed to go with that TV?
                                                                                                                                        

analog audio tape cassette nostalgia - tapedeck.org

analog audio tape cassette nostalgia - tapedeck.org

Carlin best sums it all up.

My uncle emailed me this quote from the late George Carlin. In the wake of the economic meltdown and $800 Billion dollar bailout that followed, I feel that these words have never sounded more true, and so I thought I'd take a moment to share his words .................

"Forget the politicians. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice . . . you don’t. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own, and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought, and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the state houses, the city halls, they got the judges in their back pockets and they own all the big media companies, so they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying . . . lobbying, to get what they want . . . Well, we know what they want. They want more for themselves and less for everybody else, but I’ll tell you what they don’t want . . . they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well informed, well educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that . . . that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around a kitchen table and think about how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin' years ago. They don’t want that. You know what they want? They want obedient workers . . . Obedient workers, people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork. And just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime and vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it, and now they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fuckin' retirement money. They want it back so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street, and you know something? They’ll get it . . . they’ll get it all from you sooner or later cause they own this fuckin' place. It’s a big club and you ain't in it. You and I are not in The big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe. All day long beating you over the head with their media telling you what to believe, what to think and what to buy. The table has tilted folks. The game is rigged and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. Good honest hard-working people . . . white collar, blue collar it doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-working people continue, these are people of modest means . . . continue to elect these rich cocksuckers who don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t give a fuck about you . . . they don’t give a fuck about you. They don’t care about you at all . . . at all . . . at all, and nobody seems to notice. Nobody seems to care. That’s what the owners count on. The fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes everyday, because the owners of this country know the truth. It’s called the American Dream because you have to be asleep to believe in it . . .”

My responce to IL Magazine's feature story by Simon O'Hagan

Spotify is Fly, but not HIFI

Let me 1st say, that even though I'm an American, one of my favorite publications is Britain's own  "WHAT-HIFI? Sound & Vision Magazine", because I'm so into this A/V "hobby". I have over ten years of experience selling A/V gear, and I really enjoyed this article, and just wanted to chime in here.  During the 1980's & 90's, no Stereo Rack System would ever be considered complete if it didn't have a Turntable, double cassette deck and a CD (or later, a 5,6,25, or 100 disc) player, so I'm a fan of each format, with all their pro's and con's. As far as cassette playing "second fiddle", while I'll agree that the prerecorded material certainly was, for sure, and therefore took a back seat to the LP and CD, for those of us who had higher end tape decks, however, and bought the right blank cassettes (like the Maxell XLII-S, or Sony HX-Pro, or Metal SR) the recordings we could make from those sources still sounded

better than the vast majority of today's MP3 downloads and streaming services.  I, of course, grew up "on" and with records, and always enjoyed listening to my parents collection of older 60's and 70's albums, ( still have an Technics SL-7 turntable) as well as the thrill of going to the record store ( something my children, ages 12 and 16, will never know or experience, even though they will more than likely look back on GameStop with the same fondness)  to buy that new album and get home after working at the local drive-in movie theatre and taking that LP for a spin, and listening to those big tower speakers sing away through out the night. (Both my Father's 1980 MCS Series (Technics) speakers and Scott’s vintage  Radio Shack Realistic Optimus T-120's come to mind.)  As far as The Brennan is concerned, Microsoft developed this thing over 10 years ago that had most of those features, and you could just plug it in with an Optical cable to the back of your surround receiver. It was called an XBOX. "Party on Wayne." "Party on Garth."