Amazing what I find in my junk closet
November 17, 2005So I’ve been trying to clean out my junk closet the last few weeks. It’s the closet in my spare bedroom, filled to capacity with, well, junk. Stuff I’ve accumulated over the years, and hauled around with me from house to house, state to state. It’s finally time to get rid of it, as it’s a lot of stuff I clearly do not need to keep.
Like there was an old Macintosh SE case, which I gave to a co-worker who in turn made a little DIY project out of it. Not exactly what I had in mind but at least it’s no longer sitting un-used and un-loved in my closet. It has a home and a purpose.
I’ve also sold off some stuff on eBay. Got rid of an old Sony Minidisc player, and a VHS set of the Star Wars Trilogy (the original of course, pre-tinkered-with-by-Lucas). Will probably find a few more items worth discarding thru eBay, but also a lot of junk I’ve just thrown out or put in a box to take over to the Salvation Army.
But tonight I came across a bit of an unexpected treasure–a Xitel MD-port DG2. It had been part of another MiniDisc player I used to have–it was the PC connection that let you record music from the PC in pure digital beauty onto the MiniDisc.
Now the reason it’s a treasure is that I’d actually been thinking about buying something similar, not realizing I already had one. See I’ve got this el-cheapo eMachines PC that I use as my iTunes/iPod hub. It rips the CD’s lickety split, and it’s got a Firewire card in there to let me sync it up with the iPod.
But it also is plugged into my stereo, so that I can listen to my music from the PC. But the damned sound card is crapping out on me–it’s producing so much static that listening to music had become painful. You couldn’t even listen to most classical music, because during the soft passages the static would drown out the music.
So I’d been thinking of getting some kind of external sound card, USB or Firewire, that would let me take the music stream digitally from the PC straight into my receiver. And what should I find in the junk closet but this Xitel USB-to-optical sound device. Completely plug-and-play, at least on XP–didn’t require any external drivers.
I’m so happy it’s hard to describe. My stereo is blasting out Berlioz’s Requiem in all its glory, and I can finally enjoy it again without the hiss of any static whatsoever. Next I plan on queuing up the Carmina Burana by Carl Orff, loud enough that my neighbors will hear it. Well, maybe not quite that loud.
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