Dick Pountain /Idealog 358/ 07 May 2024 01:32
In my back-room hardware morgue is a black cotton bag, about the size of Santa’s Sack, containing nothing but cables. This unwholesome collection bears witness to a long career in personal computing: RS 232 serial, parallel printer, CAT3 and 5 ethernet, BT telephone, USB, phono, SCART, HDMI, Composite Video, and more. (A long-time fan of dub reggae, seeing it prompts me to put on the Bag-O-Wire album).
My home/office has been almost wireless for years, ever since the advent of WiFi and Bluetooth, and while that’s generally a very good thing, it’s not quite problem free. I listen to a lot of music and am fussy about sound quality, so I route all my sources through a hi-fi system with vintage Castle speakers. But I don’t only listen to music, I also make it, using several guitars and a small Marshall amplifier.
My last remaining wired connection was from an outdated LG Smart TV to my hi-fi amplifier, which has Bluetooth but supports only one connection at a time, which was occupied by my laptop for Spotify and YouTube. I tried a Bluetooth dongle in the TV’s headphone output, but the switching involved proved more inconvenient than running a wire under the rug. Recently that TV died and I replaced it with a new one with Bluetooth built in, and the fun began.
The IT industry has come up with a fair number of dodgy protocols, but by far the most perplexing to me is Bluetooth, which often appears to have a (malignant) mind of its own. In a couple of recent columns I’ve mentioned Albert Einstein’s dislike of Spooky Action At A Distance. Well, to me Bluetooth is Snooty Action At A Distance: it connects only when it feels like it and if you don’t irritate it. (I Googled SAAAD and in addition to the Einstein reference I discovered it also stands for South African Academy of Aesthetic Dentistry, a spooky connection).
Now having a spare Bluetooth dongle (so cheap they could give them away in cornflake packets) I thought it would be nice to put it in the line output of my guitar amp, so I could practise later at night using my JBL wireless headphones. I paired these but my first test was explosive. The guitar output actually came out of the hi-fi at colossal volume instead, but I was wearing the over-ear headphones which attenuated the sound so much that it took me a devastating while to realise this…
Turns out the dongle is happy to talk to the hi-fi amp but not the headphones. The same happened with the new TV where I could use the headphones, but only by manually disconnecting the hi-fi amp via my laptop (which didn’t work for the guitar amp). I also have a Samsung tablet which I use, among other things, to run a midi sequencer app on which I write bass, drum and occasionally piano tracks to play along to. Shifting the Bluetooth dongle from the guitar amp’s output to an input channel and switching it from Tx to Rx talks to the tablet perfectly! But that same tablet won’t pair with my laptop! I may be getting hysterical! And my teeth may be turning blue through excessive swearing! The problem is twofold. Some devices are picky about what they’ll pair with, possibly due to Bluetooth version clashes, which often aren’t easy to ascertain. But also most small Bluetooth devices have no user interface to make visible what else is going in the Toothosphere. I expect someone will write in to say none of this is a problem if you buy all your kit from Apple, or Sonos or whoever, but I’m not interested in wiring the whole house for muzak, merely to connect the actually-existing kit I’ve selected over the years.
I’ve reached a reasonable equilibrium. My new Panasonic telly has Dolby sound good enough that I don’t need to Bluetooth it to the hi-fi. The wireless midi sequencer works a treat as accompaniment. And I dug out a pair of wired Sony headphones for late night practise, All this I can live with.
What I can’t live with is the traumatic experience that buying an up-to-date Smart TV has become. In the few years between my old LG and this Panasonic, a pandemic of streaming services has rendered TV viewing a nightmare, with screen after screen full of horrid thumbnails for trashy programs on crumby networks, almost all of which want you to subscribe. This new set regards watching live TV channels as some kind of perversion which it tries to hide away from you. But that’s a topic for another column, on Cory Doctorow’s concept of ‘enshittification’ and the plague of rent-seeking.
[Dick Pountain is now convinced that Smart TV is an oxymoron]
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