Tag: computer audio

More Desk Fun

I shared a bunch of pictures on Tuesday of the changes I made to my basement office. Mostly I was focusing on splitting my work computer off into it’s own space. Doing that freed up a ton of space on my home computer desk but I didn’t really do much with it.

Until now!

Jen bought new speakers for her computer upstairs and I inherited an old set. I put them on the desk on Tuesday, but I didn’t have an amplifier that would work with them. Off to amazon.com we went and I was able to set it up this morning and test it out.

The new desk audio setup is sah-weeeet.

New speakers:

New digital audio converter:

Can you guess what the first test subject was? I bet you can. Sure you can.

USB Fail Part 2

The plan was to plug a DAC and the USB powered speakers I bought into two USB ports on my monitor. That way I could use the speakers on both my MacBook Pro and my work laptop. It didn’t work. The DAC and the speakers had power, I could switch them both on, but the MacBook Pro couldn’t find them. It wasn’t an option in my sound preferences. I moved the DAC to my final USB-C port on the MacBook itself (via an adapter) and it worked fine. I listened to a little King Crimson to test drive (Epitaph) and it sounded 10 times better than the speakers built into the monitor. I doubt I’d use them to mix a song or anything, but they sound great for watching Netflix (I test drove it with an episode of Community. The one where Jeff takes a pool class and they meet an Abed look alike).

So it didn’t work the way I planned, but I wasn’t really intending to use the speakers with the work machine anyway. It would have been nice to have the option, but I don’t really need it. It worked well enough on the Mac though, and that’s the important part. So we’ll say it’s only a partial fail.