AmpSwap Episode II: A Lack of the Clones.

Thanks to my wife promising her dad that sure, Earl would be happy to spend all of his Saturday night dubbing VHS tapes for him, the somewhat leisurely “I’ll get it done when I get it done” schedule for swapping out the A/V amps got ramped up to “get it done by 7 o’clock tonight so you can stay up all night dubbing tapes and then go feed horses.” Tomorrow we’re also supposed to get together with my wife’s cousin and her husband, who is home on leave after spending way too long in Baghdad. I’m not going to get into the politics of pulling out or not pulling out; put simply, I think it’s hard to disagree that one day serving in the U.S. armed forces in the danger zone in Baghdad is one day too long. Her cousin’s husband has been there a few hundred days too long.
Anyway, on to the completion of the AmpSwap project, which rapidly turned into an exercise in banging my forehead into the nearest solid surface. Pics aplenty, so…

The easy part: putting my now-audio-only amp in the place of Jan’s audio-video amp in the living room. It worked out pretty well. Since this one does not have a working remote (and I haven’t ever been able to procure one), I put it at a more reasonable height; the amp that was there was so deep that it had to go on a lower shelf.

Mission accomplished…in the living room. I was asked to get rid of the PSone that had been hooked up in the living room, so gone it is; I guess this means I now have an unmodded U.S. PSone to use as an “expo machine.”

Houston, we have a huge problem: a crippling lack of inputs and outputs on the back of the amp that’s now moving into my game room. Seriously: this thing has only half the inputs and 1/3 the outputs that my original amp had. For comparison, here’s that photo of the back of the other amp again:

And it just doesn’t work the same way: with the original game room amp, I could leave the headphones plugged in but manually select whether or not the speakers were on. With this amp, if the headphones are plugged in, blam, the speakers are automatically shut off. Gah. One of the two available audio outputs also won’t work unless you configure the thing in some arcane way manually, everytime to switch to them. So there’s a trip to Radio Shack for some RCA Y-splitters in my near future. Assuming Radio Shack still has such things and isn’t just pimping cell phones.
I have the thing working acceptably to get these tapes done tonight, but I’ll be tinkering with this setup some more. There are workarounds for the lack of inputs, but I can’t help but feeling like the sudden halving of my A/V capabilities is a tremendous indignity. Still, I’m lucky that I had another amp to switch off to. To finish off my goal of causing grievous injury to my own back, I also swapped out the broadcast monitors; curiously, they’re now both on their best behavior. Go figure.

Here’s the only one of these you’re gonna see east of the Seattle NWCGE meet this weekend, many many thanks to Jarett at Packrat Video Games. Too bad I can’t play it while I’m dubbing bloody VHS tapes, thanks to the new setup… 🙄

Observed while going out to fetch the above game cartridge from the mailbox: Chloe watches while Othello rolls around on the ground, exposing his belly to the world.

She seems somehow underwhelmed by this first-ever case of a documented feline ROFL.

It was a nice day today, so Othello was on the prowl in the wild…uh…in the bushes just outside the front door.

Chloe is suitably impressed by his bravery.

So much so that she’s probably going to doze off again soon.