shawnwall

For the past few months we’ve been renovating (or paying someone to renovate) our game room downstairs. It’s finally usable again, and I had been thinking about simplifying the home theater/stereo setup for some time. In the past, we had the following setup:

• Samsung 42” LCD
• FIOS Cable/DVR
• Onkyo Receiver
• PS3
• Wii
• JBL front towers, center, rear bookshelf surrounds

I wanted to lay out the room a little differently and eliminate the existing surround-sound setup and go with a simple 2.1 system. After reading around the web along with trying out equipment at various stores, I ended up finding a great deal on the Bose Cinemate Series II System at the Factory Outlet in Washington, PA. They ran me $399.99 instead of the $599.99 retail price found elsewhere. They sounded pretty good at the store, but keep in mind my expectations weren’t outrageous - they are $400 speakers so they aren’t going to be perfect…

Setup

The speakers were well packed and setup was a complete breeze. You simply place the satellites, connect them to the sub, connect the processing unit to the sub, plug a single digital optical out from your tv to the processing unit, and plug in the sub.

Use

There is a tiny on/off and volume remote that must be used with the system. If you are trying to simplify and not have to use another remote, you may not like this.

Sound

TV/Movies

I honestly can’t complain about the sound when it comes to watching TV and movies. The bass is plentiful, so much so I had to even turn down the default setting on the sub. The treble and mids aren’t mind blowing, and sounded a little “distant” but again I wasn’t looking for extremely high cost sound here. You have to play a bit with getting the satellites at the right high, distance, etc, but if you find a sweet spot these speakers really do excel for home theater on a budget.

Music

This is where the review turns sour. So… I purchased an Apple TV to be able to not only watch tv & movies but mainly to be able to listen to Rdio and iTunes through the stereo system. The sound is really quite poor… You have to crank the speakers up to get decent treble & mid out of them to the point where the bass is just out of control even if you turn it down on the sub. You just get the feeling where you want to clean out your ears or your head is clogged up. It simply doesn’t sound right.

Another thing to note here is that if I plugged the digital out of the appletv directly into the Bose processing unit, the sound did get a little better. This shows a flaw in the design of this system where the quality of your TV may effect sound quality since it may muck with the sound while doing a pass-through.

Games

I played a few things on the PS3 and don’t really have a complain. Again the bass was plentiful, and besides the general lack of high-end in the system it wasn’t really too bad.

Verdict

They are getting returned today. Thankfully Bose has a great “try it out” policy where you can return the speakers within 30 days (or 90 during the current holiday season). The speakers simply do not work for me with my goals of tv/movies and music. They are truly meant for tv & movies so I can’t knock them as they excel at their intended purpose for a fairly low price point.

We’re going back to the old equipment, except I may just end up doing stereo with my massive JBL towers.

I’ve been wanting to compile a list of the software & services I use to make my worklife just a bit more easy & enjoyable, so here we go:

• Harvest Time Tracking & Invoicing. This is seriously one of the most well done services I have ever used. I can’t live without it. The companion iPhone app is also fantastic.
• Beanstalk Hosted Source Control. Git or Subversion repositories combined with a great web interface and best of all - automated continuous deployment.
• Basecamp Project Management. Love it or hate it, there’s not really a better way for a small company to manage its projects & tasks. Is it perfect? No.
• XCode Mac IDE. You want to make iOS or OS X apps? Here’s your only (realistic) choice, and it is worlds ahead of anything you’ll be using for Android development.
• BBEdit Text Editor. Sorry but I never really jumped on the TextMate bandwagon. BBEdit has been around since before some of you were born, and it will continue to be around forever. It just works. I do all my python development in here, and general text editing besides Markdown.
• Mou Markdown editor. Do I really need a Markdown-only editor? This is a newcomer to my set of tools but I love it. It reminds me of the LaTeX split-editor I made many moons ago.
• Cornerstone Subversion GUI. If I’m using Git I prefer to just use the command line, but this GUI by Zennaware makes source control a breeze - branching, merging, you name it. It’s well worth the $ for the time saved.
• Intellij Community Edition Java/Android IDE. I hate Eclipse. Hate. It was one of the reasons I avoided Android development so much. Along comes another great IDE from the folks at Jetbrains. It’s fast, it has better code completion, along with various other great features built right in without constantly searching for more junk to bloat your Eclipse install. Make the switch…like you really use that Android Layout Designer anyway.
• Omnigraffle Wireframing/UX. Along with Barebones, the Omni Group has been around forever. I remember using OmniWeb on NeXTSTEP back in the day. This is a very powerful tool where you may only scratch the surface of its features and still be making great wireframes. Definitely check out the iPad/iPhone/Android Stencil Kits from ZURB.
• Dropbox File sharing made easy. Dropbox is a no-brainer. Keep all your work related content there so you don’t have to worry about backup or easy access from your several computers & mobile devices. It’s also great to use as an Intranet like we do at TwoTap Labs.
• Evernote Notes & Clippings. Whether i have my iPad, iPhone or Macbook Pro with me, I’m taking notes in Evernote so I can easily find them later. I’ll admit I’m also known to carry a Moleskine and be old fashioned.
• Pixelmator Image creation & editing. Bye Bye Photoshop. That’s all I have to say.
• iWork Pages, Keynote, Numbers. You know you want to rid yourself of those last remaining Microsoft products.

I dont think they really require being spelled out… but I also use Chrome, Twitter for Mac, Mail.app, Rdio, iCal, and iChat.

Apparently what appears to be a large percentage of Jawbone UP bands are experiencing an incredibly early death. The batteries appear to be failing on devices within a week of ownership. I’ve had this occur to two friends already, and there is a forum post detailing many users’ experiences of the same issue.

So far I’ve charged my band once and haven’t had any issues, but reading about the experience of many other users is very disappointing. This is incredibly bad press for Jawbone and it’s hard to regain a customer’s trust after such immediate problems with a new device.