Dep't of unmuffled jams

[roadrunnertwice]

I got some new computer speakers recently, and was initially somewhat disappointed in them... but then I rearranged my desk to move them to shoulder-height (up from belly-height), and now they're great!

I'd been using my previous ones since 2001 — some Harmon Kardon dudes with a subwoofer, which were an upgrade option with the Dell desktop I got for college. Having a desktop at school was a completely outrageous drag, although at the time I think laptops were obsoleting into unusable potatoes on an average half-life of around twelve minutes (I feel like it wasn't 'til around 2008 when we started getting laptops that didn't feel like junk within four years?), so I didn't really have a great alternative, but anyway, the speakers served me well for a good long while. Eventually they started having some kind of problems with the crossovers or the potentiometers or both, where the right-hand speaker (the one with the control knob) would severely muffle certain high and mid frequencies — when I played something involving a stereo panning effect through them, it made me feel like one of my ears was clogged.

Well, 20 years is a long enough service life to let me feel only a little bit guilty about spending some money on gear, so I got the "budget" ones the Wirecutter currently recommends, the PreSonus Eris in the 3.5" woofer size. Or rather, I got the version of them without built-in Bluetooth, because IMO that's eventually negative value. (More components is more crap that can contribute to early failure, and I expect a pair of normal speakers to outlive at least two full protocol obsolescence cycles.)