Marco Arment

And then when I try to play sound, it doesn't play because they're still asleep and they're still waking up for the first second or two.

And then so I miss sound effects or I miss the first part of music or I miss the first few words of a video.

I find that very...

very annoying.

So what I do, at the beach where I have the KEF Q150s, those are passive speakers, like regular old speakers that you plug into a powered amp.

And the amp I have, I forget, maybe I'll dig it up in the show notes, it's one of the many 60-ish dollar Amazon Class D digital switching amps.

And I think it's from Topping or one of those brands.

There's a handful of brands on Amazon or SMSL

There's a handful of brands that make a whole bunch of these like 60-ish dollar power amps that are very small, like the size of a few decks of cards and produce certainly enough power for desktop speakers.

And usually you have to get one with a subwoofer output if you're going to have a subwoofer.

But it's a whole class of very good products that don't cost a lot of money.

And it's just on.

So my computer, when it plays sound, it just plays.

There's no latency.

It works 100% of the time.

It just plays.

And I love that about that setup.

It's one of those things where as technology has gotten more sophisticated, certain things have gotten worse.

You get more features, more flexibility, whatever it is, but certain things are worse.

One of the common things that I hear our friends talk about, like John Gruber talked about this a lot, is when you turn on a TV now and switch channels.