Landrew’s Take on Technology

When a person decides to buy a new stereo, that person needs to face the epic-ish question, do I want a two or four speaker stereo system? This question can often be hard to answer if you don’t know the facts or you’re just really dumb.

First let’s talk a little bit about stereos. For those who don’t know, a stereo is a thing that takes something round and with a hole in the middle and forces music out of it through little boxes called speakers.

Stereo used to mean a system with only two speakers. That’s because before anyone who is alive now was born there used to be a thing called mono, which meant a system that only had one speaker. There’s a different thing called mono now, which is when you’re tired all the time from interacting with the wrong kinds of girls. This new mono has nothing to do with stereos and so I won’t talk about it anymore.

Maybe you’re thinking, hey, I’ll strike a compromise and get a three speaker stereo system. That’s a stupid idea. Here’s why: My roommate, Greg, has a girlfriend and she comes over sometimes. Whenever she comes Greg wants me to leav but I don’t want to because it’s my apartment too. So I don’t leave and then the three of us just sort of sit around not doing anything. Well, it’s the same way with three speakers but more wires are involved.

So the question might seem really easy to answer because when you put two and four next to each other, the alligator always eats the four. But we’re not alligators. We’re people so we won’t eat our speakers like alligators would if they had stereos. So we need to delve deeper into the question than some lame speaker-eating alligator.

Quantity is not the same as quality although if you squint and look at both of them really fast they do look the same. More speakers does not always equal better speakers. Here’s something to ask yourself: would I rather have two real speakers or three cardboard boxes that have been drawn on to look like speakers? If you said you’d like first option, you’ve made a great decision. If you said you want the second option, I can have some speakers ready for you to buy in ten minutes.

Think about the type of music you listen to. Do you listen to a lot of CDs that are just a guy and his acoustic guitar? If so, think about how ridiculous and confusing that would be to play that over a four speaker stereo system. You’d always be thinking: How many guitars is this guy playing? And why is he singing from so many different places in the room? Is he some sort of ventriloquist or magician or something? And then you’d be really disappointed when you saw him live and found out that he isn’t.

In conclusion, look at this parallel example: would you rather date someone with two eyes or with four eyes, and not in the glasses way? You’d choose the person with the standard two, unless the other person’s extra eyes were in someplace really. This is what it’s like with speakers.