Is the sky blue?

Careful with the reading of Spec sheets Nova they often do not tell the whole story. Multidriver cabinets do not guarantee a better sound. They add the need for a crossover, in the case of those most likely a passive one, and if not well built they introduce a dip in frequency response at the crossover point. Also if the drivers are not aligned in space then they will add phase cancellation to you audio which is also a problem. When I get home from Toronto tonight I'm sure I'll write some more on this. My advice on home systems is to always go and listen to them. Pick the one that has the sound you like. You will often be surprised to find that it is not the one with the stellar looking spec sheet.

So, while we're talking about sound...

You know how, when you're planning to build a house you believe you can do anything? This is that fun part of the process. So the SO is going all craxy (it's funny, buffista usage of this, 'cause his nom du net is actually craxydog with that spelling) planning his portion of the house which is, of course, the studio.

Later for fun I'm going to post our current Sims version of our plans, for critique, but for the purposes of this discussion, I'll summarize. The studio is a room roughly 8' x 14', but with one open wall (to be filled in or not with movable acoustic foam, maybe dressed up like a shoji screen. It's got a closet to double as a vocal booth and a big picture window that goes into the living room. We'll be running boxes through the walls to allow use of the living room for a full band, the guest bedroom across the not-hall as an isolation room, and of course the vocal booth/amp closet. It'll be slab on grade, so we're thinking of floating the floor. And of course, two of the walls (it's in phase II of our planning) will be straw-bale, so super-insulated and pretty absorbent acoustically. We may offset the studs (if there are any) on the remaining wall, but it's all closet space on its side or the other, so prolly not necessary. The SO's running the numbers now to get the standing frequencies worked out.

Then we're going to run through to the other side of the wall so the living room can be used as a listen-back space. So, prolly some sort of surround sound speakers there, that can be tied into either the household sound system or the studio monitors.

So, sound geek(s), got any suggestions? Advice?

Almare, the iPod seems to be like the TiVo: people who have them don't see how they ever lived without them.

This is such an embarrassing question, but I can't puzzle this one out. I installed a trivial little freeware program (or plug-in, possibly) on my iBook whose entire function is to make sheep bounce along the address bar of my web browser when I go to a new page.

It's no big deal, it's not causing a problem, but now I'm really tired, and I cannot for the life of me find it to uninstall it. I tried googling every possible combination of "sheep / mac / apple / freeware / OS X / download" because I figured if I could find the damned thing, at least I'd know what to search for on my system.

No luck.

It's a longshot, but -- any suggestions?

Liese, how thick are these straw bale walls going to be? Because an 18 inch thick straw bale gives an insulation value of R26. That is a lot better than most homes have, but I'm not sure it qualifies as super insulation. Of course, if you are talking 36 inch thick walls, which is not uncommon with straw bale construction...

After looking at the systems in person, we went with the Yamaha because our living room is tiny, and the Onkyo speakers would have completely taken over the room. (That, and I know I don't hear well enough for the sound quality to make that much difference.) Next stop: Radio Shack for more cables.

Steph, the directories you want to look in are:

• /Library/Internet Plug-Ins/
• ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/
• /Library/Application Support/
• ~/Library/Application Support/
• /Library/Startup Items/

Where "~" is a shorthand for your home directory.

If you still can't find it, make sure Safari is running, and go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor->Monitor->Show Activity Monitor->File->Print...->Save As PDF...

If you send the PDF file to me, I can help you eradicate the evil sheep from your computer.

From my perspective, the Ipod is absolutely worth it, but I use it for music and as an extra hard disk. Just for the additional space alone in a compact case...wonderful.

ND: To be fair, my original recommendation of the Onkyos came entirely from reading AB comparisons of the Onkyo HTIBs with similar price-pointed systems by people on hometheaterforum.com - a rather uptight sound quality group, generally. The spec sheet reading thing came afterward, specifically since the Onkyo HTIBs I had seen reviewed were generally slightly higher-end than that one. And I was curious.

Not that Jessica's decision isn't personally reasonable - for many (most?) people, aesthetics are more important than sound quality. I get that. And those Onkyo speakers are pretty durn big.

Hey, ND, what do you think of Axiom speakers? Any opinion? Any knowledge? I'm thinking of setting up a 5.1 system using Axiom M3ti's as the fronts and center and QS4s as the surrounds, with a highly recommended ~$150 sub from partsexpress (a Dayton 10"/100W) to take the LFE.