Continuing from where I left of earlier, my journey to the Quality of Sound began.
Although not an accomplished acoustic aesthetic by then, I gathered enough decibels of quality to catch up in my music. CD Players were expensive then and I never had one. I still managed to get ‘CD recorded’ songs of ar rahman on a Cobalt Tape (Rs 80/-), paying another Rs 100/- for Recording.
It was a pristine collection.
Time flies. Engineering doors opened, I never had a computer till 3rd semester and when It was time to buy a computer (a modest P-II AMD 350 MHz, 64MB Ram), my hunt for good speakers has begun. I didn’t want to settle in for the substandard 200/- box speakers which cry after sometime. Neither did I have the pocket money to invest in thousands. My choice, then, was Mercury 2.1. A decent sounding subwoofer speakers. It was good and the movies & games had big impact in my hostel room.
Graduating from Tape to mp3s was a Big thing! Months passed and soon after a year, I got bored with these speakers. My acoustic buds was yearning for more as at this point I had a keen understanding of the mid highs and rich bass which the Mercury Speakers weren’t delivering.
Creative was on my list next but again they were the mercedes in their segment. Spending few thousand Rupees was taxing. Remember, this was early 2000 and smarty pants still made phone calls on a Saturday, in a STD Booth – “Dad, can you please send me thousand rupees more this month?”.
(Life is so different now, I tell you)
I still didn’t garner pocket money enough to blow up on speakers overnight. Here comes another opportunity, like an orgasm in the middle of a lunch break. This guy (who is not even my friend) drops in, just days before our 5th semester exams.
“Hey, I need an urgent favour from you man”.
“Hey, what’s the problem man?”, I said.
“I have this friend and she screwed up her project work, we hardly have 4 days now and we need to rewrite the whole thing. You seem to be good in Java, can you help?”
“Dude, I haven’t even begun my Algorithms & Design, I might flunk”, I hesitated to help him as it was virtually impossible.
“Please man, do something the team will flunk miserably, ladki ka mamla hai yaar 
”
“Hmm but I don’t even know her man, this is too much. How do you expect me to help, sacrificing my own”, I tried to politely refuse.
He was really desperate, I could see that. “Don’t worry she is willing to pay you. Quote your price buddy”
I was shocked! “Pay me, but why? I’m not a professional programmer and I don’t think I like this idea of taking money for programming”. He started convincing me, “Relax man, if you make it happen you really deserve this, why should you feel embarrassed? It’s your hard work man, You’ve earned it”
I still couldn’t believe it and was not convinced if it was a good idea.
“Is 3000 rupees fine for you?”
“Well, I can buy my Creative speaker for 2500/- with that” (This was my thought in my mind, I was selfish, definitely)
“Hmmm … I dont know man, you’re tempting me”.
The next thing I remember was, he opened a floppy disk, inserted in my comp and was unzipping his project files …..
As for the rest of the story, I rewrote the entire app in the next 3 days, in fact I wrote a diff app for them which suspiciously looked like the Title of their Project – “Java Graphics Tool”. I basically did a rehash of the JDK example toolkit and added my own stuff in it!
3000 bucks for 3 days. I had my creative on the same day. Bonus – a creative soundcard.
Sometimes it is indeed true, if you really really desire for something genuinely, you’ll get it.
The next two years I was hooked into Creative line of Products. I moved onto their 4.1 series. I upgraded my Sound Card to a 24 bit. Your ordinary sound card would be 16 bit and they process sound with a sampling rate of 48Khz and a 24 bit is many many times (in theory) better and has a sampling rate of 96KHz. I was also a compulsive DSP Effects collector. My winamp was loaded with a bunch of DSP plugins and I would make my ordinary 2.1 or 4.1 speakers set into a virtual hall with an array of sound immersions. The soundstage was much better with these plugins and of course, It was bloody good to catch a movie on my speakers.
People ask me why I wasn’t running after girls in college. Now you know what I was doing 
. I was happy with my speakers.
I graduated from Engineering and bought my first 5.1 Creative series. It was intense, powerful and as I had my own room and house this time
I’ll talk more about technology and the science behind sound and soundcards in my next post. The story so far ends in India and I landed in the UK in 2003 and what one do if they had desires which has no boundaries of financial obligations?
To be continued ….
(a metamorphosis from a bargain speaker buyer to an experimental audiophile with a catalog of sound apparatus from Bose Triport to the 120$ earplugs)