Visual Cortex

I was in London Drugs today (I wasn't shopping for drugs) and had the pleasure of checking out a bunch of really nice HDTVs. Up until this point, HDTV for me has been something that companies have tried to use to pry open my wallet and friends have talked about sporadically and without a lot of enthusiasm. The units I saw today though really kicked me in the audio visual gland though, and got me thinking that perhaps $4000 wasn't too much to pay for a slick plasma or LCD television with enough swanky bells and whistles to break a yak's spine.

The really strange thing was that the HDTVs were all showing live coverage of baseball, a game that usually does about as much for me as a thimbleful of lukewarm porridge. On the HDTVs though, the game was completely enthralling. Every blade of grass, grimace of athletic effort and emotion was bright and crisp on the screen. A bat broke in half on one swing, and a small cloud of splinters went fluttering away to the left as a piece of shattered wood cartwheeled to the right. Beads of sweat rolled down the pitcher's brow next to his reflective sunglasses as he looked around the bases. A man in the crowd's face twisted in bitter disappointment as he spilled his beer. It was all pretty amazing, and this was just baseball. Highly emotion-charged, action-packed games like cricket or lawn bowls would deliver an experience that would be almost overwhelming.

I had a similar aural experience recently when I went out and bought myself a set of Klipsch 2.1 speakers and an Audigy 2ZS sound card. Up until this point I was running off the cheapo onboard sound from my motherboard and my fairly nice, but aged, Sennheiser HD210 headphones. Suddenly songs that I thought were only average sounded bloody great, and songs I thought were bloody great made me nearly weep with joy. Classical music was particularly improved, as was acoustic stuff, and FPS games sounded like a large scale war had broken out in my lounge. Dance music isn't improved so drastically, but the subwoofer certainly punches basslines up to where they sound like the wildly pulsating heart of some mad pagan god, which is certainly a good thing for that particularly musical genre.

I expect our brains will get used to HDTV in the same way people got used to the step up from black and white to color, or hessian to cotton, or vanilla to rocky road. It is a little weird to be completely enthralled by the sporting equivalent of watching grass grow, but then quite often I... ooooh! Shiny thing!