Our family (by that I mean me, Chris and Mom) received an interesting birthday present from our children. When they were over Saturday for our little family brisket-eating festivity, they presented us with a rather large, long, slender festively-wrapped box. None of us could even come close to imagining what could be inside. Micah and Cailyn and Jachin were pretty excited about us opening it, though. They even pitched in to help. And with that assistance, it wasn't long before the wrapping was crumbled up on the floor. There before us was … we still didn't know. We saw the picture. We read the packaging. We still weren't sure. What in the world is a sound bar?
It seems that all our children were concerned that we have to turn our TV volume up so loud to hear it. A sound bar connects to the TV and acts as an amplifier to increase the volume option and clean up the sound quality. There. Did I get that right? It felt like I was creating a commercial while I typed that. Anyway, this sound bar had an extra option that looked quite promising. With a touch of a button a little drawer opened up. You could place your iPhone into the drawer and the sound bar amplified the sound of whatever music you had saved on it. The hope for me was that if we downloaded the Netflix ap, that we could use the phone to watch movies on the TV. We had never had Netflix, so I had been looking into it. Man, I sound so tech savvy right now.
Kel and Nathan got the contraption hooked up and turned it on. And we turned the volume up, expecting to be blasted away by the intensity of sound waves that would explode from within. And … there was no difference. No blast that made our hair stand on end. No feeling of being on the front row of a 60's rock concert. To its credit, though, the iPhone drawer worked just fine. And the music from the phone did respond to the call for more and more volume. Alas, however, the hopes of a Netflix connection were dashed when we read the fine print.
The boys were furious. They unhooked the offending machine and packaged it back up. Off we went to find a replacement. Once at the store they began to do more research. Kel had an ap on his phone that allowed him to take a picture of the bar code on an item and it would look up all the pertinent information about the product. Nathan had my phone and was looking up something else. I was browsing the movie aisle in a somewhat more conventional manner. They finally settled on trying a different brand of sound bar, this one without the iPhone drawer. Kel said it had much better internet reviews anyway. And we were off.
They had it hooked up in no time. And then came the moment of truth. And … no different. What? Impossible. Troubleshooting minds went into high gear. How does it work with the DVD player? We tried that. And strangely enough, it worked just fine. Got extremely loud. Even Mom complained about how loud it was. Apparently that was a telltale symptom of an entirely different problem. The sound bar was not at fault after all. The problem was with our cable. So I called the cable company. It took awhile to get through, but I finally hooked up with someone and began the slow process of determining what was wrong. Somewhere in that process Kel heard me say something that flicked don a light bulb in his head. He jumped up from the couch and ran over to the cable box. He made some kind of adjustment that took about two seconds, grabbed the remote, and turned up the sound. And there it was. The sound explosion we were looking for. He told me to hang up on the guy; he fixed it himself. I thanked the cable guy before I hung up. I'm sure he was shaking his head at the knucklehead who called for nothing.
The problem was a simple one. The sound level was being restricted at the cable box. All Kel did was turn it up to the maximum. Hmm. It seems we didn't need a sound bar after all. The boys told us we could keep it or take it back and get something else. Maybe a Wii or Xbox or something we could use to subscribe to Netflix. That's just what we needed for our birthday … more decisions.
Proverbs 23:24 says, "The father of a righteous man has great joy; he who has a wise son delights in him."
Father, thank you for giving us sons we can be proud of. Amen.
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