The Official Wirewize Blog

Dear Santa,

We’ve been very good this year! We helped thousands of people connect their confusing A/V systems, which should get us a place in heaven, if not a few extra parcels from your magic sack.  And we know there have been a lot of naughty kids this year too, so we’re sure there’s plenty of room in your sleigh for the stuff we want.  Let’s not waste time, we know you have a lot of stops to make.

1) We want a Blu-Ray player! But we want one that loads a disc and starts to play before New Years kicks in. Really, what’s up with these machines? We feel like we’re booting Windows 3.1 from a floppy drive every time we want to watch a movie.  Everything else in high tech gets faster, how come disc players get slower?

2) We also want a handshake. No not with you, just between our cable box, receiver and TV.  We’ve connected them with HDMI and we keep getting funny error messages. We’re all for copy protection, so why does everyone assume we’re thieves?.  We pay for our programming and spent good money on these cool new components.  We prefer peace on earth but will settle for it in our living room.

3) We want surround sound from all our sources!  Why is it that every time we consider a home theater in a box sound system there’s only one or two inputs for audio from our other components?  Are we supposed to chuck our game console  and VCR or something? And please don’t tell us get a receiver.  The reason why we we’re considering an HTIB is because our old receiver was so complicated.

4) That being said, how about a receiver that’s easy to use?  Apple’s iPod has destroyed its competition, not because it sounds better or because it’s cheaper, but because it’s easier and more fun to use.  When you show us an AV receiver that’s fun to use we’ll be sure to leave out extra cookies and milk.

5) We want a good TV! Spend a little time and pick out something decent for us, will ya? Some of these cheap LCD sets we’re seeing are so bad we flash back to the days of QuickTime 1.0.  We know everything can look good in HD.  But we’ve got dozens of DVDs and VHS cassettes too, not to mention our non-HD TV shows.  The two-dollar scalers built into some of these sets aren’t cutting it.  A new TV should give us a better picture not worse, wouldn’t you agree?

6) We want a video game where nobody gets shot or dismembered, nobody runs over a pedestrian, and nobody gets punched or kicked as soon as they show up on screen.  Please don’t tell us to get Rock Band.  We’ve already got it and if we wanted bad karaoke, there’s a Korean neighborhood down the block.

7) We want a remote control that Mom, Dad, Sis and little Boo Boo can work too.  We know they’re out there.  But we don’t think a good remote control should cost more than a receiver and ten times as much as a DVD player.  That’s why we still struggle with our six remotes on the coffee table.  Help us Santa, we’re seeing little buttons in our sleep!

We’d like satellite radio for Christmas, but we’re not sure which one to get, Sirius or XM.  Oh wait, they’re the same thing now (as if they were different before), so we’ll take either one.  On second thought never mind. We think people should pay us to listen to Howard Stern, not the other way around.

9) We want bass!  Bass that’s able to play more than the same one-note thud that just about every cheap subwoofer foists on us.  We know that eliminates almost every HTIB on the market.  But we can’t help it, we remember when music used to sound like music and not a cell phone.

Normally we’d have a 10th request for you Santa, but we know that this has been a troubled year for everyone.  So we’re willing to take a 10 percent cutback in our holiday requests and hope that others are willing to do the same.

Hope you have a nice holiday, and give our regards to the folks making all our electronic gadgets in your workshops!

Best,
The Wirewize Team