Month: March 2018

Speaker wars

Of course there is no war at all, except that which has been in my head over which speakers to use in our office. I have switched between having a HomePod in the office to having my Harman Kardons in there… and back and forth a number of times.

Most recently, we have one HomePod in the living room, one in the bedroom, and the Harman Kardons in the office. This has been working rather well. Shawna has been using the HomePods in the bedroom and living room and enjoying them.

So today I was doing some “audio tests” and came to another decision (a similar thing happened the last time I did audio tests). For those who don’t know, these audio tests are what we refer to around here as “music appreciation hour”. That happens on occasion when I am left unsupervised for more than an hour or two.

Anyway, my conclusion today was… while the Harmon Kardons might outcrank the HomePod… there are more things to consider.

Perhaps the Harman Kardons are superior. I don’t even really know for sure. I do know that all the feedback I’ve read about the HomePod talks about the excellent sound. Even the people who don’t like it say it sounds great. So I simply might be mistaken in thinking the Harman Kardons sound better. I honestly suspect that is true. I mean how could a $150 set of speakers outperform a $350 one that by all accounts is “great sounding for the price”?

So my decision… is to double-down. I am going to buy a third HomePod to use in the office. We will essentially have one in each room of the house. My OCD likes things being uniform. Three matching speakers. Yay! And Siri in every room to control our HomeKit devices.

So the Harman Kardons are back in the box in the garage where they will likely stay. If they are truly the better-sounding speakers… then oh well. Regardless of which speakers actually sound better, I am fully determined at this point that the HomePod will suffice. It may not be true hi-fi, but it’s “good-enough-fi”.

I did a similar thing when I shed my $2,000 front room stereo in favor of a sound bar. Being content with less is a good thing. And if I can’t crank the HomePod loud enough so the neighbors can hear it, well that’s ok. I probably shouldn’t be doing that anyway right?

to k-cup or not to k-cup, that is the question

For the past two years… at home, I have had my top-rated OXO coffee maker and Shawna has had her Keurig machine. We had been doing strictly Keurig before I bought the OXO. I went with my OXO coffee maker because the end result is better-tasting coffee.

When I first bought the OXO, I decided that I would not buy coffee beans, but would instead buy good-quality ground coffee. Of course grinding fresh from beans produces better coffee. But it requires a grinder on the counter and additional mess. I settle on Peet’s for my ground coffee, and the results were pretty good. Even without grinding my own beans, the OXO made considerably better coffee than the Keurig.

One of the aspects of switching to the OXO from a Keurig machine was an expected reduction in cost. I had thought that k-cups were probably the most expensive way to buy coffee. However this turned out not to be true. And that’s because my OXO calls for a pretty large amount of coffee each time I brew.

For example… one pot of coffee requires nine scoops of coffee (18 tablespoons). And yes, this makes it strong, as it should be. But because of the large amount of coffee that is called for, I don’t really think I was saving any money over using k-cups.

Based on $10 for a pound of decent coffee and .36 ounces per scoop. Ground coffee runs about $0.22 per scoop. It takes 2.5 scoops to make one cup of coffee using ground coffee ($0.55). Whereas a cheap k-cup is more like $0.35. So, cost is not a good reason to be using ground coffee over k-cups.

Even though the OXO clearly makes better coffee, at some point one might just be ok with “good enough”. If we go with good quality k-cups, the result will certainly be closer the level of the OXO. And honestly, a really good k-cup may well produce better coffee than what most people typically drink.

At work, we buy Starbuck’s k-cups because my boss is a shareholder. Those k-cups actually make a pretty decent cup of coffee. At home, we usually get Costco’s Kirkland brand. They are some of the cheapest we’ve found. And they are acceptable.

There is one aspect of using k-cups that I’ve thought would be nice to avoid. And that pertains to our morning coffee routine. We will typically run through 6 k-cups before leaving the house in the morning. But after thinking about that, it’s not as bad as it sounds.

While it is somewhat of a pain… 6 (actual drinkable sized cups) of coffee is more than a full pot in my OXO. So either way you look at it it’d be a fair amount of effort to get our morning coffee taken care of. I don’t know that brewing two pots of coffee using the OXO is any less hassle than running 6 k-cups through the Keurig.

So the Keurig wins.