Wednesday 3 March 2010

GALA

Bless those boffins at Blaupunkt with their Teutonic ingenuity!
    The stereo in the turbocharged roller skate I use to terrorise the road users of Southern England has a feature called GALA, no doubt an acronym for whatever the German is to say "Make it louder when the car speeds up". The way I have it set with the likes of James Naughtie and Eddie Mair reading me the notable events of the day it allows me to hear the latest from the Corridors of Power very nicely as I zip along the dual carriageway between the traffic jams. They're fairly quiet.
    Today was different though. My trip into work was later than normal so to avoid the tediom of mid-morning radio I stuck a CD in. The Tea Party's Tangents. I like this CD so I cranked it up as I meandered through the endless twenty zone and the cloud of buses that swarm round my city like flies to a dungheap. Big mistake. Because when I hit the dual carriageway instead of the normal stop-start rush hour I had an empty road and I nailed it. Ouch. GALA kicked in and my poor little car stereo responded with square waves so jagged they'd break an oscilloscope screen. Amazingly this HF distortion seems to have done no harm to my tweeters. Whether my ears have had the same good fortune remains to be seen.

4 comments:

  1. Your poor doctor. Just when he thinks he's got you under control, you go staggering in with mangled tweeters...

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  2. Since he seems to be taking my advice a lot at the moment, maybe he'd fit me with a piezoelectric prosthesis.

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  3. I so relate to this, Jenny! Mine is set to do the same thing.

    Now, explain dual-carriageway?

    I am assuming that is what we who don't speak the Queen's English would refer to as a freeway (except for those we refer to as a tollway or turnpike) or those we refer to as an Interstate, but then there is the expressway.

    Whatever....I assume your dual carriageway is a divided, multi-lane highway were one can haul ass with the volume turned up whilst looking for law enforcement in the rear view mirror.

    Calie xxx

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  4. Er... four lane divided highway. But one that is legally the same as a normal road, so you can encounter tractors, cyclists, horses etc.

    Our motorways are closer to your freeways, restricted to traffic that can go quickly, minimum speed limit.

    Seeing as how I have family on the Other Side of the Pond, I should be better at resolving these linguistic differences.

    The road in question is the former, but near-as-damnit the latter in character.

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