Invasion of Home Media Center Can Be Repelled

I usually avoid reading shelter magazines and The Times’ Home section because they invariably 1) make me aware of things we don’t have or 2) make me feel guilty for not undertaking tasks at home that would make life easier for all of us in our household.

But even though I’ve protected myself carefully against such noxious propaganda, I haven’t been able to completely avoid the latest hot item in the home of the ‘90s: the home media center. This is partly because some of its components have repeatedly been called to my attention by family members who admittedly have an ax to grind.

Because of this propaganda, Americans who were once quite content with a perfectly serviceable family room containing a TV set and modest hi-fi equipment now lust after--for God’s sake--a “Home Theater” with a TV screen the size of the Radio City Music Hall and all manner of interconnected audio and video equipment, with wraparound sound, customized cabinets, often garnished with a computer that will write bad poetry or beat you at chess. It’s enough to make a person long for the days of outdoor toilets and crystal set radios.

Although this is a minority opinion in our family, I certainly don’t consider the electronic equipment we own backward, nor do I regard our lifestyle as slightly advanced from the Dark Ages. We have a quite functional 17-inch TV set that may be a little shaky on some of the UHF stations but certainly brings in those we watch most of the time quite well. I haven’t missed a football game because of faulty TV performance in years.

Our hi-fi is 15 years old and the speakers are something less than state of the art and we can’t play discs and the record player is a sometime thing, but our tapes work quite nicely, and the Angel baseball games come in loud and clear. And I find my IBM Selectric II typewriter functioning quite well in lieu of a computer, even though it has become rather difficult to find someone to repair it.

All sorts of discordant elements are now being thrust into this perfectly comfortable picture. My 13-year-old stepson feels that we are initiating neighborhood blight because we have neither cable TV nor a large screen set; as a result, I have taken to destroying what seem almost daily flyers from cable TV companies before he sees them. He wouldn’t understand the insidious nature of a “free installation.”

My wife also favors a large screen TV and would like to upgrade our hi-fi system. But mostly she leans on me to get a computer, complaining that our lifestyle is almost pre-diluvian without one. I was softening on this until I read the recent Times’ piece on “Technostress,” which convinced me I’d be taking several years off my life if we got a computer. I empathized totally with a northern California psychotherapist when he expressed alarm that the computer has destroyed “a human sense of time,” then added:

“With a typewriter there were time and motion interruptions when you tore up a piece of paper or hit the carriage return--all kinds of separations between you and the machine. Then comes this wonderful technology that alters time. You can work for hours being almost motionless, and basically you are hooked into this machine.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Moving into other facets of a home media center would also require learning a new language. I would be expected to know what “user friendliness” is, and to master such terminology as residential sound, thermal stabilization, burn-in period, pre-amps, solid state electronics and similar Sanskrit.

I would also be expected to give a much lower priority in my life to such important questions as who will lead off for the Angels and what Pat Riley uses on his hair in order to take on a whole range of new concerns. For example, I’d be plunged into the middle of such nonsense as whether stereo equipment will last longer and sound better if you turn it on and off or just leave it running all the time. Or whether or not to paint the rims of compact discs with a green felt pen. Or how much air space to leave around a CD unit. Vital stuff like that.

It gives me a headache writing about it. Besides, we’re not as primitive in the Electronic Age as the foregoing might have suggested. I didn’t mention that we have a VCR. It was given to us several Christmases ago and has turned out to be a mixed blessing. My stepson tends to regard everything he tapes as cast in stone, and we have long since run out of storage space for cartoon shows he hasn’t looked at in years--and won’t again.

I find the VCR useful for taping football games that I have to miss, but I have also discovered that I seldom play them once I know the outcome. Just the other day, I discovered a game between Indianapolis and Green Bay that I think I taped in 1987, but I have no idea why. We have also spent an uncommon amount of time watching video movies that were not very good in theaters and don’t improve any on our TV screen.

Frankly, that tells me all I need to know about whether or not we should capitulate and begin to assemble the components of a “Home Theater.” If there is something absolutely compelling on the cable, we can always go next door to watch. And, meanwhile, we have the satisfaction of knowing we have successfully resisted this newest onslaught of technology that threatens to reduce all of us to electronic eunuchs.