What is a bit annoying about this method of watching sports though, is constantly going in and out of conversations about the game. At one moment John Madden is telling you that “the only yardstick for success our society has is being a champion,” the next he’s telling you that “the road to Easy Street goes through the sewer.” After going in and out of this for 45 minutes you feel like you’re going to go a bit crazy from the broken conversation.
I’ve pretty much just accepted the fragmented conversations as being the price I pay for having the luxury of being able to watch a game so quickly, but the Consumerist points to a hack that actually allows me to take the announcers out of sports programming.
When you are listening to sports in Dolby 5.1 on a home theater system, you can mute your front speakers and subwoofer and all that you are left with are the ambient sounds from the game. This lets you still hear the bone crushing hits, but you don’t have to hear Madden say stuff like “his helmet flew off…that’s the bad news. The good news is his head wasn’t in it.”
I don’t have any games on my TiVo right now, so I’ll need to wait to try this, but this sounds like a much better way to zap through a game and have it still feel like a continuous process.
Davis Freeberg is a technology enthusiast living in the Bay Area. He enjoys writing about movies, music & and the impact that digital technology is having on traditional media. You can read more of his coverage on technology at www.davisfreeberg.com. Davis owns shares of TiVo stock.