Cable mess
A few weeks ago the center channel on my stereo stopped working -- any time we watched a movie on DVD or cable, the channel that carried most of the dialogue and sound effects was absent.
It was easy enough to work around -- I just had to switch the receiver to stereo mode, which streamed audio to the left and right speakers, specifically, avoiding the center channel all together. But clearly it wasn't a fix.
I suspected it was a problem with the wiring to the speakers, rather than the receiver itself. I had speaker cables back there that I'd been using for a couple of decades, and I had little doubt that something was squirrely. So on Sunday I moved the entertainment center forward a couple of feet and began unraveling the Gordian Knot of cable that had amassed there since we moved into this house in 2001.
What I soon discovered was horrifying -- a congealed lump of patch cables and speakers coated in a thick layer of dust and cat fur. As I'd upgraded and replaced the cables for various components -- moving from composite to SVHS to component to HDMI video, for example, I'd run new cable but hadn't bothered to remove the old stuff, figuring out of site was out of mind.
The net result was, that in addition to pulling probably about 30 feet of "bad" speaker cable, I also yanked another five or ten pounds of unused patch cables.
Now they're sitting next to the living room sofa staring angrily at me, waiting for me to figure out what to do with them.
But for what it's worth, I fixed the problem, and we have 5.1 sound again.