The oxymoron of the week appeared on page 8 in last Sunday’s Target advertising circular, extolling 15 percent off Just Wireless cables.
Lo-fi, another increasingly popular term, makes little sense. An online mental-health service advertises lo-fi music as a way to relax, another offers lo-fi background music. Having spent my entire adult life promoting hi-fi, this sudden shift raises my hackles.
The human brain prefers sound as close as possible to the natural, original live sound. When the ears send the brain lo-fi information, it attempts to reconstruct the “natural” or “original” sound and soon tires of this. Thus, lo-fi music is the opposite of relaxing. That explains one of the reasons why extended phone calls, Zoom chats and other efficient but limited bandwidth communication exhaust listeners. In this wireless era of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, as well as mediocre earbuds and cheap speakers, few people enjoy the pleasure of true high fidelity.
A visual analogy would be if you picked up this newspaper and suddenly saw fuzzier type than in the past. You soon would tire of reading. That’s why Amazon progressed through multiple generations of Kindle e-readers to create a satisfactory reading experience.
Moving from preference to safety, electronics and their peripherals tend to be more dangerous today than in the past.
Although the government never strictly regulated safety beyond the workplace, the existence of those business codes often migrated to home products.
You can thank your insurance company for most safety standards. Insurance companies, in their self-interest, mandated that electric/electronic products meet standards published by Underwriters Laboratories (UL), headquartered in Northbook. I toured UL a few decades ago and came away highly reassured by its incorruptible, rigorous standards.
A similar organization in Canada, originally known as the Canadian Standards Association, now called the CSA Group, extends far beyond the Canadian border.
Once upon a time, you could always find the product you wanted that met the standards of one or both of these organizations. There are numerous smaller, lesser-known safety standards organizations.
Meanwhile, the bodies charged with standardizing electronic progress lack enforcement powers. The groups that promulgate USB, HDMI, Ethernet and similar interconnection standards provide specifications to manufacturers, leaving it up to the manufacturer to get it right. While large companies with recognizable names, such as Samsung, LG, Sony, Apple and others go the extra mile to meet UL and CSA standards, smaller companies fly under the radar.
Batteries and cables stand out as the most dangerous links in electronics. This grows more worrisome as manufacturers increasingly use USB, with even higher electrical current in its newest iterations, to charge devices. Although lithium-ion batteries manufactured by major names rarely suffer meltdowns, batteries built by little-known companies in unrecognizable Chinese factories sometimes ignite.
My LG phone charger carries the CSA logo, but not all of the assorted chargers piling up in my office include such reassurance. Anker, a recent Chinese entry in the field of chargers and cables, advertises all of its products meet UL standards. Cables present a real headache, since once removed from packaging, they lack any visible acknowledgment of safety standards.
China and a few other Asian countries manufacture nearly all of the cables and power supplies currently on the market. Many come from small, garage-style factories with the goal of being the cheapest supplier. While major brands rely on reputation, most of the products you see on Amazon (often with suspicious reviews) and retail stores rely on price and sometimes appearance.
Very low failure rates lull us into a sense of complacency, until it’’s your house that burns down. When shopping for power supplies, cables, surge protectors and extension cords, inspect them for the UL and/or CSA labels.
Sadly, sometimes these appear fraudulently until UL and CSA can track down the culprits. Spend a few cents or even dollars more for safely.
Rich Warren, who lives in the Champaign area, is a longtime reviewer of consumer electronics. Email him at [email protected].
