Boats and Modems and Sound Technology

We are relatively new comers to the boating world, TRB is our first boat and we wanted it to be a real home from home, so we wanted it to have what we have at home apart from the TV. I love modern technology and think we should embrace what we like and leave what we don't. I have worked in Recording Studios, Production Houses and Radio Stations for a long time and I find I get withdrawal symptoms if I don't have a computer to play on for more than a few days. I love the internet, I don't read News Papers, it's yesterday news and tabloids are so obsessed with 3rd rate celebrity wannabe's and sex I just can't even look at the front pages in news agents. So I read and get my news online, and I use various websites to stay in contact with people.

So when we eventually found the boat of our dreams, certain things needed looking into.1st did it have 240v as well as 12v, did it have a good shower and a pump out loo and a good galley to cook in with plenty of space!!! (I know, but it does). Could we actually have our own space? and is there a decent dongle modem that would give us the internet at a fair price when we cruised. We don't want a TV but we did want a sound system to go with our IPods that would sound amazing and not cheap and thin...

We found T Mobile had the best coverage and gave you unlimited internet access (fair usage, not sure what that is, but we never get charged any extra) we do find we spend most time out of the 3g area but that's OK. After a lot of searching we found the perfect sound system for an IPod. Now I am very hard to please with sound systems, I don't care what other people have but I like to have a good sound. The Fatman ITube Carbon was what we settled on with some Tannoy Mercury F1 Custom Speakers and it does sound really amazing. I am able to plug my laptop into it when we watch a movie on my laptop. I need to get some sand filled speaker stands as I am losing some bass through the floor into the bilge.... but that is a small issue.I guess we all have our own idea of what sounds good and what we like, I know this little beast of an amp is truely amazing, the valve amps soften the clinical digital sound of the IPod and make anologue recordings sound truely awsome, I was listening to some Abba tracks and they just blew me away, Led Zeppelin come to life and a live blues album I recorded a couple of years ago is stunning. Movies sound fantastic and have that cinema feel with the bass and middle sounding larger than life.

So we are happy we have all we need really, well apart from enough time onboard to enjoy it all.