I found myself in need of new speakers for my PC a while back, and on the advice of PC Gamer I went out and picked up a set of Logitech Z407s. And they’re good! Except for one minor thing that occasionally makes me want to smash them into small pieces with a hammer.
See, the goddamn things will not stop going to sleep. It’s not a defect or a user error, they’re purposely designed that way: After not receiving any audio input for a set amount of time—10 minutes, 30 minutes, I don’t really know but it’s not very long—they go into a power-saving mode, and won’t kick back on until the signal starts flowing again.
That sounds like not a big deal, but the issue is that it takes three or four seconds to kick back on after the signal input starts up again, which means short audio cues—incoming email notifications, DM alarms, a “new comment on Steam” popup, that sort of thing—will go unheard, because they’re over before the speakers are able to come back to life. Even for longer audio clips, the first few seconds are inevitably cut off because the speakers take those few seconds to fire up after the music starts playing. It’s jarring, and irritating.
Some redditors and audio forum users say the Europeans are to blame for this ridiculous state of affairs: That the mandatory standby mode is the result of EU regulations on power management, which makes sense because there’s no way the Americans would ever do something like this. They’re still out there building Canyoneros for suburban moms and wondering why they won’t buy them in Japan.
Anyway, Reddit luckily also has some ideas for how to get around it. The one that eventually worked, after more dicking around than should have been necessary, is a little program called Soundkeeper, which keeps the speakers alive by constantly playing an inaudible audio signal—kind of like a dog whistle, except it’s hopefully not bothering my dogs. (They don’t seem to mind, anyway.)
My gripe stands despite a solution being at hand for the simple reason that I shouldn’t have had to pour so much time and effort into figuring out why my speakers were jerking me around and how to stop it, nor should I need to have something constantly running in the background just to have functional audio cues. Look, I’m all for greening the world, but having my PC audio turned into an endless headache by regulators in Brussels while ultra-rich dickheads ride private jets halfway around the world for brunch just doesn’t sit right. If I want my speakers off, I’ll turn them off myself!