The digiZoid ZO

digiZoid ZO 2.3

After a month of wait­ing for them to get more sup­ply, I fi­nally re­ceived my di­gi­Zoid ZO 2.3. The box calls it a "per­sonal sub­woofer" which sounds en­tirely ridicu­lous, but think­ing about it I can't seem to come up with any bet­ter tagline my­self.

The ZO is a $100 head­phone amp, which di­gi­Zoid says is ca­pa­ble of dri­ving cans up to a fairly de­mand­ing 300Ω. Its main claim to fame, how­ever, is a unique bass-boost­ing tech­nol­ogy they call SmartVek­tor. Not your dad's one-note bass-boost­ing EQ, SmartVek­tor adds an ad­dic­tive warmth and pre­serves tex­ture while bring­ing even the slight­est hint of bass into the fore­ground.

The device

Op­er­at­ing the ZO is pretty sim­ple, hav­ing a large LED bar on the front, a multi-func­tion rocker on one side, and a Mini USB port on the other side for charg­ing. The case has a nice soft rub­ber­ized feel, though it looks a bit cheaply built.

With 32 con­tour lev­els, the ZO al­lows you to fine-tune the bass boost for your cans, music, and tastes. Con­trolled by the rocker, the front LED fades from green to red as the level in­creases. The low­est con­tour is nearly trans­par­ent, just barely warm­ing and rolling off around 30Hz. A few lev­els up at a yel­low-green color and the boost be­comes un­de­ni­able and with­out any rolloff. At red the boost has such an in­ten­sity that even the biggest bass-heads might find it too strong.

While di­gi­Zoid did put some ef­fort into mak­ing the con­tour lev­els per­cep­tu­ally lin­ear in the ZO 2, it's still not quite there. The ma­jor­ity of the boost­ing still hap­pens in the first half of lev­els, with the dif­fer­ence be­tween or­ange and red being very small.

Also pre­sent are low- and high-gain modes, con­fig­urable by press­ing the side but­ton once the ZO is turned on. Some have men­tioned they can hear a dif­fer­ence (other than vol­ume) be­tween low- and high- gain modes, but I haven't been able to de­tect any.

In­tended for usage with line-out, the low-gain mode al­lows you to at­ten­u­ate the vol­ume with a 32-level dig­i­tal vol­ume con­trol. Again, the vol­ume con­trol doesn't seem to be per­cep­tu­ally lin­ear ei­ther—at about 8 steps in it's al­ready quite high, and will slowly get about 2x louder in the re­main­ing 24 steps. The LED in­di­ca­tor also re­flects this, not ap­ply­ing the ~2.2 gamma re­quired to lin­earize it for human vi­sion.

Once the vol­ume is as high as it can go, the LED will turn pur­ple. Hold­ing down the rocker for sev­eral more sec­onds will turn the LED pink, ac­ti­vat­ing high-gain mode. In­tended for use with head­phone-out, high-gain mode lacks any vol­ume con­trol but will give a very sig­nif­i­cant boost to vol­ume.

The ZO's max­i­mum input is 250 mVrms in high-gain mode and 1 Vrms in low-gain mode, mean­ing it is fairly easy to over­load it with a stan­dard 2 Vrms line-out such as the one on my sound card. di­gi­Zoid rec­om­mends start­ing with your source vol­ume at 25% and in­creas­ing the ZO and then the source's vol­ume until it's at ac­cept­able lev­els.

The box con­tains two 3.5mm male to male ca­bles, one six inch and one three foot. They are per­haps the cheap­est look­ing ca­bles I've ever seen, but I sus­pect any­one who cares will al­ready have some badass $200 cryo-treated cable of their own. To me, the six inch one is great for portable use.

One of the first is­sues I no­ticed while using the ZO is that one of the chan­nels will some­times (very rarely) cut out until you fid­dle around with the cable. This ap­pears to be an issue with the de­vice it­self, from the jack being slightly re­cessed and thus hav­ing a poor con­tact area with some ca­bles. The ca­bles in­cluded with the ZO have a small ring that fits the re­cessed area per­fectly, and thus far have not ex­hib­ited the prob­lem.

This is the fourth re­vi­sion of the ZO. After being ig­nored for some time, the first began get­ting a lot of no­tice by audio fo­rums like Head-Fi, which di­gi­Zoid was quick to join. After tak­ing a lot of input from the com­mu­nity the ZO 2 was un­leashed with a by­pass mode, re­moved loud pops when you turned it on, and per­cep­tu­ally lin­ear con­tour lev­els to allow much more fine-grained tun­ing at lower lev­els. The ZO 2.2 cor­rected hiss­ing prob­lems with IEMs and vol­ume prob­lems with line-out. The most re­cent re­vi­sion, the 2.3, re­moved by­pass func­tion­al­ity and added sep­a­rate low- and high-gain modes to fur­ther cor­rect prob­lems with line-out.

In­cred­i­bly upon dis­cov­er­ing is­sues with the pre­vi­ous re­vi­sions, di­gi­Zoid of­fered to re­place vir­tu­ally every ZO 2 with a 2.2, and then again every 2.2 with a 2.3. I've never seen this kind of above-and-be­yond de­vo­tion to prod­uct qual­ity and cus­tomer sat­is­fac­tion be­fore, es­pe­cially with a de­vice they're charg­ing $100 for. This was ac­tu­ally one of the big­ger fac­tors that con­vinced me to take the plunge and get a ZO.

For how big of a punch it packs, the ZO is sur­pris­ingly tiny and portable. Here it is com­pared to—from left to right—the Pen­guinAmp Royal, Cowon D2, and in case you've never seen ei­ther of those, a credit card.

PenguinAmp Royal, Cowon D2, credit card, and ZO size comparison

As far as test­ing goes, I've got sev­eral sides of the spec­trum cov­ered: the Bey­er­dy­namic DT-770 Pro 80Ω, Su­per­lux HD-668b, AKG K81 DJ, Etymōtic ER-6i IEMs, and Log­itech Z-5300 speak­ers. For my sources I'm using a Cowon D2 (with D2+ firmware) for high gain mode and the line-out on an Asus Xonar D2 for low gain mode. I've been able to give it a good run lis­ten­ing to a va­ri­ety of film scores, techno, and rock.

SmartVektor

Sim­i­lar to BBE's Mach 3 Bass, SmartVek­tor is more than a sim­ple low-freq EQ. De­signed to process a purely ana­log sig­nal, SmartVek­tor will eas­ily in­te­grate with pretty much any dumb audio sys­tem. For now it ex­ists solely in the ZO, but di­gi­Zoid hopes to bring the tech­nol­ogy into other less niche sys­tems much like BBE has done.

De­scribed in US patent ap­pli­ca­tion 20090290728, "DY­NAMIC CON­TOURED-SOUND/SUB­WOOFER-SYN­THE­SIS AUDIO SYS­TEM", SmartVek­tor at­tempts to com­pen­sate for both the human au­di­tory sys­tem and the fre­quency re­sponse typ­i­cal in speak­ers. Though the ZO cur­rently only boosts bass, SmartVek­tor is also ca­pa­ble of op­er­at­ing on tre­ble.

The sound of SmartVek­tor is a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to de­scribe. It seems to pull out de­tail that nor­mally re­mains hid­den deep in the bass, bring­ing it into the fore­ground for a rich, warm, tex­tured ex­pe­ri­ence that you'd nor­mally only get with pow­er­ful speak­ers cranked to 11 and a ded­i­cated sub­woofer.

On ini­tial use it was easy to set the con­tour level to yel­low-or­ange and for­get the ZO was even con­nected. After re­al­iz­ing this, I'd con­stantly turn it down to green to see if it was ac­tu­ally doing any­thing. Like night and day, turned down the music just de­flates and be­comes life­less.

More often than not it sim­ply makes music sound bet­ter and most im­por­tantly, nat­ural. Using it doesn't feel dirty or dis­re­spect­ful to all the hard work artists put into the cre­ation of the music.

RMAA

This is the first time I've used RMAA, but I be­lieve I did every­thing right. (Well, as right as it can be.)

All test­ing was done from my Xonar D2's line-out into the line-in with a 75Ω load at 24-bit and 48kHz. Un­for­tu­nately RMAA con­tin­ued to ei­ther crash or not pick up any sig­nal every sin­gle time I plugged in my Cowon D2 to test BBE's Mach 3 Bass. If any­one knows what would cause that, please let me know!

Frequency response at low contours

Here you can see the ZO's ini­tial con­tour lev­els. A green level (con­tour 1 on the graph) is very nearly trans­par­ent, with a rolloff be­gin­ning at around 90Hz and pass­ing below 0dB at around 40Hz. At yel­low-green (con­tour 4) the boost is a very au­di­ble 4dB with a rolloff be­gin­ning at around 50Hz. With rolloffs still well within the au­di­ble range, it's pos­si­ble that some will be able to no­tice it de­pend­ing on how low their setup can re­pro­duce.

Frequency response at high contours

At a yel­low con­tour (8 on the graph) the boost reaches around 6dB with a rolloff be­gin­ning around 40Hz. At this point the rolloff should be nearly in­audi­ble. Per­haps co­in­ci­den­tally, this is the level I pre­ferred most of my music at. At or­ange (con­tour 16), it hits around a 9dB boost. At it's high­est con­tour (red), the boost reaches just around 13dB.

Low- and high-gain comparison

Some have men­tioned hear­ing a dif­fer­ence be­tween low- and high-gain modes. My tests here show them to be iden­ti­cal, so I'd be cu­ri­ous to know what se­tups peo­ple are using that let them hear a dif­fer­ence.

Comparison with the PenguinAmp Royal

And fi­nally we have a com­par­i­son be­tween the Pen­guinAmp Royal's high­est bass boost and the ZO's high­est con­tour. The Pen­guinAmp peaks at 14dB—just a smidge above the ZO—and has no au­di­ble rolloff.

De­spite boost­ing by sim­i­lar lev­els on paper, the ZO ac­tu­ally sounds much louder due to its peak being about 15Hz higher. This cre­ates a ~3dB gap at fre­quen­cies which are both eas­ier to hear and eas­ier to re­pro­duce. The ZO sounds far more de­tailed as well, which con­tributes sig­nif­i­cantly more than sim­ple in­ten­sity.

Beyerdynamic DT-770 Pro 80Ω

Beyerdynamic DT-770 Pro 80Ω

The Bey­er­dy­namic DT-770 Pro 80Ω are bass-heavy cans. Prop­erly paired with an amp the bass be­comes very tight and tex­tured, with a pref­er­ence to­ward deep bass keep­ing them punchy with­out mud­dy­ing up any­thing.

The ZO has no prob­lem dri­ving these 80Ω/96dB­SPL cans, with no noise to speak of. Kept be­tween green and yel­low, this com­bi­na­tion pro­vides mind-numb­ing bass that I'm com­fort­able lis­ten­ing to for hours. Bring it up to­wards or­ange and bass will be­come far too heavy, and with some songs even causes dis­tor­tion as the dri­vers begin to run out of ex­cur­sion.

I wasn't sure how the ZO would sound with al­ready bass-heavy head­phones, but it turned out to be pretty damn good. Kept to low con­tours, the ZO adds a lot of tex­ture and warmth with­out di­min­ish­ing other qual­i­ties.

Superlux HD-668b

Superlux HD-668b

Mon­i­tors in every sense of the word, the Su­per­lux HD-668b are very an­a­lyt­i­cal, with im­pres­sively crys­tal-clear mids and highs and a very muted bass re­sponse.

These have the least amount of bass I've heard from any full-sized head­phones, so to me they were the real test for the ZO's magic. Thus far, I've not heard a sin­gle bass boost which could make these cans thump. Again the ZO had no prob­lem dri­ving these 56Ω/98dB­SPL cans, with no au­di­ble noise. Every­thing from yel­low all the way up to red works won­der­fully with­out any dis­tor­tion.

While not nearly as in­tense as the DT-770s, the ZO does give these a re­spectable amount of tight, de­tailed bass. These re­ally are ex­cel­lent sound­ing head­phones for the price, and adding the ZO rounds them out very nicely.

AKG K81 DJ

AKG K81 DJ

The AKG K81 DJ are bass-heavy and a tiny bit warm, with slightly rolled off highs.

The ZO drove these sen­si­tive 32Ω/100dB­SPL cans well, again with­out any au­di­ble noise. A green-yel­low con­tour level is the sweet spot, with bass be­com­ing far too strong around or­ange. For those want­ing to clean some wax out of their ears, the ZO works all the way to red with­out any dis­tor­tion, even at high vol­umes.

The K81 DJs aleady have a lot of bass to offer, but the ZO helps tighten it up and adds a lot of de­tail. If you can han­dle the head­band's squeeze of death, the ZO and the K81 DJ will make a very good pair when porta­bil­ity is re­quired.

Etymōtic ER-6i

Etymōtic ER-6i

The Etymōtic ER-6i are cold and an­a­lyt­i­cal, with fan­tas­tic mids and highs. Typ­i­cal of af­ford­able bal­anced ar­ma­ture IEMs and prob­a­bly moreso than most, there is no bass to speak of.

At 16Ω/110dB­SPL, these are very sen­si­tive and will usu­ally pick up any flaws in what they're plugged in to. Un­for­tu­nately, there is a lot to pick up with the ZO. There's an au­di­ble hiss—in­de­pen­dent of vol­ume, gain mode, and con­tour level—which is very not­i­ca­ble in quiet parts. In com­par­i­son, it has around 3x the hiss of my Asus Xonar D2, and 2x the hiss of my Cowon D2. An­other noise, less of an issue, is an only slightly au­di­ble click every time the vol­ume is ad­justed in low-gain mode.

Using a re­sis­tor adapter does alter the sound slightly, but is well worth it as it will quiet all the hiss. A 32Ω adapter would prob­a­bly be plenty, but I've only got a 75Ω one and the ZO has plenty of power to spare.

Even mov­ing all the way up to red, the ZO pro­vides next to no bass—I sus­pect these IEMs just aren't phys­i­cally ca­pa­ble of it. Don't let that dis­cour­age you though, be­cause it does sig­nif­i­cantly im­prove the ex­pe­ri­ence by adding a huge amount of warmth. If your music doesn't have a lot of dy­namic range or if you have a re­sis­tor adapter, I can def­i­nitely rec­om­mend the ZO for thaw­ing out these im­pos­si­bly cold IEMs.

Logitech Z-5300

Logitech Z-5300

The Log­itech Z-5300 are def­i­nitely not au­dio­phile-grade speak­ers. De­signed for mid-range 5.1 gam­ing, they're warm, very heavy on the bass, and not super ac­cu­rate.

I've had them for nearly 10 years and they've done the job well enough both for the paint-chip­ping thud of an AWP going off in Counter-Strike and fol­low­ing my evo­lu­tion through the overly-loud mus­ings of a teenager's pop­u­lar rap and rock, a soft­ware pro­gram­mer's thump­ing techno, and fi­nally into more re­fined film scores and indie rock.

Given SmartVek­tor's claim of cor­rect­ing for the fre­quency re­sponse in speak­ers, I wasn't sure what to ex­pect when paired with a 6.5" 100W (RMS) sub. Un­like head­phones, I didn't no­tice much more tex­ture in the bass—it ap­pears the sub was al­ready doing that plenty well on its own. It did, how­ever, be­come much deeper and cer­tainly more pow­er­ful. The satel­lites did be­come warmer and bassier, but only slightly.

The sweet spot to me was a con­tour level of yel­low, though the ZO was able to func­tion fine from green all the way to an in­toller­a­ble red with no au­di­ble dis­tor­tion or noise. The sys­tem al­ready had plenty of bass for me so I don't think I'll be pair­ing the ZO with it in the fu­ture.

Music

Over­all the ZO seems to work great with pretty much any pop­u­lar music. The de­vice does un­for­tu­nately shrink the sound­stage, so music with a lot of bassy in­stru­ments may be­come a bit muddy if used at a high con­tour level.

Film scores

Syn­the­sized '80s scores tend to sound re­ally fun. Jerry Gold­smith's Grem­lins and Bear Mc­Creary's '80s-in­spired Zom-B-Movie are awe­some. Sim­ple ac­tion music and eth­nic in­stru­ments also fair well—Greg Ed­mon­son's Un­charted 3 and Harry Greg­son-Williams' Prince of Per­sia: The Sands of Time both sound in­cred­i­ble.

Com­plex or­ches­tral arrange­ments with a lot of in­tru­ments are the ZO's down­fall, eas­ily be­com­ing muddy and los­ing sub­tle in­stru­ments while over-em­pha­siz­ing oth­ers. This seems to be very de­pen­dent on the cans, as my HD-668bs sounded far bet­ter than my DT770s here.

Rock

The ZO shines with rock. Korn's dub­step-in­fused The Path of To­tal­ity, Shiny Toy Guns' Sea­son of Poi­son, Nine Inch Nails' The Slip, and The Whigs' Mis­sion Con­trol all sounded wicked.

On the flip side, I no­ticed some bass gui­tars tend to be­come over-em­pha­sized. Un­like drums which stay punchy, the bass gui­tar quickly re­sults in muddy, over­bear­ing bass that risks swal­low­ing vo­cals and other gui­tars. Again, this is very de­pen­dent on the head­phones.

Techno

Techno works great, flat out. This is what the ZO was made for. Lis­ten­ing to Hadouken!'s For the Masses, Bass­nec­tar's Di­ver­gent Spec­trum, and all the DJs on afterhours.​fm, the ZO is the next best thing to being there live.

'nuff said.

The bottom line

The ZO is an amaz­ing, ad­dic­tive de­vice. The bass boost is hands down the best I've heard from any soft­ware or hard­ware-based so­lu­tion, bet­ter than BBE's Mach 3 Bass and eas­ily beat­ing out the Pen­guinAmp Royal. As far as an amp goes, I'd say the qual­ity is less than the Pen­guinAmp Royal but still far bet­ter than run­ning with no amp at all.

Pros
Cons
Wishlist

Was it worth the $100? Ab­solutely. Very highly rec­om­mended!

Absolute Zero gets a blog

I fi­nally con­vinced Soul that Ab­solute Zero needs a web­site, and we've been spend­ing the past cou­ple days fill­ing it with con­tent. If you've been in­ter­ested at all in my past posts on the Left 4 Dead cam­paign, the web­site will have a lot more stuff in­clud­ing in­side in­for­ma­tion, con­cept art, screen­shots, and a new HD video we shot to show the progress of the map. I should be writ­ing there for the cam­paign pretty reg­u­larly, so check it out!

New Years, live-ish with Green Day

Green Day

I've gone to far too many events this past week. If I don't put an end to this quick, I may be­come "nor­mal"…

I took it to the next level tonight, though, by trav­el­ing into the fu­ture to see Green Day's New Years Eve con­cert at LA Live. Well, sort-of. NBC was film­ing the con­cert with Car­son Daly as the host. They gave us all new years hats and had us all count down from 30 as if the ball was drop­ping on New Years Eve. Ap­par­ently they'll air this then. TV Magic!

After the count down, Green Day came on with a "Happy fuck­ing New Year!" and rocked the stage for the rest of the night. Their per­for­mance was com­plete with ex­plo­sions, fire­works, and a good mix be­tween their newer stuff and the older stuff I was lis­ten­ing to on tape when I was eight years old (holy crap) in el­e­men­tary school. Bet­ter yet, a friend I hadn't seen in ages was down to visit fam­ily for the week, so I met her and her broth­ers there and caught up. Good times!

The Whigs come to LA

The Whigs

Just saw The Whigs live at the Trou­ba­dour—what a kick-ass show! The owner of my pizza place turned me on to these guys a year or so ago and I've been a big fan ever since.

Open­ing for them was The Dead Trees and The Fea­tures. I had heard of nei­ther, but they both put on great sets of their own—I bought their CDs right after the show. :)

If you've never heard The Whigs be­fore, they are giv­ing out two songs from their up­com­ing CD "In The Dark" for free from their web­site.

Come play Absolute Zero

Over the past cou­ple months, a friend of mine has been cre­at­ing a fun Left 4 Dead cam­paign called Ab­solute Zero. The first map is done, and the sec­ond map is com­ing along nicely. We cre­ated some nice HD videos to show it off to every­body:

If you want to playtest map 1 with us, down­load the beta and come join the cam­paign's Steam group.

Come meet up at The Underground

Live around LA or here for the PDC? Like last year, Mi­crosoft is host­ing a party. This year it's at the Conga Room at LA Live. It's free, so if you're in the area make sure you RSVP and come grab some drinks!

The Plan is in effect

Absolute Zero

I've re­cently started re-watch­ing the en­tire Bat­tlestar Galac­tica se­ries from the be­gin­ning, and I'm find­ing it sur­pris­ingly awe­some con­sid­er­ing I al­ready know how it plays out. A big part of what made BSG great is all the lit­tle in­ter­ac­tions be­tween the char­ac­ters, and these are first things you for­get. So, I've still got a lot to enjoy.

I watched The Plan on Blu-ray today. In it, you fol­low two Cav­ils while they plot and ex­e­cute their plan to de­stroy hu­man­ity. It takes a lot of the mem­o­rable mo­ments of sus­pense from the minis­eries and sea­son one—when you knew some­thing was hap­pen­ing but weren't given all the de­tails, or when you sus­pected some­one of being a Cylon, etc.—and ex­pands them to show you what was re­ally hap­pen­ing using a lot of old ma­te­r­ial is used to seam­lessly tran­si­tion into the Cy­lons' point of view.

I'm re­ally sad to say that the only part I liked about The Plan was Dean Stock­well's frakkin' amaz­ing act­ing and Bear's equally great score. The Plan has a lot of prob­lems. First and fore­most is that it's lit­er­ally a recap of the minis­eries and sea­son one -- there's no new story. If I had to guess, 25 to 50% of the scenes were ac­tu­ally old aired footage. An­other prob­lem is that all those great mo­ments lost their sus­pense by being ex­panded. And the last major prob­lem is that the new ma­te­r­ial fo­cuses on the "bad" Cy­lons. This seems like a re­ally great idea at first, but what I quickly re­al­ized is that the TV show never made us con­nect with them and as a re­sult I had trou­ble car­ing at all about their scenes. Most of the time I was just hop­ing my fa­vorite human char­ac­ters or "good" Cy­lons would get on screen and give me all those lit­tle in­ter­ac­tions I talked about.

Purely as a BSG geek, there was some in­ter­est­ing new in­for­ma­tion to learn. But bot­tom line? I was bored. I wouldn't rec­om­mend this to any­one. I'm re­ally sorry to say it too, be­cause I and so many oth­ers were look­ing for­ward to it.

More Ice Caverns updates

Absolute Zero

A new pair of videos is out, this time show­cas­ing an an­cient tomb in Soul's Ab­solute Zero cam­paign for Left 4 Dead. The area's de­sign draws from a lot of an­cient civ­i­liza­tions to cre­ate a unique yet fa­mil­iar look that makes you imag­ine what it was like in its orig­i­nal state. Even though it's not done yet, the ar­chi­tec­ture still looks pretty awe­some!

Dur­ing the mak­ing of the video we couldn't stop play­ing around as hunters. The area quickly re­minded me of some of the freestyle trick maps for Quake where there is no par­tic­u­lar goal, only at lot of stuff to play with. We began mak­ing tricks more and more com­plex and were hav­ing so much fun that I recorded a few of them for the start of the video. De­spite con­sist­ing of a mere three pounces, the mid­dle jump was by far the hard­est to pull off, re­quir­ing snap aim, tim­ing, and air con­trol all within a quick few sec­onds.

Valve's orig­i­nal idea for Left 4 Dead was to make it a game of who sur­vived the longest, not who sur­vived. They didn't go through with that idea, but it's one that we've al­ways liked. One of the first de­ci­sions Soul made when cre­at­ing this cam­paign is that it would be much harder than Valve's cam­paigns. Even ex­pe­ri­enced teams shouldn't ex­pect to sur­vive with­out some re­ally ex­cel­lent strat­egy and team­work. I know a lot of play­ers seem to think that fun means win­ning and win­ning means never dying and fin­ish­ing with a score of 8000 to 300, so this map might not ap­peal to all crowds. For peo­ple who enjoy a real chal­lenge, I think this cam­paign will have a lot to offer.

If any map­pers, mod­el­ers, or tex­ture artists are out there, Soul could use your help! He's cho­sen such a dif­fer­ent art de­sign that most of Left 4 Dead's pre-made stuff isn't going to work.

The first level of the map can cur­rently be down­loaded from L4Dmaps. This sec­ond level is about 80% of the way to­ward a basic beta ver­sion.

Dollhouse might get cancelled?

Amy Acker in Dollhouse

Doll­house fin­ished its first sea­son with pretty poor rat­ings, with Fox de­cid­ing the only rea­son to keep it on air is DVD sales of Joss Whe­don's shows are al­ways high. Fox did de­cide to trim some fat, though, choos­ing to can­cel the more ex­pen­sive Ter­mi­na­tor: The Sarah Con­nor Chron­i­cles in­stead. The sec­ond sea­son pre­miered a few weeks ago to even worse rat­ings, at the bot­tom of the charts with the sec­ond episode even being beat by re­runs.

Ap­par­ently there is now real talk of can­celling Doll­house mid-sea­son. I can't say I'm sur­prised. Peo­ple have blamed the Fri­day night death slot, while oth­ers blame los­ing Ter­mi­na­tor: TSCC as a lead in.

My­self, I just don't think it's a good show. I'm a huge fan of Joss' other shows— Buffy, Angel, and Fire­fly were all frakkin' fan­tas­tic, along with all of the comics. Doll­house just doesn't cut it, though. I re­ally can see the po­ten­tial for an in­ter­est­ing story, but it has thus far been tak­ing the ir­ri­tat­ing Lost ap­proach of only spend­ing 5 min­utes of every episode to ad­vance the over­all story. This might work in Lost, but with Doll­house in­tro­duc­ing new char­ac­ters (though played by the same peo­ple) every week it be­comes very hard to in­vest in.

Most fans agree that the DVD-only bud­get episode "Epi­taph One" is the best in the whole last sea­son, and that doesn't do much of any help if it was only on DVD. I had hope that sea­son 2 would quickly ad­vance the sto­ry­line into some­thing more like "Epi­taph One", but so far we've just had more wasted mon­ster-of-the-week time. Ter­mi­na­tor: TSCC was an in­cred­i­ble show, I think much bet­ter than Doll­house, and it re­ally sad­dens me to know it died for this. Un­for­tu­nately due to the way TV is filmed so far ahead of when it airs, there's not much quick ad­just­ing that can be done to save it ei­ther.

Should Doll­house be saved? I think Joss would even­tu­ally be able to pick up the pieces to make it in­ter­est­ing, but I can't help won­der if it would be best to just cut it now and let him move on to some­thing new. Prefer­ably with more Amy Acker hint hint.

Valve's Double Entendre

Crash Course poster

Today's the big launch day of Valve's much an­tic­i­pated Left 4 Dead up­date in­clud­ing the two-level cam­paign Crash Course… sigh.

I re­ally won­der if Valve has a QA de­part­ment. It seems to break in one of three ways—ei­ther it silently launches a local server (de­spite lobby set­tings), puts the server you con­nect to into a live­lock re­quir­ing a man­ual restart, or makes each player con­nect to their own local IP. It's not an iso­lated prob­lem, with their fo­rums being full of com­plaints. It makes me yearn for the days when patches weren't forced down your throat by some crap like Steam.

It ac­tu­ally works in sin­gle-player, so I tried the new cam­paign there. It uses a Death Toll theme, look­ing a lot like the level where you start in the church. In what seems to be a stor­age area, you jump from room to room or walk down the al­leys con­nect­ing the rooms. Each level is un­in­ven­tive, look­ing like one big area in­stead of smaller ones that vary to keep it fresh. Every room and alley looks the same, just a ran­dom scat­ter­ing of boxes and cars.

Re­ally, there's not much to left say about Crash Course. Given how short it is and how un­fin­ished and mo­not­o­nous it looks, I can't imag­ine my­self play­ing it much in ver­sus. Much rather be play­ing Ab­solute Zero or Death Aboard. If ver­sus ac­tu­ally worked, that is.