How To Plan A Celebration of Life - Start HERE!

 

When you know you want a beautiful and fitting tribute but have no idea where to begin how to  start or how even to plan one of these events this video is for you we're going to go through the five  building blocks and the five foundation pieces that every memorial has in order to help you get  started and feel confident beginning your planning journey my name is Christina from new narrative an  event planning company that mixes event planning with technology solutions to help families stay  connected and gather to commemorate lives without lots of the stress so before we get into the video  a reminder to please subscribe to our channel and like and do all that good stuff when it comes  to YouTube leave a comment below you can download our family planning guide and I'd love to hear  your feedback on this video so let's get to it the first component is the feel and tone of the event  so before you start any detail planning you'll want.

To think about the feel and the tone of your  event and it's okay if you just have some vague ideas think about how you want your guests to feel  when they log out or when they leave your venue in order to get started on thinking about the  feel and tone of the event i highly recommend that you journal and it can just be a piece of paper  write what you like write what you don't like you'll want to bring those in and consider those  as you make the decisions coming up the second big component big building block is your location and  this one is a very interesting one since services and ceremonies have looked a lot different since  the beginning of the copen 19 pandemic in 2020 so when you think about your memorial event i want  you to consider where you'll be convening and take some time if you are convening in person take some  time to select a venue that reflects your needs and wants as a family so this can be a variety.

Of needs and wants you'll want to go back to this location over and over for the coming years it can  be a location that you never want to go back to it can be a location that's close to your home it can  be a location that holds a lot of meaning to your family so for instance if it's a park close by to  where your mother lived or if it's a hotel ballroom that your grandparents would always  rent out for family reunions or if it was a special location where you want to intentionally  travel there to honor and celebrate the life of your loved one you can also host these events  totally virtually which means that anybody can log in through a zoom meeting and just  be there and be all together and you can see each other through a computer screen now this makes it  easier for guests to attend and it is a bit more accessible and there's pros and cons to holding an  event virtually or in person but the nice thing about virtual is that you can actually have your.

Family can have your families can have little watch parties so if you are connecting families  say from connecticut and vancouver bc and florida and the united kingdom every little location can  be a separate small gathering and you can all be together um in more of a hybrid style so you can  see and hear each other on the screen and with a technical director director in the background they  can help you with all of the technical details and to make sure that everyone is coming through  correctly everyone is muted and all of your guests simultaneously are hearing the slideshow.

Songs seeing the pictures and these individual tributes the third aspect to consider and the  third building block is your speakers so consider who who the important people in your life  are who would you like to ask to speak and say a few words that represent the life and legacy  of the person that we're honoring one thing i loved about a recent memorial that i worked on  is that the family was very intentional in picking different people to represent different facets of  our honoree's life so we were able to hear about her as an activist her as a grandmother her as a  friend her as a colleague her as a mother her as just a choir member and it was so beautiful.

Because everybody's the goal of the family was for you as an attendee to come and learn something  new about this person about our honorees something you didn't know before and with different speakers  representing different facets of somebody's life then you really have that full sick 360 degree recollection of who they were and their life and their legacy and it can be a beautiful  time for remembrance and sharing stories and memories and who knows more might come up in  the chat and more might come out during the open share we're going to cover this  in a different video but there are absolutely more ways to incorporate speakers than just  live on screen or live in person so for example having them pre-recorded is a beautiful option.

Because with pre-recorded you can film anywhere anytime on your own terms you can edit you can  infuse pictures special songs and you can really create your own custom tribute to this person to  be shown on screen at the time of your speech it can be a beautiful a beautiful remembrance number four so the next one on the list after speakers is thinking about your attendees and  your invitations so this may change depending on if you're hosting a virtual event or an  in-person event and the reason i say that is because the number of people may may differ  and if you're hosting an in-person event obviously there are some limitations on the amount of people  that you can have in a specific venue cove it aside some venues only have room for say 50 or  400 or for 200 and if you have a bigger group then having a virtual component is definitely  something to consider now for virtual events again we use zoom so we are only limited by the.

Thousand-person capacity of zoom so you can send these invitations far and wide and another beautiful thing about hosting a hybrid event is that you can have people attending in.

Person but also streaming in virtually and that essentially is unlimited especially if  you stream to Facebook you can possibly have a ton of people there with you in the moment  and experiencing this commemoration all together i actually recommend that you create a mind map  so put your honoree's name in the center and draw a little circle around it and then from there i  encourage you to start branching out so start with associations groups family members just important  groups and community sectors that are very important to your family and from there once you  have a specific group you can actually do little tiny branches and start to name specific people.

So for instance if we're honoring ted in the middle and ted was part of a car club and had  three or four acquaintances say bill was one of his closest friends at the car club and tom was  helping to run their virtual meetings maybe those two people you'll want to ask to be speakers at  the event because they represent one part of ted's life in on that vein if say ted was a principal  then you may ask a couple of important teachers or administrative staff or if ted was a grandfather  you may ask one of the grandchildren or do a little video montage of all of the  grandchildren speaking again tons of possibilities we'll go through this in a different video.

Finally one of the biggest elements and one of the most personal is music  now music definitely sets the tone for your event and this sets the tone at the beginning  continues that tone in the middle and of course ends the event on a beautiful note no pun intended  when thinking of options i want you to consider songs that meant a lot to your honoree or to your  community so were there any special artists or genres or albums that your loved one was fond of  do you want to begin the event on a more low key note do you want to infuse some pop hits in there.

Do you want to end with some higher tempo music so that guests leave with a celebratory feeling  we recommend selecting the two most important songs that you have or the ones that you deem  most important and using these as event bookends well most of your attendees will be there right  at the beginning and right at the end um there's a little bit you know the pre-event music they  won't hear at all but the most people that you'll have there will hear that last song  and that first song at the very end so those are the five foundational elements i hope you found  this helpful if you did please write in the comments below let me know what you thought  subscribe like please do share this with a friend or a family member if you think that  they might find it helpful and we are only an email away if you have any questions the link  is in the bio download our family planning guide too and check out our other videos here or uh here.

And this is Christina from new narrative we'll see you in the next video.

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I replaced my $13K Home Theatre with a SOUNDBAR

 

This right here is one of my favorite movie moments. The rumbling, guttural roar of the Balrog! It's incredible! Wait, on a soundbar? Oh, movie magic exposed.

Nakamichi's sales pitch here is absolutely wild. I mean, one does not simply position a soundbar against a multi- channel audio system that costs tens of thousands of dollars. And yet, they did. So, okay, Nakamichi, if that is your real name, I'll bite. I'm gonna rip my SVS home theater apart, I'm gonna replace it with your soundbar, and I'm gonna see if maybe I could have saved myself thousands of dollars and a heck of a lot of hassle.

I'm also gonna see if I can tell you about our sponsor, Ugreen. Their 145 watt power bank is equipped with power delivery and quick charge 3.0 fast charging, along with 65 watt input and a massive 25,000 mAh battery to fulfill your on-the-go needs. Check it out at the link in the video description. I like tinkering, so I went the discreet route for my home theater.

I got some SVS ultra towers and surrounds, in-ceilings courtesy of Klipsch, and a pair of SVS subs, all wired through my walls to a Denon AV receiver. These components together cost an eye-watering 13,600 US dollars, not including the price of install, which probably sounds completely bonkers to the average consumer who's buying a $200 Bose soundbar like that one that we covered last year, but if you've spent any time on the home theater subreddit, you'll know that somehow we're still in bang for the buck territory, which is what makes Nakamichi's claims so unbelievable. I mean, who do they think they are? No, really though. Old school audio nerds are going to remember Nakamichi's history making high-end cassette and CD players with the dragon name indicating their top-of-the-line products, but.

.. That company failed to transition from analog to digital, and in 1998, they were purchased by a Chinese holding company, Grand Holdings.

Four years later, they filed for bankruptcy. In the 2000s, their shambling corpse was reanimated to sell iPod docks and portable DVD players with only modest success, and more recently, the company has returned to the high-end audio scene to focus on.

.. Soundbars. Let's see if they should have stayed buried. The first thing you're gonna notice about the Dragon when you get it is that it is huge and really heavy.

To get a sense of the scale, here's that best-selling Bose soundbar off of Amazon, and here is the Sonos Arc. It completely dwarfs them both. Now obviously these comparisons aren't entirely fair because the Dragon justifies its massive size by packing in a whopping 17 distinct drivers.

Including four that reflect off the ceiling to give you a sense of height and these nifty air motion transformer tweeters that work like an accordion Squeezing in and out to produce mid to high-end frequencies with extra clarity Supposedly, but I think we've gotten ahead of ourselves a little bit. Let's look at the rest of the package Quad subwoofers you say I mean there are dual 8-inch drivers in each of these two subwoofers But my speakers have multiple drivers in them I don't call them Three speakers this won't be the last time we see Nakamichi stretching the truth We'll come back to that But first there's the surround speakers which each feature four board drivers on the sides and an angled upward firing driver that can be Rotated towards your listening position to improve overhead audio effects these bring the total number of drivers to a whopping 31 with a circuit blowing peak power of 3000 watts thankfully you'll never actually need that much power at once because at even 50% of maximum volume we are well into Uncomfortably loud territory which means we should be able to get theater-like performance out of this package then right?

Well, what are we waiting for? Let's give it a shot Good clarity The mids feel a little empty to me.

It's a pretty big sound from a sound bar though Yeah, and I think having the nice big surrounds is great Sometimes you'll get systems where you have these small surrounds and they sound piddly whenever you have surrounding But these are big enough that you still get a similar sound all the way around you. Yeah, it's a good volume of sound Surround is okay. Yeah.

It's not as good as the HTA9's. It's not as good as a dedicated 5.1. That's beside me, that ain't behind me. The subs sound pretty good.

I will say that the subs are great. I think that the bass is punchy and it's quite musical, but the issue is that it just doesn't get that low. Let's pull up "Baby Driver" and you'll see exactly what we're talking about.

Like, did you hear that just now on the bass line, that walking downwards? It gets a little boomy at the top because it's trying to compensate for the dip where the crossover lies.

Every criticism I have of it though has to be tempered by the fact that realistically in my mind what I'm comparing it to is a system that costs several times as much. If I was comparing to something else... I wouldn't be sitting here going, "Mumm, yes, but the dip, it quite." For me, I remember when I was testing this earlier, I had listened to Your Home Theater first, and then I listened to The Dragon, and then I went, "Oh." But then I came back three days later after the weekend, listened to The Dragon first, and I was like, "This is awesome!" Switching over to my quote-unquote spoiled speakers.

You just hear this like when when there is that bass punch just like like you actually feel it Yeah, which you don't get from the Nakamichi, which is really disappointing considering. They are big subwoofer still I mean at half the volume of the ones that are here though, and you know what?

Yeah, it sounds more Natural it's a better balanced experience But at what cost? yeah, and I was gonna say in terms of the treble performance The Nakamichi is kind of awesome. Yeah, I don't really miss it like listening to just the music I was like it still sounds really really good coming back to the bass though part of the reason that it doesn't punch the way That the SVS subs do is that while Nakamichi? advertises performance down to 20 Hertz what we found was Actually closer to what 30 to 45 before it just rolls off completely yeah It's um it's really disappointing and I think it's fine to have bass that only goes that low but Be honest. Be honest about it.

If you guys want to experience these two systems side-by-side by the way We're gonna have a binaural recording that we created in collaboration with Blaine from Headphones.com And we're gonna have those in unlisted links in the video description.

It's Pretty darn good in terms of spatial performance, but I've definitely encountered better We've spent a lot of time comparing the Nakamichi Dragon to a full- fledged system. I mean they invite that comparison but let's try doing something that's a competitor of the same form factor like the Sonos Arc. Yeah, I like the Arc so I'll be interested to see how it holds up.

I just want to take this moment to acknowledge how good the I/O is. On the Nakamichi, the Sonos Arc gives you one HDMI, so you better have eARC. Nakamichi doesn't have any Wi-Fi, but it does have a bajillion inputs and outputs and it does still support Bluetooth. And what's nice is that having no microphone, while it does mean that the calibration is more manual and tedious, means that there's no support for voice assistants, which some people might see as a downer, but some people might actually consider to be a plus. Now let's listen to what the Arc can do.

Sonos is unironically a good little sound bar. It's a good little sound bar. The Nakamichi Dragon does sound better. It's worth noting I don't have a pair of Sonos speakers to throw in the back, but even the sound signature is smaller. I will say that the Sonos Sub is admirable.

It's surprisingly good for its size. Yeah, they knocked it out of the park with that. And something we've got to consider in all of this is any sound bar is only going to be as good as the limited options that you have available to expand it. Sure you can add surrounds to your Sonos as long as you're willing to overpay for them and find a way to mount them on your own. Speaking of flexibility, where are you gonna put the Nakamichi Dragon stuff?

It doesn't come with mounting hardware.

These stands that we got, while nice, are 300 bucks. That's kind of a bummer. So, like any solution, then, it has its advantages and disadvantages, but I think it boils down to this. The Dragon provides, I'd say about 80% of the experience that my AV setup provides, at a quarter of the price.

That is a massive value. But, and you probably know this if you've ever bought something like a graphics card, the issue is that it's easy to look good when you compare against something much more expensive, because the farther up the product stack you go, the worse value you tend to get. So, if we were to compare the Dragon then against something that costs a little less than half the price, like a Samsung Q990C that has many of the same features, but is more modest in size and has just a single subwoofer, well, you could make a pretty similar argument there, that you're getting a lot of the performance of the Nakamichi.

And, regardless of your budget, there are strong arguments to be made still for going the DIY route. Personally, and I'm sure I'm gonna ruffle some feathers here, I don't find that the height channels really add that much for me.

So, for two grand or even four grand, I might go with a mean 5.1 surround setup and an AV receiver that is gonna give me better quality sound right out of the gate and that I can sell and buy and upgrade over time to turn it into something truly exceptional.

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Check out their July promotion at the link in the video description. If you guys enjoyed this video, hey, I did too. I love checking out stuff like this. Bold bombastic claims are so much fun to investigate, whether they fall well short or fall even just a little bit short like today.

If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe go check out the ones about my home theater setup.

We've apparently got a playlist of them.

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