Sunday, December 27 2009, 8:57 PM

One of my long-standing dreams of home ownership has been to have a bitchin' audio/video setup. I've probably had this desire for longer than I've had the desire to be a home owner, now that I think about it. Just for clarification - by "bitchin' audio/video setup," I don't mean some $50,000 custom-made setup that is put into a specially designed room with amphitheater seating positioned on shock-absorbing pylons, or anything like that. While that would certainly be neat, that's not really what I'm looking for.

What I want is a system where I can be enjoying either music or a movie/tv show/whatever in one room, and be able to move to another room and enjoy the same content, seamlessly. Moreover, I want this to be usable by multiple people, simultaneously. Here are the big bullet points for what I am after:

• All rooms should be connected to a distribution setup
• The distribution setup should send at least one HDMI and at least two S/PDIF signals to each room
• HDMI feed should be attached to HD peripherals - DVD player, HD Satellite receiver, XBox360
• Optionally, HDMI should be connected to a computer for MythTV/Hulu playback
• S/PDIF feeds should be provided by a computer with some sort of remotely controllable music player
• Keep A/V equipment as out of sight as possible

Historically speaking, the audio part was more important to me than the video part. Back in my apartment days, I only had one TV/receiver setup that could play back HD content, so moving to different rooms wasn't really feasible. I did, however, have S/PDIF capable receivers in all three rooms of my apartment, so the audio part was quite achievable. I was able to run cables through the HVAC ducting between my office, bedroom, and living room, providing the necessary connections to make things work. However, my signal source left something to be desired. I was using the digital output of a Sound Blaster Live! card, split three ways, to drive the setup. It worked for the most part, but the thrice-split signal was a bit weak in the living room, and it suffered cut-outs when the signal would get too weak.

While not really willing to spend any cash to solve the problem, but very willing to dream, I started looking around for solutions. After poking around for a while, I came across a few possibilities. One device, the Sonifex RB-DDA6S, provided a full S/PDIF splitter/amplifier, but I was pretty turned off by the price. I came across a few other devices that would distribute both HD video and S/PDIF audio. I didn't have much use for the video back then, but times have changed. Now that Erin and I are living in our large new home, the video part of the equation is much larger. We've got multiple HDTVs, multiple content sources to drive them (HD Satellite, DVDs, MythTV, XBox360s) and multiple rooms, so I've started considering video as a larger part of my dream setup.

HDMI is pretty much the only way I would go in terms of video. It yields the best quality, and has the smaller connector when compared with component video + S/PDIF. Being a digital signal, it's harder to simply split it, but there are solutions to that. Earlier on today, while browsing on amazon.com, I came across this bad boy: the Intelix HDMI-2X8. This thing would satisfy pretty much all my needs in terms of video distribution (sans cabling, of course). Two distinct inputs (one HDMI, one DVI plus coaxial/optical S/PDIF), and eight HDMI outputs. That would allow me to feed in the output of the master HD content provider (my Onkyo TX-SR605, connected to the satellite and DVD units), and a computer, and have it display on pretty much any room the house. We've actually got 11 rooms (counting the garage) that we *could* run signal to, so it wouldn't satisfy every need, but it would sure get things started. Seeing as how normal DVI-capable LCDs will display HD video content (sans audio, of course) with a HDMI-to-DVI cable, this could be quite handy.

I think its time for some more pondering on how I would best control this system... More to follow!

hdmi homeaudio mythtv spdif

Saturday, April 21 2007, 4:30 AM

The past few days have been a rollercoaster ride of hardware gains and losses. The first involved my web server. On wednesday I decided to upgrade the operating system on the box to the newly released CentOS 5, which supports Xen natively. I brought in a seperate machine to handle the Xen environments so I could perform the upgrade at my own pace. I was successful in getting everything moved over, and the OS upgrade went flawlessly. The issues arose when I tried to insert an IDE card to get around a nagging problem with DMA on my hard drives. Well, that didn't go so well. The case in that machine is huge, and the IDE cables just weren't long enough to reach the IDE card. So, I decided to put everything back te way it was and to deal with it. Well, the machine had different plans. When I put everything back together, the machine wouldn't boot. The diagnostic LEDs on the motherboard indicated a problem with the CPUs, and it wouldn't boot. It remains in that state.

I was pretty despondent over the breakdown, but I decided not to let the hardware I had go to waste. I looked on eBay, and found a server of similar vintage and capability, in 2U rack mount form. It has dual Pentium III 1.4GHz processors, a gigabyte of RAM, and six 18.2GB SCSI drives. It has the same RAID card that my existing server has, so I'll be able to make a nice somewhat-large RAID5 array. I'll have the two 18.2GB drives from my dead server as spares, and the 2GB of RAM from the original server will combine nicely with the 1GB of RAM from the new server. This gem came pretty cheap too... I won it for the paltry sum of $162.50. It should be here monday. Yay for me!

Not too long before I won the auction, I got a call from Circuit City saying that my receiver was ready for pickup. Since they actually ordered parts to fix it, I had confidence that it would finally be fixed. It was. Finally. Everything's hooked back up again, and I'm pretty happy. It's nice to have everything back the way it was.

ebay frustrations homeaudio linux onkyo-tx-sr603 xen

Tuesday, March 13 2007, 3:39 PM

The ending days of last week were a total pain for me. The reason is something that I would have never thought to be much of a pain for anyone - daylight savings time. I don't know if everyone was aware of the problems associated with the change, or that there was a change at all, but it was certainly a major annoyance for me. When George Dubyah moved the daylight savings time changeover up three weeks, that mandated that just about every computer in the land needed to be updated with new timekeeping parameters.

Lets just say that the software automated updates didn't work out as well as one might have hoped. We manage an entire fleet of linux environments at work (they number in the thousands), and nearly one quarter of them needed work to ensure that they changed over properly. Most of these issues resolved around stale /etc/localtime files. While all of the information in /usr/share/zoneinfo was correct and reflected the new DST changes, /etc/localtime was wrong, and that's what the system bases its timezone conversions on. That meant a lot of work to isolate and fix all the problem machines. We got it hammered out though, with much loss of sleep and overtime. It shouldn't have occured that way though.

It doesn't look like the saga of my broken receiver will end soon either. I called up to circuit city late last week, and inquired about the repair effort. They stated that it had just come back from the repair facility that day, and was available for pickup. When I went to pick it up, I was presented with a concept that was strange to me - the receiver wasn't broken. Not according to Circuit City's repair facility anyway. They gave it a clean bill of health, which didn't sit well with me. I know it was broken when it left my house.

I asked that one of their techs there assist me in running a few tests to make sure it was functioning properly. He grabbed one of their display model TVs and a DVD player, and some cabling. We hooked it up with what we had (using the composite input/oupts), and everything seemed to work fine, except the on-screen setup menu. I thought that was strange, but was in a hurry to head into work to continue dealing with the DST problems. The tech assured me that I could bring it back in if it was still broken.

Well, it was. My fatigue and lack of motivation kept me from testing things out fully until yesterday. When I first sent it in, I just noticed that things weren't working properly, and that I could hack around the issues by changing the input/output path through the receiver. I thought the repair techs would perform more testing to localize the issue, but it would seem that I was wrong. I spent a half hour or so mapping out the various input paths I used, and what the picture looked like on the various output paths. In all the various combinations, it seemed as though there was one common issue - S-Video. Nothing relating to S-Video works. All of the component and composite video works fine. Knowing that, it would seem feasible that the internal setup menu is somehow driven by an SVideo feed as well.

I took the receiver back in yesterday and provided a nice printed copy of my notes that I had taken, which outline exactly what works and what does not. If it comes back as OK after this, I'll be quite upset.

frustrations homeaudio linux onkyo-tx-sr603 work

Monday, February 26 2007, 12:41 PM

I'm totally digging my new phone. I haven't done much in the way of software downloads for it, but I'll get there eventually. I did install PocketPuTTY, so I'm SSH-enabled wherever I can get the data service or a wifi-connection. I'm also quite pleased that HTC/Audiovox decided to use standardized plugs with the phone, and that Canon did the same with my new camera. They both use the same standardized cable, which is pretty damned nice in my opinion. I was able to buy a couple additional cables at CompUSA, so that I could leave one at work and one connected to my workstation at home. This lets me charge my phone or transfer data between the phone/camera and the computer without disconnecting or transporting cables. Pretty nice in terms of convenience.

I'm totally not digging the fact that my receiver (an Onkyo TX-SR603) decided to take a crap on me over the weekend. When I last used it thursday night, it worked fine. When I went to watch some Star Trek with Jessica on saturday night, it worked less than fine. The monitor video outs, both S-Video and composite, where pretty much dead. No picture at all, even from the internal configuration menu. After much and annoyance, I plugged my TV into the Video1 outputs, which worked, so we were at least able to watch Star Trek. Not a permanent solution though. It's a good thing that I purchased that product protection plan when I bought the receiver though. I took it up to Circuit City yesterday, and they're going to send it off to their service center for repairs. If they can't fix it, I get a new receiver. I'm actually hoping that they can't fix it, so I can get the newest model of the same class (TX-SR604), which has newer nifty features like HDMI inputs and outputs.

frustrations homeaudio onkyo-tx-sr603 ppc6700

Monday, May 22 2006, 12:56 AM

While I'm totally digging XM, I've noticed something rather annoying. It seems as though the rock stations are encoded at a lower bandwidth rate than some of the other stations. The classical stations sound like they're encoded at CD quality (and it sounds awesome), but every rock station I've listened is of noticibly lower quality. One of them sounds like it might even be encoded in mono. They also are substantially lower in volume. On a lower quality setup, it might not be a large problem, but both in my car and my home theater setup in my living room, it's quite noticable. The local XM evangelist at work, Ben, says that they do tend to alter the compression settings across multiple stations from time to time, especially when they're adding new stations or when time-oriented content like sporting events go on or off air. I doubt one customer's complaints would do much, but I plan on letting them know that I'm not happy with the audio quality. It can't hurt.

On a related note, I figured out a nagging problem with my audio setup. I've been noticing some issues with funny sound, and I finally figured out why. My CD player was skipping on a brand new CD, so I got out my CD lens cleaner and ran it through the CD player. It also has some audio tuning tracks on it, so I ran through it for the hell of it. It turns out that my right front speaker was hooked up out of phase, even though the wiring between the receiver and speaker was correct. I guess the wiring inside of the speaker is backwards. After I found that problem, I re-ran the automatic configuration on the receiver, and things sound a ton better now. I guess all the funny levels I saw before in the autoconfiguration were because of the speaker being hooked up out of phase. Let this be a note to you! Check your polarity!

homeaudio xm

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