Month: October 2005

My curious experiment in connecting a pair of hi-fi speakers with really cheap amplifier moved forward today, as I got my pair of M5s. With their polished cherry-tree, hand-made feeling they are easily the most beautiful thing I have possessed. No doubt serious high-end is something else completely, but I am happy for my ignorance. Experimenting with some nicely produced CDs (Pink Floyd, Chris Rea, some classics and other acoustic music), I finally conclude that it is not so much the T-Amp (which seems to be doing surprisingly good work) but the portable CD player I have hooked up in this bedroom extravaganza. Finally, I will give up and dig my old “heavy” system out of hibernation and plug the M5s with a decent mid-range amplifier, and hi-fi LP & CD player set (NAD & Sony). It is not only the sound quality though; the mobile equipment are designed primarily for battery use, and using them regularly indoors will conclude plugging in couple of power converters, and without remote controls, the usability just isn’t up to it. Nice experiment, though.

My other week-end operation was replacing my old PC power source with Antec TruePower 2.0 ATX 430W. But I ran out of power connectors: the Nvidia GeForce/3D Blaster 5600 FX Ultra I use seems to require its own dedicated 12V power cable, and I ran out of 12V connectors – the other free cables in Antec are SATA connectors, I suppose. Wonder if there is an adapter to use them for connecting regular 12V CD-ROM and DVD-ROM units? And the original problem remains, despite this power source update: I am constantly kicked off from WoW and other games by the Nvidia “sentinel” which claims to do this to protect the graphics card, “because it cannot get enough power”. Well, it got its dedicated cable from Antec now, and I have even plugged off all CD-ROM and DVD-ROM units for debugging this — how much more power can it demand! I am coming to suspect this is some kind of bug. Perhaps the 5600 Ultra’s bios needs to be flashed… but where to get a new bios? Questions, questions. And this is just a weekend in a life with IT.

There are many things that have happened in the digital visuals over the last years, regardless if you are looking at the new games consoles, PCs, or home theatre LCDs, plasma screens or digital projection in general. However, there is the emotionally affective field of audio, where equally interesting opportunities and developments are waiting. In many games there is already some use of surround audio, and in game types like “first person sneakers” (the style of Thief) it is even meaningfully applied to gameplay purposes. But great audio does not only consist of spatial differentiation of soundscape, it also involves high quality resolution and timbre of sound. And to reach that, you need the full sound processing chain, concluding to speakers, to fulfil certain high fidelity requirements.

There has been couple of developments going on in my home lately, as I have studied the opportunities of sound in action. Firstly, I decided to experiment by installing a decent pair of loudspeakers in my bedroom, since I enjoy listening to music while reading in bed. After making some quick compares, I ordered a black-and-dark-cherry pair of Epos M5 speakers, as I really liked their sound when testing it with a Stockfish Records Super Audio CD album (Closer to Music, a sampler worth checking out). The really interesting part is the amplifier, which is a Sonic Impact’s Portable T-Amp model TA2024, which I ordered from a net store, based on some rave reviews. It is really a toy by appearance, very small, light-weight plastic box with only one control knob; but since it has got some people so exited by its sound quality, and it is so cheap, I am waiting to get those M5s connected and make some testing.

Another process was started as my old Philips DVP-720SA broke down (a fault in the optical out, I suppose), and since there was no similarly featured model in Gigantti’s collection any more, I got my money back finally, and now am without a DVD/SACD player and free to invest. After various investigations, there are currently two major candidates left: the first is a Samsung DVD HD950, [see the manual, a 3MB download] which is competitively priced and according to some discussion forums has nice picture (via HDMI connection) and sound. But it appears weak in usability features, and cannot compete with more expensive players in image & sound quality either. The other candidate is Sony DVP-NS92, which is almost double in price, and is so new that I find no reviews, but Sony players get generally higher claims in overall quality, as could be expected, if one thinks what it the common perception of Sony and Samsung as manufacturers of quality home electronics. But I have not made my decision yet; the availability is also a factor. I have several new movies and the entire Peter Gabriel catalog in SACD waiting for the new player.

I am not sure if I am just incredibly unlucky, or if Wi-Fi (WLAN) is just inherently unstable and dysfunctional technology? During the last couple of years, I have bought and tried to set up four different Wi-Fi routers/base stations, and all of them have proved to be failures. First I got a Belkin wireless USB adapter that I used for peer-to-peer connection from my laptop to workstation (very poor performance, no signal if I went as far as to bedroom), then I invested into another Belkin product, a wireless 802.11g router thinking it would be the fix. Hah. For some reason, it drops the connection every 60 seconds or so for a period of c. 15 seconds. But as the system was so complex to configure and I had so little time to troubleshoot it, the guarantee period expired before I could sort out that the problem was indeed with the device rather than with some error of mine. Enter the third device, a Netgear router with its new 108MB speed technology and salesperson’s reassurance that this would certainly solve my problems. Amazingly, it actually worked rather fine for nine months (after I had first spent two hours straight in phone with the Netgear helpline, which by the way connects your calls to India, to set it up). It was only this week that the network suddenly vanished. After some debugging, it became apparent that everything else still worked, but the wireless part of Netgear had failed. Well, there was still some guarantee left, and I took couple of hours off my work to drive to Gigantti where I had bought the machine and sort it out. Oh yes… It is now 48 hours later, and my WLAN is not yet working. I have been instructed to call Netgear helpline to get my router replaced, spent half an hour explaining to the Indian helpdesk person same things over and over, calling to the Gigantti helpdesk, spending time hanging on and hearing them slowly type email to the Gigantti store personnel to inquire them about the situation, driving then despaired personally to Gigantti because no-one (of course) returned to my inquiry, asked by the store personnel to phone back to Gigantti helpdesk, and then finally (grudgingly, and after some testing whether I had indeed diagnosed the failure right) given a replacement product, a Philips SNB6500 which has roughly similar technology like the Netgear device it replaced. The only problem is, that now, after more than six hours tonight spend sorting this out, the Philips is still not connecting to internet. It appears to be unable to acquire a dynamic IP from the Zyxel ADSL modem, even if all the other devices in my LAN are perfectly able to do so. Well, I suppose you cannot always win. It is just surprising to see all these things failing with this 100 % consistency. That is reliability in a way, after all.