Next up, the Slingbox Pro-HD

I just purchased a Slingbox Pro-HD from a local Best Buy. In case you dont' know, this cute little device let's you turn either a video source or your CATV/Hi Def TV Antenna into a network resource.

Once plugged in and configured correctly it let's you watch your video sources (think Cable or Satellite box) from anywhere in the house or even around the world in HD assuming you have the bandwidth for it.

Unlike a lot of network appliances out which had completely inadequate cooling, the Slingbox has pretty good cooling thanks to the perforated panels on the front and back, along with vents under the feet which have enough spacing to actually allow air to get around the circuit board and up into the appliance. I thought I wouldn't have any issues with it, but after using it for a couple of days I noticed two things. First, that occasionally I'd have to power cycle the Slingbox to get it to work, and secondly that the underside of the box gets wickedly hot. Not only does this bode ill for the chips inside, it also means it's giving my DirecTV receiver excess heat. Time for a little investigation!

First, had to figure out how to disassemble the box. There are four screws which hold the entire thing in place, cleverly hidden underneath the rubber foot pads. Easy to do. You also have to take off the cosmetic metalic perforated grill on the back. It's no big loss to toss it. No one's ever going to see it and it just gets in the way of air flow. If you are careful though, i'm sure you can put it back on.

Four screws hold on the metalic shroud which seems to be to contain the EMI/RFI coming out of the box. Once you've taken that apart, you'll see something like this:


Overall a nice layout, but not a single heat sink in site. The good news is that Slingbox seems to have taken the high road, specifying higher temperature grade parts than they could have gotten away with, especially that TI chip in the middle.

That is a combination RISC/ARM chip and DSP designed specifically for video processing. At idle it reaches about 100F, but when transmitting video to your PC it runs at about 150F, or close to 85C, the upper limit of the standard issue chip. The temperature underneath that chip seems to be about 10-15 colder. So you can see why cooling this chip would be good for the Slingbox and anything beneath it. You may also notice big copper areas underneath the MOSFET devices. These are used to cool off the MOSFETS by transfering as much of the heat to the circuit board itself.

Something else I noticed. This box is never off. All the major IC's stay hot even when it's not doing anything. The coolest the TI chip ever got was around 100 degrees. As a result, I've decided to start off by adding some passive cooling. Using a combination of new Zalman RAM heatsinks and an old 80386 heat sink I took a first pass at cooling this beastie down. Below are the results.



That round black heatsink is probably complete overkill, but I will say that it's temperature now is about 30 degrees cooler than it was, and that the underside is cooler as well. You may also want to substitute the Swiftech VGA RAM coolers instead of the Zalman. They're copper, and about twice as tall which may give you a little better performance.

I'm not sure either solution alone satisfies me yet, and I have found an extra power supply. The generous people over at Slingbox have included a USB port on the back of the slingbox, for which I have no use for, except to attach a small 5V fan to! Muahahahahah. So, the next part of this project is to take a fan that originally went to a hard disk cooler, and attach it to the underside of the top panel, and power it through the USB port. If I can do that I know I can bring the CPU temp down from 120 to about 100 or less.

The Future of High End Home Theater

There are two directions I see coming, one you probably know about, the other you do not.

The first is PC based sources. The idea of having an audio appliance will come and go, with perhaps some hold outs, but most vendors going to a pure PC based solution. Sorry Apple, you'll probably be left out because of your insistence of all hardware coming from you. Vendors will be looking for PC's because they already read all the software. DVD/Blue-Ray/Internet Radio, and anything else that happens there will be cheap readers for on the PC. Now, some will take the PC accessory route, like USB DAC's, but more sophisticated, either by offering PC cards or perhaps by using custom outboard processors like E-MU uses.

The second, not so obvious trend will be hyper modularization. Companies with the know how and money to spend will realize that the only way to keep delivering the best solutions, and the most flexible solutions will be tiny modules that can be plugged into a virtual network, all of which can be PC configured and driven.

Imagine if you will a rack mountable chassis that accepts 1 to 12 cards, each of which can be a processing card or an output card. That these cards can handle audio or video. That you control how things are routed via a PC based configuration program that allows you drag and drop these cards into your own custom audio / video processing chain. Further, because the system is so modular, and the PC is just a commodity item you end up paying no more than say a couple of hundred dollars more than a mid-range Onkyo or Pioneer processor.

Also imagine that multiple chassis are linked via a simple network cable, and that output cards are all optically isolated from the network, and master clocks and FIFO buffers are all near the target outputs.

After this there may be another open vs. closed platforms battle. Some companies will have entirely closed systems, and others will publish their spec's out to the world to design accessories for. Wouldn't it be great if you could say, get your DAC's from Benchmark, but then buy whatever room EQ you chose? Or have just one media storage appliance in your entire house, and then pick and choose which rooms get what type of playback? Does your half bathroom really need 9.1 channels of 24/192 dCS ring DAC's to play the morning news while you browse yet another lame ass review for magic stones to put on top of your amplifiers? Those companies who have the most confidence in their products will take the open source approach. Those who feel they have a lot to loose if people can pick and choose will go closed. They'll come up with bogus stories about tight integration and better user experience, blah blah blah.

What made me think of this? Perhaps it comes from my obsessively watching for news from Theta, and their unwillingness to start a new platform paradigm instead of trying to upgrade the Casablanca. While they seem to be making noises about releasing an HDMI card in our lifetimes, what I see absent that everyone is going to ask about next is the room correction software. Mind you, I'm an absorber/diffuser sort of guy but the latest generation of acoustics processing software looks really sweet to me. What good is it, people will ask, for an aging platform to add all the latest HDMI audio formats if they can't also integrate it with the latest generation digital processors? When the Casablanca can't help you get room eq, internet radio, or download the latest 24/96 track is it really anything more than a rack of DAC's already?

I don't know what Theta, Meridian, dCS or Halcro will do next, but I do think that when the economy perks back up the high end will once again reconsider the home theater market and be looking for some completely new completely outrageous product platforms, and I believe that those who don't go into making the PC a complete home theater platform will look towards networking and hyper modularity as the next logical places to be. I also wonder how long it will take for smart stereophiles who also happen to be industrial and electrical engineers to start their own open source home theater platforms. Also, my guess is that some smart video only companies are probably already thinking this way and we may see entries from them competing for the real high end space sooner rather than later.

If only I could upgrade the Stereophile cover

I'm constantly amused by Stephen Mejias' blog over at Stereophile. In particular the self congratulatory postings they have been making about their covers lately, especially since they are so damn boring they literally put me to sleep. When I get a copy I have to quickly turn the cover so I don't collapse in a narcoleptic fit before I get to any of the articles.

Seriously Stephen, you put out a magazine cover that is exactly like every other cover Sterepohile has published in the last thee years and you want to crow over you choice of border color? Wow, that's just delusional. Do you think that covering up a couple of letters on the end of "Stereophile" makes you edgy? Or was it your daring choice of plum for the border? Give us a break, please! What I think you guys do over there is have a pair of dice. One has colors on it, from which you'll pick the border color, the other which side of the speaker you'll take the cover photo from. You wake up, roll them and that's what you go with, then get all giggly like a school girl if you do something clever, but please don't' tell me that took you more than an hour. Yes, I am including the time it takes to unpack the speaker and take the picture in your single back drop. Come on, splurge a little, rent a cat or a backdrop or something. How about a pug? No, how about a plant on top of those Wilson's from last week? A nice fern growing out of the top of them would be nice. You really want to shock me? Put a mezzo soprano on the cover.

What is it with you sick fascination with sterile hardware and page after page of technical data on the performance of a new DAC? Puhleese. Talk about repetitive. I am glad you are doing it, really, but page after page? What a total waste of valuable space.

Theta HDMI A Year Later

In September of 2008 Theta Digital announced HDMI support for the Casablanca III. I just wanted to say it's a full year later and I haven't yet seen any evidence any HDMI product has ever shipped to a customer from Theta Digital, and December is not looking any better.

Meridian - That's What I'm Talking About

So about one month after I suggested that Theta Digital was amongst the living dead, and suggested that they should have built an out-board adapter instead of completely re-working the Casablanca cashcow from the ground up, Meridian introduces a product along exactly the lines I was suggesting, for about $3,000 meridian owners of several different processors can purchase the HD621 and upgrade to full HDMI.

They could probably sell 3x as many if they could make it work with Casablanca's instead! Hah!

NHT changes it's name to NDY!

For Not Dead Yet! Hahah.

Speaker Manufacturer Now Hear This has announced they are back in business, and plan to re-launch themselves as an Internet only company.

If you like a lot of presence, efficiency and volume, NHT are your speakers.

Sadly, I've never heard a pair of NHT's I liked, or felt were natural on anything other than brassy big band jazz or rock and roll.

Good luck to them just the same!

Nigel

The New York Citty Ballet's "Romeo + Juliet"

I was only able to watch Peter Martin's "Romeo + Juliet" on television. Most of it in HD via WGBH, the rest through a lower res version sent out via DirecTV. Both versions suffered from a maddening tick on the right channel.

I could kvetch a full pages worth, but here it is in a few sentences. The best dancing happens well before the interlude. The lead's are entirely believable, but I'm afraid there's just not enough pretty dancing, and most of the group dancing scenes were choreographed "loosely." What I mean is that most group dance numbers were very individualized. It would have been nice to see this fine troupe doing at least a couple of really tightly synchronized pieces.

If you love ballet for ballet's sake, this R&J will leave you feeling like you just had Chinese food. Full, yet hungry. On the other hand, if you are looking for an experience that will sate your hunger for drama and moves at a good clip, this may be just the ticket!