Brands I miss:
* SUMO
* Tandberg - Not only a great FM Tuner, but amplifiers that really could control any speaker better than anything. And let's not forget their luscious reel to reel and cassette players.
* Nakamichi
* Threshold
* Kyocera as an audio brand.
* Snell while Peter Snell was alive.
Brands I am grateful are still with us:
* Conrad Johnson
* Audio Research
* JBL (love / hate relationship. How do you design an $11,000 speaker with $1000 worth of parts and still have to make it in Mexico to turn a profit? On the other hand, they sound soooo good....)
* Focal - Best performing, widest range of top value speakers in the business and terribly under appreciated in the US.
* Monitor Audio, though I liked them better as an undervalued bargain brand than as a high end manufacturer they are trying to become with the new Platinum line.
* dCS - Can't afford any of them, but I still wonder if anyone has bested their Ring DAC for sheer ingenuity of DAC technology.
* Meridian - For pushing the Digital envelope, sounding great and being such a bargain on Audiogon
* Analysis Plus
* Kimber Cable
* Cardas
Sunday, May 16, 2010
The Audio Undead
I remember a long time ago on TV, perhaps the Twilight Zone, there was an episode where in a country home Grandpa had died but he was too stubborn to accept it so he kept showing up for meals, each time looking more and more disgusting. Only after he is surprised with a bag of black pepper and he sneezes his nose off does he finally accept the truth and die.
I've been thinking a lot about the fact that many of us have cherished brands from our past who passed away without any sort of ceremony or sometimes even notice. These days it seems that instead of the brand actually laying down and dying gracefully the web allows them go hang on long after they should have been acknowledged to be beyond hope. Which brings me to a few brands I've been looking at lately whom I wonder if they aren't doing just that.
As you may know, I am a huge fan of Theta Digital, though I believe that they have passed beyond this world and into the world of the past. Because of that I've been doing some online snooping of them. One thing I found that is new to me is that Morris Kessler, the person at the head of Amplifier Technologies, Inc. (ATI not to be confused with the graphics card manufacturer) also had started SAE a long time ago and that has ties to a company which we know know is dead but I really liked, Sumo.
Anyway, onto the undead. I took a look at the web presence of ATI and Theta Digital whom ATI acquired in November, 2007. If I look only at the web side of things it looks like ATI is done for. No new products in years, and all Theta has to show recently is a modified Oppo player becoming the flagship disk player. In the past I have rung the death bell for Theta Alone but now I must wonder if we should have been ringing it for ATI as well. Time will tell.
Along the same themes of death and resurrection is Miller and Kreisel, or MK Sound. As many may remember, they went belly up quite suddenly a while ago, but the original web address www.mksound.com now takes you to Ken Kreisel Professional Sound. Ken may have the web address, but not the brand, as MK Sound is now apparently under the management of the Dolphin group, with both Ken and Dolphin trying to claim the legacy of the professional movie monitoring business MK Sound had established. Good luck to both of them.
Also receiving honorable mention for not quite giving up is the reborn Threshold brand. I really had high hopes for them.
I shouldn't be so melancholy I suppose, it's just that I save my money for years and when I finally can afford what I want, they go under.
I've been thinking a lot about the fact that many of us have cherished brands from our past who passed away without any sort of ceremony or sometimes even notice. These days it seems that instead of the brand actually laying down and dying gracefully the web allows them go hang on long after they should have been acknowledged to be beyond hope. Which brings me to a few brands I've been looking at lately whom I wonder if they aren't doing just that.
As you may know, I am a huge fan of Theta Digital, though I believe that they have passed beyond this world and into the world of the past. Because of that I've been doing some online snooping of them. One thing I found that is new to me is that Morris Kessler, the person at the head of Amplifier Technologies, Inc. (ATI not to be confused with the graphics card manufacturer) also had started SAE a long time ago and that has ties to a company which we know know is dead but I really liked, Sumo.
Anyway, onto the undead. I took a look at the web presence of ATI and Theta Digital whom ATI acquired in November, 2007. If I look only at the web side of things it looks like ATI is done for. No new products in years, and all Theta has to show recently is a modified Oppo player becoming the flagship disk player. In the past I have rung the death bell for Theta Alone but now I must wonder if we should have been ringing it for ATI as well. Time will tell.
Along the same themes of death and resurrection is Miller and Kreisel, or MK Sound. As many may remember, they went belly up quite suddenly a while ago, but the original web address www.mksound.com now takes you to Ken Kreisel Professional Sound. Ken may have the web address, but not the brand, as MK Sound is now apparently under the management of the Dolphin group, with both Ken and Dolphin trying to claim the legacy of the professional movie monitoring business MK Sound had established. Good luck to both of them.
Also receiving honorable mention for not quite giving up is the reborn Threshold brand. I really had high hopes for them.
I shouldn't be so melancholy I suppose, it's just that I save my money for years and when I finally can afford what I want, they go under.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Gaim / Pidgin Sucks
Pidgin is a free multi-chat client. It used to be called GAIM. It is similar in intent to Trillian.
So, the quick review. My main reason for investigating it was that Trillian does not offer encrypted messaging outside of AOL, and that messaging is subject to relatively simple attacks.
So, on to Pidgin. After 30 minutes of screwing around with it, neither AOL nor Yahoo were connecting. Only MSN worked.
I'm very very happy to get rid of it.
So, the quick review. My main reason for investigating it was that Trillian does not offer encrypted messaging outside of AOL, and that messaging is subject to relatively simple attacks.
So, on to Pidgin. After 30 minutes of screwing around with it, neither AOL nor Yahoo were connecting. Only MSN worked.
I'm very very happy to get rid of it.
Friday, April 9, 2010
Lexicon vs. Oppo Blu Ray Player
Stereophile ran a fairly decent article on the Oppo player and it's reincarnation under the Lexicon brand name. I nearly chocked. Not because the article was descent, they do that now and then, but because I had no idea Lexicon still existed! Hah!
Saturday, April 3, 2010
Apple iPad - Two Comments
Two things you should know about the Apple iPad:
1. It has no USB adapter.
2. It doesn't support Adobe Flash, but I doubt Steve Job's explanation that it's too slow. The real reason they won't support flash is that the moment they do they open up the iPad to being a remote computing platform. Imagine what you could do if you could run programs on your Mac or Windows PC, but control it from your iPad, or what if you could purchase a service, allowing you to run any program from a cloud based application. This would break Apple's main goal in selling the iPad: To get money from every single application. That's where their real cashflow is coming from, not the hardware itself.
1. It has no USB adapter.
2. It doesn't support Adobe Flash, but I doubt Steve Job's explanation that it's too slow. The real reason they won't support flash is that the moment they do they open up the iPad to being a remote computing platform. Imagine what you could do if you could run programs on your Mac or Windows PC, but control it from your iPad, or what if you could purchase a service, allowing you to run any program from a cloud based application. This would break Apple's main goal in selling the iPad: To get money from every single application. That's where their real cashflow is coming from, not the hardware itself.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, October 26, 2009
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.
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.
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