seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 22, 2024 6:46:27 GMT
AJP, I *think* your latest link to Audiophonics is incorrect, it seems to open a new TAS page.... I could be wrong, it's early and I should be getting ready for work.... maybe this Is this better?Cheers Sean
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 12, 2024 12:03:38 GMT
Daytona,
Many thanks for the reply... I like the look of that amp, I have glanced at it before.... looks like a neat solution built around components I have an interest in and probably respect for....
What I was originally looking for was something similar but with support for up to say 7.1 speakers and modern surround formats without the video switching side, all of the legacy connections and all the bulk. I have had reasonable but modest 5.1 speakers for ages... and my circa 2009 AV receiver was starting to fail.
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 12, 2024 8:56:47 GMT
Slinger,
As I mentioned in my previous "audio only > 5.1 amp" thread, I believe the historical AV amp topology is dead since smart TVs are much more at the centre of things now and modern surround formats require more bandwidth than can be squeezed down optical/coax.. hence ARC and eARC. With my new to me, 2012 Onkyo TX-NR717, I have had some success feeding sound from the telly to the AV amp back down the HDMI lead via ARC. Now this seems to work OK with 2.0 and old school lossy 5.1, but anything beyond this drops back to 2.0 PCM. In my case, this is to be expected, 2012 amp is ARC only and the more modern Samsung telly has eARC. However, looking at the manuals of even modern kit has thre are often phrases like "it may not work"... it all seems to be down to manufacturers only partially implementing spec's for HDMI standards and things like ARC/eARC. Reading online seems to confirms lots of problems. The industry is doing itself no favours in this area, the myriad of formats feels like betamax vs VHS etc.
I needed a stop gap amp, and I was willing to try and open the door to newer surround formats, but I have been put off and will wait for a while before committing to spending real money.
Sean
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 12, 2024 8:31:50 GMT
Slinger,
I will update this thread and then continue this conversation in your AV thread. I gave up looking for an audio only amp.... As a stop gap, I bought a 2nd hand Onkyo TX-SR717 for £105 from ebay local collection. While my previous Onkyo TX-SR607 was still mostly working, the OSD died (probably due to cooked capacitors on the HDMI board) and the front panel display also died so there was no means of controlling it. and having factory reset it to try and clear the problems all configuration was lost.
One thing to note is that this amp is "network ready" and comes with a primitive dlna music client.... having fed it some flacs from the NW, the sound is "interesting" but totally OTT, literally 10x more bass, 10x more treble, in fact 10x more everything, in a totally uncontrolled manner. What it does show is that the main front L&R speakers have a lot more to give, which was always likely since they are better spec'ed than the rest of the system. One of the hazards of working abroad in recent years, projects have been stop/go.
Cheers
Sean
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 11, 2024 17:52:23 GMT
Many thanks Slinger, Mike and Martin, this is exactly the sort of help I was hoping for
Cheers
Sean
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 11, 2024 16:38:18 GMT
Dear all,
I would like to add some banana plugs in place of bare wire connections... most of the equipment involved is budget and so no need for anything too extravagant. I need some that can take quite thick speaker cable. I have seen rhodium coated rather then gold mentioned??? I found some Nakamichi which seem to work OK, cable was little broad for the hole.
Any comments/suggestions
Many thanks Sean
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 3, 2024 16:11:58 GMT
Slinger,
As always, thanks for the swift reply. The nobsound box of tricks, is close in promised functionality. just seems to be 5.1 formats, I was hoping that any new box would support the more modern lossless surround formats which I *think* can only go over modern HDMI (Arc/eArc) since the bandwidth is too great for digital coax/fibre where I *think* the surround information is just "passed-thru" packaged as PCM (I could be very wrong).
I had not considered synchronisation of video/audio. However, the TV has an option to advance/retard this, During my travels I was using an el-cheapo projector with a separate bluetooth speaker... I used a little clapperboard video clip to help to set the delay, easy and once set it was fine.
Ironically, it seems that decent sound bars work this way, but I do NOT want to go that route since I prefer the separate speaker approach I have already
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Feb 3, 2024 13:48:18 GMT
I have had a modest 5.1 AV receiver (currently onkyo) and 5.1 speakers / subwoofer for around 25 years (with subtle updates along the way). Initially the set up followed the "80s hifi stack" topology where the AV receiver with many inputs switched/selected most* of the AV sources to the TV and speakers. having recently acquired a new to me 4k HDR Samsung telly (with eARC on one HDMI), things have changed. The TV still has enough smarts in the smart telly department, and hence it seems to me that the original AV receiver topology has mostly been overtaken by events. The TV effectively has most of "the sources" in it and if it doesn't it has a fistful of HDMI inputs anyway. effectively sources and hence source selection has moved to the telly away from the AV receiver. I am currently feeding the audio from the telly to the receiver via digital optical. while this works, much of the receiver is now redundant which set me thinking.
While I could continue as is or buy a more modern AV receiver easily enough, they tend to be huge and come with 1001 legacy inputs which I do not need. I *think* all I really need is an audio only surround amp which can take modern, better than 5.1 audio, which might be uncompressed, and hence have to come via a modern flavour of HDMI, since it is too much for digital audio (PCM?). I would also be happy to invest a little for a couple more speakers to match 7.1 etc.
Do such surround audio only amps exist? I have seen audio extractor boxes but not audio only amps which are value for money compared to a whole more modern AV receiver.
Comments?
Many thanks
Cheers
Sean
* most... TV sound was always at odds with the topology and a digital feed had to go back to the amp for freeview etc
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Oct 1, 2023 7:57:38 GMT
Your benchmarks are interesting.... I get about 1/4 of your motionMark and about 40% of your SSD score.... the context here is interesting... I consider this secondhand box of tricks "to be no slouch" in terms of performance despite it being a deliberate bargain basement approach.
I was reflecting on Friday that the last few school provided el-cheapo close to bottom of the range laptops (often Lenovo) are now actually perfectly reasonable in terms of performance, quality, look and feel. Of course there are dumb schools out there which insist on shaving the last £20 off of the price making the machine unusable in terms of RAM and SSD sizes.
not so long ago, booting and start-up times used to be real drag... make a cup of tea time, then literally overnight there was a triple whammy:
1. Windows became a lot more stable removing the need to reboot quite so often 2. SSDs and faster NVME "drives" became mainstream 3. The windows startup code was streamlined
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Sept 30, 2023 15:57:04 GMT
I am a big fan of small form factor machines like this.... I have had Intel NUCs in the past before many others were available and just before Christmas I bought a secondhand ASUS PN50 (AMD Ryzen 7 4700U, 16GB RAM, 512GB SSD) for under £300 and swapped a few bits around. Your new machine looks a really great spec'
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Sept 17, 2023 7:36:42 GMT
WannaRock, Thank you for the link to this DAC... I look forward to following it up.... on face value, it appears to have a similar topology to the Moondrop Moonriver 2 Ti although the DAC chips are different and the price of the Moonriver is around double.... I've seen one review (from iwii) for the moonriver and it was positive. Is anybody using this type of DAC dongle with BALANCED IMEs or headphones? if so which ones?
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Sept 10, 2023 18:42:07 GMT
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Aug 21, 2023 16:11:57 GMT
We have had 2 induction hobs in the last 20ish years, the first one was very good, a Bosch one, but it broke after about 3-5 years. It required a dedicated "cooker feed". The second one was a el-cheapo temp replacement which is still there!!!! this one runs off of 13A. The difference is control of the medium and low settings.... I *think* that the power settings are achieved by pulsing the power on and off.. on the first one this went unnoticed, on the cheap one you can really feel the full power/off cycling like morse code... Not really a problem, just makes it feel cheap which is was
If I was buying one today, it is one item where I would read respected reviews carefully as as starting point.
Advantages
1. The Ergonomics and a 100% smooth/flush surface 2. With a decent one, and a little experience, they are as flexible as gas probably
Disadvantages
1. Touch buttons can be a little fussy when either the hob or your fingers are damp 2. Take care with overheating.. in our case caused by the oven below even with venting 3. Initially, needing specific pans, may or may not be an issue.
I have relied on camping hobs as fallback for many years and I think if you happen to have one anyway adds flexibility
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Aug 5, 2023 18:33:19 GMT
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Aug 5, 2023 17:51:22 GMT
In short, I feel that the key is making your house less attractive and more difficult than those around you. In particular:
1. Dead lock doors with BSI/TUV approved locks. Remove keys and block letter boxes 2. where appropriate lock windows 3. Dead lock gates etc and make sure they are high enough to make it more of a challenge to vault
An ongoing interest is using hidden external PIRs to trigger internal house lights such as a landing to simulate people being woken up. Alexa or similar can do this and a simple routine could trigger a cascade of lights to simulate walking from the bed, across the landing to the hall. The routine would only trigger during hours of darkness.
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Aug 3, 2023 17:39:22 GMT
Hi Martin, I tend to agree with you that 4g+ is the current sweet-spot for mobile internet. Currently, decent 5g is too expensive unless you can use a service based on three with a cheap 2nd hard 5g router from three. I make use of a mobile router since I can use it at home and simply move it to the camper when I am away. I have a cheap 2nd hand Huawei B535-232 router... Whilst it is a dull/simplistic router, the DC input is 12V rather than something close to 12V meaning it can be easily powered in the van without conversion losses. At home I tend to also get around 70Mbps which was an improvement from the 40 or so with the more simplistic single channel 4g router I had previously. Ideally in a camper you need an external aerial since it is a metal box. However, 4g+ and cheap routers have a problem in this area. While the internal aerials is 4 way 2+2 Mimo and suitable 4 way aerials cab found easily, only 2 of the 4 channels make it to the external aerial sockets on the back. There is a company which will modify such routers to allow an appropriate 4 way aerial to be connected. Alternatively, you can buy industrial routers (at greater cost) which have enough sockets. The playlist below has a lot of info in this area, although some of the earlier videos are now basic and dated. www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHOEQx7dQbeUmrE2GUZ7ZbDSHqK28DxwSI tend to use the following SIM only deals from network resellers SMARTY £16 per month unlimited everything uses the three network Lebara £25 per month unlimited everything uses the Vodaphone network
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Jun 13, 2023 15:45:10 GMT
I have a 28 year old campervan, the model ran from circa 1994 to around 2007. In the middle the transit base van changed from Mk 5 to Mk6 and maybe further. The most visible difference is colour... earlier ones were British racing beige, latter ones silver. The price range is from about £10k to £25k. At any given time, there are about 18 on ebay. I can usually spot 3 of them as scams straight away... put simply the ads are very tempting because they are too good to be true. Typically, you see an expensive "silver one" advertised for less than a cheap "beige one". I believe that they copy and past real ads from elsewhere or from the past, and use hacked ebay accounts with good feedback. I think/assume that they make their money by taking multiple upfront deposits for vans which do not exist. I assume people are keen to lock in deals which are [clearly] too good to miss.
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on May 21, 2023 16:47:01 GMT
I ended up with a Mi Redmi note 11 Pro 5g while semi-stuck in China... I've had it about 15 months and at the time it was about £200... hard to see the need to wander outside this price point... I am pleased to see Slinger recommend something from the same stable, I cannot directly recommend mine since the exact model I have is Chinese specific. Going into the Mi stores in Asia is interesting, they are all white and look like an Apple store... the phones are laid out on big tables... the first models kick in at about £80, move one step to the right and the next phone is about +£10 more for a bit extra....repeat this process and before you know where you are, you are standing in front of the latest and greatest for about £1200 or whatever... and to paraphrase the talking heads: "Well, how did I get here?"... the tricky bit is knowing just how many steps to the right from the starter price phone to take.
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on May 3, 2023 9:58:54 GMT
The first album is Natalie Merchant's Live in Concert New York City (1999). Carnival starts with a heavy drum beat and then her voice is dead centre, Crikey!!! Martin, I followed this recommendation and I love it straight off the bat.... real toe tapping, genre defying stuff... While I often favour live over studio recordings for such tracks... thus far, I prefer the studio version (this may change). OK, now I need to follow the other tracks you mentioned... Thanks Martin Sean
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seanm
Rank: Trio
Posts: 162
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Post by seanm on Apr 11, 2023 12:30:51 GMT
My guess is that this a HDR problem.... If I *attempt* to watch HDR on my old telly which is NOT HDR the colours are totally washed out and wrong... feels like 60% of the colour is missing. The easiest tell-tale is the red N logo for Netflix is only pale orange. There are several different flavours of HDR maybe the one employed is not used by your telly?
Cheers
Sean
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