I can understand people wanting to listen to recordings that don’t grate on their nerves or cause fatigue. However I think that many of the analog devotees have mis-identified the source of the harshness in digital media that they do not like. They are blaming the whole concept of digital storage itself as the source of the problem, rather than a) the quality of the source content or b) the quality of the DACs in their playback equipment.

Regarding the revival of cassettes: it’s amazing how much trouble these people are going to go through to achieve – under the very best set of circumstances – mediocre audio performance that does not even match vinyl. I hope they are at least resurrecting high-bias metal tapes and recording/playing them back in decent Nakamichi decks with automatic azimuth adjustment.

Of course a lot of people are contrarians and just want to use old technology because it’s perceived as being cool. I have to admit that I enjoy tube electronics for that reason myself.

Come back Rob – your fans miss you!

Only one comment so far everyone? Just won’t cut it…here’s another from me – now there are two!

Tom made a great comment that we all love separate amps…but that most of us can honestly “get by” with a good-quality receiver in the over-
$500 range.

I have always wanted a separate multichannel amp, but I have to say that today’s mid-range receivers really impress. The knock on internal amps has always been that there are compromises in the power supply etc. However no one talks about the benefits of having amps that are perfectly matched to the preamps that are feeding them. For example, the path between the final preamp stage and input of the amp stage is very short. Thinks about it – straight out of the DACs and into the amp. No chance to pickup external noise on the way to an external amp through an analog audio cable.

Impedance matching between preamp and amp can be perfect…there is no need for a generic output and generic input.

Discrete circuitry on separate amps can be over-rated. IC amp stages can be quieter and more linear than is even possible with discrete circuits.

^^^ Lol !

I’m here. I was just about to write to Tom and Liz to say that I purposely waited before commenting on this episode. I don’t want to seem like I’m the only one commenting. But look at what happened! lol

Oh well…

I’ve mostly just been fiddling with my new NAS. It’s the DS411j from Synology and the thing is pretty incredible! It’s basically its own little Linux box and I’ve thrown four 3TB drives in there and hooked it up to my router. There are a bunch of apps built in and a ton more out on the web. I’m pretty much just using it as a big JBOD to serve up all of my Blu-ray, HD DVD and DVD titles (which have spilled over onto two additional USB 2TB external drives, indicating that I already need a second 411j!), but there is so much more that this NAS could do. It’s rather daunting actually!

So screw analogue cassettes! I might regret all the time and cost of setting up this NAS if and when streaming services ever match both the audio and video quality of Blu-ray. But for now, it’s super sweet having fast, easy access to all of my library over my network and there’s no way in hell I’d ever go back to anything less now!

On the gaming tip:

I’m sure most everyone has heard about the Project Cafe (Nintendo Wii 2) announcements by now. I just want to say, unless Nintendo has some HUGE online plans to go along with it, no amount of “slightly more powerful than the PS3” or 6 inch touch screen controllers is going to matter at all!

Microsoft has proven that Xbox Live is more important to gamers than sheer processing power or even a console with a near 100% failure rate!

I’m happy to see Nintendo finally go HD and a little more “hardcore”, but without an online service that’s as good or better than Live? I’m afraid it’s basically all for naught.

Rob! Rob! Rob! Rob! Great to have you back!

I heartily second your endorsement of the Synology NAS. I have been using a Synology DS-210j NAS with two 1TB drives in RAID 1 for about a year. I have ripped all of my music CDs to it as native .wav files. It also stores all family photos and home videos, and it provides long-term storage for “Recorded TV” from Media Center (too bad Media Center forces you to record to a local drive – ugh).

Recently I have started backing up my DVD collection to it. I find that the ease of surfing my DVD collection on the network outweighs the fact that they are just upconverted SD.

I haven’t found a good way to play them back on my HTPC…seems like I need to invest a lot of time in setup and tweaking. I have PowerDVD 10, which loaded itself into Media Center but then MC didn’t output any audio no matter what I did, so I removed it from MC. (Multichannel audio over HDMI can be complicated). But, I can play the backed up DVDs running PowerDVD as a standalone program…the browsing interface just doesn’t look as slick as I’d like. How do you handle that, Rob? Minor rant: the week after I purchased PowerDVD 10, they released 11!

Ditto to Rob’s gaming comments. XBL is the greatest thing in gaming, ever. I sure wish that it was still active for the original Xbox, though. Most Xbox multiplayer titles will no longer even load in an Xbox 360 (Halo 2, Ghost Recon 2 for example). My son and I would love to play some online multiplayer Halo 2. It seems like a breach of faith to sell games as Xbox Live and then later bail out of supporting them altogether.

Yeah, I gave up on trying to make a pretty interface work between Windows7 and the NAS setup. I’ve just gone super simple.

1) I rip all of my Blu-rays, HD DVDs and DVDs as straight ISO image files – zero conversion and all menus, special features, BD-Live, etc remain intact. I use Slysoft’s AnyDVD HD, for which I thankfully bought a lifetime subscription before they took away that option!

2) I just create shortcuts to the ISO files that are on the NAS. So to access all of the movies, I just open Windows Explorer. I’ve set up a file folder called, “Movies”, and I simply have all of the shortcuts in there pointing to the actual ISO files that reside on the NAS.

3) I just use AirMouse to navigate – or a wireless mouse :p

4) I use Slysoft’s free Virtual CloneDrive to mount the ISO image files. I’ve associated ISO with VCD so it’s just a double click on the shortcut to get the ISO mounted.

5) Mounting the ISO automatically launches ArcSoft Total Media Theater for playback. From there, it’s exactly like I put a physical disc into the tray.

So, this is by no means pretty or slick, but at least it works! HD DVD playback is sometimes problematic (it’s the reason I use ArcSoft TMT, since that’s the only current playback software that still supports HD DVD!). I’ve wanted to create a prettier interface that can work easily with a basic remote, but nothing so far has panned out with the ISO image files that I’m using.

There is always the option to convert the full ISO images to MKV or some other format. The thing is, first and foremost, I like to retain maximum video and audio quality, so recompressing the video into H.264 doesn’t appeal to me. Audio can also be tricky. Most people just convert the lossless TrueHD/DTS-HD MA/PCM to DTS or DD in order to save space. You can convert to lossless FLAC, but most receivers won’t support FLAC via HDMI output, so you have to do PCM decoding inside the HTPC with that setup.

Then there are all the menu, special feature and subtitle issues, not to mention there being no way to retain BD-Live. Now sure, all of those things are often unwanted anyway. But personally, I like to keep those things around “just in case” I ever happen to want them.

So ISO files just make sense for me, personally. I get an experience that is identical to playing a physical disc, which is what I want. I’ve thought about using something like a Popcorn Hour, which is one of the few media tanks that supports ISO playback. But I look at the price and all of the interface issues that plague the Popcorn Hour and it just doesn’t make sense. For barely any more money, anyone can easily build a basic, low power HTPC. So my solution might not be pretty, but at least it works! 😉

Great info, Rob. I also snuck in under the wire on the AnyDVD HD lifetime subscription….it’s great! When you say that you make ISO image files, do you mean that you just copy/paste the entire disc to your NAS? Or is that a special function inside AnyDVD HD? Sorry I’m an HTPC noob.

The Windows Explorer shortcut trick is pretty clever – very efficient. The whole idea of mounting an ISO image is new to me, but the concept makes sense. You’re tricking the PC into thinking it’s looking at a physical disc. I really like the idea of not transcoding the files…down-rezzing everything to another CODEC seems very counterproductive; it takes more work and the result is diminished performance…although admittedly more convenient to work with. I mean, what’s the point of buying and backing up your Blu-rays if you aren’t going to be able to enjoy Blu-ray quality?

AirMouse, as in the DeanMark AirMouse? That’s wild. I’m using a Cideko Air Keyboard with a “gyro” mouse…it kind of looks like an Xbox 360 controller with a chat pad attached, but the mouse responds to movement like a Wii.

If you’ve got AnyDVD HD installed on a Windows computer, you should have the option to have the little Slysoft icon displayed in your system tray. If you right click on that system tray icon, one of the options says, “Rip to Image…”. Use that option and AnyDVD HD will create an ISO image file from any disc with zero conversion. It’s a pure image of the disc, meant to be used to burn that image onto a BD-R or DVD-R.

ISO files cannot be played back normally. So a virtual drive is just a way to “trick” the computer into “seeing” another disc drive installed in your computer. When you mount the ISO file onto that virtual drive, the computer just “sees” another BD-ROM drive and plays back the file exactly like you put a physical disc into a physical disc drive.

You can set up Virtual CloneDrive (which, again, is free) to support multiple, simultaneous virtual drives. If you are using a single HTPC to feed multiple screens, this is one way to have a different ISO file playing on each screen! However, if you go this route, you have to be a bit more careful. When you are finished watching, you have to remember to “unmount” the image file before mounting a new one for each virtual drive. This is a pain and a hassle.

I just have my one HTPC right now, along with my laptop, which also has HDMI out. My plan is to just have one HTPC for each screen. No conflicts and no threat of inadequate system resources that way. So I limit Virtual CloneDrive to only one virtual drive. That way, I can simply double-click on any of the ISO files and Virtual CloneDrive will automatically unmount the old file and mount the new file that I want to play. This is a much simpler setup and makes it so that other people in my home can easily use the system.

I’m a firm believer that Blu-ray is the highest quality audio and video that we’re ever going to see available in our homes. From here on out, all of the movement is going to be in the online streaming space, where it will always be preferable to use less bandwidth and lower bitrates. I do believe that 1080p/24 video and lossless 5.1 audio will eventually become the norm for online streaming video, but I do NOT believe we will ever see 40GB movie files and 19+ Mbps bandwidth for the video alone.

So that is why I have invested in creating my own Blu-ray library. For those of us who care about having the utmost quality, I truly believe that this is as good as it will ever get – at least for a very long time to come. So for me, it makes absolutely no sense to recompress the video and downgrade the audio. Most people don’t care. They just want to torrent movies. Recompressed H.264 in an MKV container still looks better than DVD, and most people don’t care about audio quality what-so-ever. So for the pirates, the MKV versions are what they want…but not me 😉

Finally, AirMouse was an App for the iPhone. I took a quick look and it looks like the name is now “Remote Mouse”. There is a new App called “Air Mouse”, but it’s not the same one that I’m using. “Remote Mouse” looks to be it. It’s very simple – it just lets me use my iPhone as a track pad and a small on-screen keyboard. It’s perfect for use as a basic navigation tool. I wouldn’t want to do any sort of “work” with it. But for just navigating around basic Windows, it’s just like using a laptop track pad. If you already have an iPhone or iPod Touch or iPad, I think it’s a great little $2 App 😀

Ah ha! “Rip to image”…will definitely give that a try.

My HTPC just feeds one projector. So thanks for the tip about using Virtual CloneDrive to mount one virtual drive, which then unmounts/mounts automatically as different ISO files are selected. I am really looking forward to getting this procedure up and running! Full BD quality and features…booyah!

So far I am not drinking the Applejack…however my daughter has made the leap to Android (in her words, “I am in the process of removing Apple from my life”) so maybe she’ll let me try it out on her old 1st Gen iPad Touch…

Yeah, I use an iPhone anyway (ever since the 3G came out in Canada – we never had the Gen 1 iPhone up here :p ), so for me, it was a painless and easy choice. I pretty much always have my iPhone4 on me now, so it’s a convenient way to control my HTPC in my case.

I want to get into home automation and I would really love to just be able to control EVERYTHING from my iPhone. I would like to have iPads as my large touchscreen controllers, iPod Touches for easy, handheld remotes, and then access to surveillance cameras and complete off-site control over 3G via my iPhone.

I’ve no idea if I’ll ever get to that point, but that’s the dream anyway :p

Synology’s NAS servers are already set up to work as a surveillance system, so that’s just one more super-cool thing they can do!

It’s kind of a wild, hodge-podge system that I have in my mind. iDevices as controllers, Windows PCs as the brains, Synology NAS servers as the content and recording tanks and most likely Insteon products for the home automation. The trick is going to be getting it all to work together and trying to create SOME sort of cohesive interface for all of it. Thankfully, I am not the only person out there with this sort of “dream system” and Apple’s iOS devices are ubiquitous and popular enough that they are a likely candidate for developers. That said, if I had the programming skill, Android might make more sense. Being open source, I’d have the option to just right a program myself! But sadly, I don’t have that sort of skill.

We’ll see how it goes, but right now, really getting everything to work the way I want it to is far more difficult than it ought to be.

^
^
Typo above “iPad Touch” should have been iPod Touch.

In general I really like the Apple devices…so well executed. I gave my son a 1st iPad for Christmas and he loves it. But…the lockdown, stuff like the difficulty of printing and moving files on/off the device that have stopped me from embracing Apple myself (yet). However the uses for home theater and home automation are EXTREMELY compelling.

I’m also interested in home automation. Now that I have a computer that is basically “on” all the time, that seems to be a good starting point. To be able to remotely (i.e. from anywhere in the world) turn lights on and off, change HVAC settings, open garage doors, operate surveillance cams, receive wet basement alarms, etc. would be awesome.

Thanks again for your tips and perspectives on all things AV!

Did I seriously type “right” when I meant “write”? O.o

Good grief, I’m never going to be able to live that one down, am I?

:p

Dang homonyms and the continuing inability to edit comments here!