Category: Audio

Audio

Has Your Schiit Remote gone MAD?

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 5, 2024

Both Schiit Audio and PS Audio provide this simple remote control with some of their products. It’s a simple but effective thing and the one shown here has survived 4 years of drops onto a hardwood floor. When that happens, the circuit board, secured by magnets, can be dislodged from the housing. It’s easy to fit back together. No self-respecting audiophile would put up with such nonsense and would immediately begin the search for a DIY mod to put an end to remotes gone MAD. There’s a simple cure offered and a bit of silly after the break.

Audio

A 21st Century Personal Music System

Post author By davehamby
Post date August 23, 2023

I’ll make an assumption that the kids need shoes so budget is a concern. And I’ll make another assumption, that you are able to listen to music after baths and bedtime stories, so loudspeakers are out on space and familial considerations.

Modern headphones offer live concert detail without intruding on the household and do so at a price within reach of many.

Dave Rolls over a ROCK

Post author By davehamby
Post date April 5, 2023

System76 small task-oriented IA64 computers

For many years (2017 or so), Dismal Manor’s Roon Server has run in a virtual machine on a TrueNAS Mini or home-brew storage server. To do this Dave installed a BHYVE virtual machine, added a System76 POP_OS guest, and installed Roon IA64 Linux edition. It worked but TrueNAS had its own agenda. That got old so Dave opened his purse. Read on to learn about the Roon ROCK experience.

Audio Music

ROON Update Planned

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 16, 2023

Roon Website masthead image showing key features of Roon.

Roon had been running badly on the SuperMicro servers. Time to see if we could figure out why and what to do about it. A little tinkering around found that our POP_OS VM was paging out over night and when we resumed play, it would page fault back in. Not the best UX. So, time to come up with a fix.

Audio Personal Computing

Modius Mystery

Post author By davehamby
Post date November 9, 2021

The other day, I had the urge to listen to Gumby and Modius to get a better feel for the difference between the two. So I put both in a Roon audio group and started a record playing in the group. Gumby remained on SPDIF. Modius was shifted to SPDIF. Different Roon Bridges served the common source to the two devices. Modius hung. I did some poking around the next day to see what I could learn.

This attempted experiment started a rather lengthy snipe hunt. Several misunderstandings on my part prolonged the hunt. The investigation uncovered a misunderstandings about MacOS System Information display and found a misconfigured Raspberry Pi based Roon endpoint. Read on for the details.

Audio Music Personal Computing Uncategorized

An Inexpensive Streamer

Post author By davehamby
Post date September 24, 2021

Featured image courtesy of Darko.Audio [1]

I’m going to go out on a bit of a limb here and recommend a piece of kit that I don’t actually own or use but that is a close cousin to kit in use here at Dismal Manor.

When Jason Stoddard, co-founder of Schiit Audio, has one of his periodic ask me anything interviews, a viewer invariably asks if Schiit will make an inexpensive streamer. Jason invariably answers, “no, that’s not our thing”. Jason has wisely chosen to avoid all the pain of what works with what in Linux Land.

But the question comes up sufficiently often that folks might like an answer. Back when I was looking for a streamer to replace AirPort Express and ChromeCast bits, I happened to discover John Darko’s Darko Audio YouTube channel. One evening, John reviewed the Allo Digital DigiOne Signature streamer and gave it marks that placed it firmly in high end sonic company with the Bluesound Node. After a bit, I ordered the boards and enclosure and put one together that I use in my lounge as my main stream receiver. I have a secondary HiFiBerry stream receiver that I use with the TV and video players.

In this article, I’ll tell you about a newer Allo Digital product that takes a bit different tack that will work nicely with today’s kit. That product is Allo Digital’s USBRIDGE Signature [2]. We’ll also look at what the more commercial products offer that is not part of the DIY streamers.

Audio

OMG, Apple Music is Good! But not Perfect

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 26, 2021

For a million years I’ve been scowling at Apple Music and the iTunes Store as Apple sold lossy-compression renderings of all of the music offered. All of the gripes to Apple Feedback finally payed off somewhat with the initiation of Apple Music Lossless. An earlier article explained the switchology of setting up Lossless streaming and downloads. This article talks about the results. It’s simple, Apple Lossless delivers the Red Book original. Spatial and Dolby Atmos are another thing. It’s all about the mastering, who did it and their goals for the mix.

Audio

Apple Music Lossless?

Post author By davehamby
Post date June 11, 2021

Apple now offers bundles of online service under the Apple One logo. Here at Dismal Manor we have

Apple TV+
Apple iCloud storage
Apple News
Apple Music

Since my storage plan was $10/month, Apple TV+ was another $10, and Apple News another $10, changing to Apple One Premier was the same out of pocket and allowed me to add Apple Music to the mix. Read on to learn my impressions of the new Apple Music Lossless offering.

Audio Personal Computing Video

M1 iMac Pre-Purchase Planning

Post author By davehamby
Post date May 4, 2021

M1 iMac stock image courtesy of Apple.

I expect Apple Silicon to have a major impact on the functionality of the iMac. The addition of the custom rendering and custom machine learning hardware resources places the desktop Macs on par with the iPads and iPhones opening possibilities for audio and video processing on the new products. So I decided to be an early adopter while my 2017 iMac had some trade-in value.

In this post, I’ll talk about some things to consider in the pre-purchase planning phase.

Audio Personal Computing

Roon Core Saga

Post author By davehamby
Post date March 7, 2021

Our Roon Core was last installed in 2018 using Ubuntu Cosmic Cuttlefish. This was a fall version with only 2 years of support available. Given that it had dropped out of support, I decided to reinstall the VM’s Guest OS. This post shares what I learned.