Logitech bought Slim Devices last week. It’s hard to say what this means as of yet–except they’re keeping Slim Devices as a wholly-owned subsidiary so they should function about as they did before, with better access to manufacturing and distribution resources. Some are worried they’ll lose their focus and hands-on attitude with support, which is a possibility, but hopefully it won’t happen. And hopefully they’ll also keep their focus on open source and the development model, which is one of the things Logitech said they were interested in even though they’re not doing much at all with open source at this point.
All I know is I have a great Squeezebox and look forward to many good years with it.
I had several projects over the last few days. I talked about them a while ago.
One was taking my trusty 1″ spade bit and drilling a new hole between the living room and family room. I had a hole, but it’s full with 2 DirecTV cables and a phone cable for the TiVo. The new hole is to run an RCA audio cable between the family room receiver and the living room receiver. I had this running through the doorway on the other side but that was suboptimal. The cable is now out of the way so I’m much happier, not to mention the wife.
And on those kitchen speakers, I did get the Polk RC60i speakers for $149 at Circuit City several months ago and hadn’t put them in. The wall where the refrigerator is is opposite a living room wall, so a hole in that wall goes into the living room and I can hook the speakers up as the B speakers there. I have a soffit above the fridge and cabinets, and had intended to put them in the front of the soffit, but there’s a smaller soffit behind the big one, and it would have involved cutting the wood to do it. I realized this weekend I could just put them under the soffit–it’s about a foot deep and would fit the 6 inch speakers just fine–they’re 8 inches with the trim. So today I bought a drywall saw and hacked away–the back wall behind the fridge is also a false wall with about 6 inches of clearance to the back wall of the living room, so I cut a bigger opening, through which I had to drill with the spade bit and then poke a hole with the drywall saw through the living room wall on the other side to find where to drill from the living room to make a hole all the way through. Easy. It was then nothing to run speaker wire behind the fridge and into the soffit (it’s open behind the fridge, just have to go around the cabinet), measure and cut the holes, and install the speakers, which have an excellent mechanism that you just screw in and the retaining clips pop out.
They sound good–when I tested them before I installed them the bass response was off but that’s because they’re designed to use the wall as a resonator. Since this isn’t a typical installation I think it’s a bit more “boomy” than it should be, but I don’t know if it’s worth fixing–eventually, someday, we’re going to redo the kitchen, and I don’t think we’ll keep all these fake walls. Maybe I’ll stuff some insulation up there and see if it changes anything.
Tomorrow maybe I’ll test running both receivers and all 9 speakers (5 on the family room, 2 in the living room, and 2 in the kitchen) all at once.
I decided this weekend it was time to upgrade to SlimServer 6.5 beta. Took a couple of false starts–I had converted 6.3 to run with MySQL, and 6.5 does it by default, and comes with it’s own MySQL instance to run, so I had to sort that out. I ended up no longer running it as root, which is probably a good idea anyway–now MySQL and SlimServer run as my non-privileged user account on my Kuro Box.
6.5 is nice. It comes with SoftSqueeze 3.0b2, which emulates the Transporter, so you can play with that. It’s certainly as close as I’ll come to getting one.
The one problem I was having was lots of random pauses and not going to the next track with Random Mix running when I was accessing SlimServer from work. Turns out it didn’t happen if I streamed FLAC instead of transcoding to mp3, but I don’t want to be a bandwidth hog. I ended up fixing it with the new feature to fork a separate process for the audio stream. This apparently kept whatever was causing the dropouts to happen from happening. It’s very cool.
The other thing is I think the latest firmware sounds better. But that’s crazy voodoo talk so I don’t believe it’s anything other than observer effect., but I guess I’ll take it.
So Slim Devices has released a new piece of hardware, the Transporter, which they’re billing as their “audiophile” music player. Basically, it’s rack-sized, contains even higher-quality components than the Squeezebox, has buttons and a knob on the case, a lighted remote, tons more inputs and outputs, and 2 displays instead of one. I must admit that when I first saw the picture I thought it must have been a crazy mock-up with the two screens and all the buttons. It looks really nice, and costs $2000.
This is clearly a part for the high-end market. Reading stuff about the Squeezebox, you realize that many of the absolute pickiest audiophiles didn’t take the Squeezebox seriously because it didn’t look like an audiophile component. They’ve certainly addressed that, and the price is enough to make people feel it’s worth something, but it’s still quite cheap compared to things like high-end CD players. Thing is, the Squeezebox is a sensational box–blows things like the Netgear and Roku away sound-wise–and 95% of the people who want a device like this will be happy with the $300 Squeezebox. But now, for those who insist on the most exotic stuff, the Transporter will be there to transport an additional $1700 out of their bank accounts.
If you can’t tell, I won’t likely be buying one, mostly because it’s completely out of scale pricewise with the rest of my equipment, and it’s hard to justify $2000 on something like this when the Squeezebox is pushing the bits just fine. But I’m glad Slim Devices made this to help satisfy some of their audiophile critics and get some revenue from them. There will be plenty who are happy to pay $2000 for it and from what’s been said it will be better enough than the SB3 to make them happy with the sound. And I can only assume some of the innovations in the Transporter will trickle down to the Squeezebox line in good time. Certainly it will be using the SlimServer software like my box, and stuff they develop for the high-end market in terms of interface will likely be available to me.
So, good for Slim Devices on their new box, and here’s to more innovation.
So if you go to kurobox.com today, it’s a stupid domain park. Apparently someone forgot to pay the bill. Just when things are looking like they’re getting better. It’s frustrating.
(By the way, I use Dreamhost. They autorenew domains. I imagine most hosting companies will. If they didn’t I’d be losing domains left and right. Dreamhost is really good and if you want to host a domain, use them.)
I haven’t posted in a while. I’m in a sort of holding pattern. SlimServer 6.3 will be released soon, I’ll probably upgrade when it comes out. Looks like it will fix some niggling issues I’ve been having.
Really, things are just working nowadays. I bought some CDs recently and got the ripping notification all working again. Revolution is running a contest on interesting Kuro apps, and I’ll probably enter this month, even though second prize is a Buffalo LinkTheatre which is sort of competing with the Squeezebox. But I think my solution is a good one.
I’m also looking forward to the new Kuro, which should be released in the fall. Faster processor, SATA, upgradable RAM, all of which should mean better SlimServer performance. Also, I’ll probably get a 500GB or 700GB hard drive for the new one, which is good since I’m actually running out of space (I have 26GB left, which is probably about 60 CDs more, which I won’t fill before fall, but it’s getting tight–and I’m using several GB for backups of files for the laptops.) If I do upgrade I’ll use the old Kuro for backups and file storage and the new one for music. But that’s the future.
Well, I finally got the 2.6 kernel running on my Kuro Box. I had tried and failed several times. Then I was reading the thread about it and realized there should be messages in /var/log/messages. There I saw the kernel was actually booting but the ethernet driver wasn’t loading.
It was then I realized I had built the kernel for the regular Kuro Box instead of the Kuro Box HG, because I followed the wrong instructions. Whoops! (Actually, I may have had other issues at first but since the kernel was booting last night I knew I had fixed that stuff.)
I should have better USB performance because the annoying debug message logged for every block transferred is gone. And the 2.6 kernel is just slicker all around. So I’m happy.
The new receiver is sweet. With my sub hooked up it sounds fantastic. I’ve been listening to a lot more music lately which is good.
I’ve got a temporary audio cable running from it to the old receiver now in the living room. It too sounds really good (I forgot how good the Polk R15 speakers I got dirt cheap ($70) at Circuit City were). I will eventually cut a hole between the living room and family room. Iwas originally going to drill a small hole, but I think I may just cut something about the size of a junction box so I can put stuff through whenever and however I want. Right now I’ve got a hole with the 2 satellite cables for the DirecTiVo, and the phone line for it, but the hole is full.
One thing that is not optimal is listening to music while in the kitchen. But my wife came to the rescue with the suggestion that we put wall-mount speakers in the soffit above the refrigerator. I will run speaker wire to the B terminals on the living room receiver (which is on the other side of the wall the fridge is against.) I think I will get the Polk RC60i speakers which should sound as good (maybe better) than the R15s. Problem is they’re a little pricey. I found a website (Brand-electronics.com) that sells them for $116 but I don’t trust them. Circuit City has them for $200. I’m hoping for a sale tomorrow. That will be an ideal solution–and I’ll have the ability to pipe audio at a reasonable volume level all over the downstairs of the house.
I’m also thinking about outdoor speakers for summer. The Denon can drive another pair of speakers, being a 7.1 receiver I’ve got hooked up as a 5.1 configuration. That will wait until warmer weather.
Someday I’ll think about what to do upstairs.
I got the new sub amp and put it in. Sweet.
Partstore.com listed this part as a replacement for the original part. It was very different–the PCB for the amp circuitry was completely different, there were larger power transistors and a heat sink (the old one didn’t have a heat sink–hmm, you think that might have had something to do with it blowing out?), and the knobs were stepped. And yes, the amp gain control goes to 11.
I’m hopeful this part will last longer. I put it in and reset the receiver to send signal to the sub again. It was clean, pure bass, better than I’ve heard in years. Good stuff. It’s also helped make my other speakers sound better too–the little Klipsch Quintet speakers really are dependent on the sub–I have the amp crossover at 120Hz, which frees up the satellites to do what they’re good at.
I read at avsforum.com that people recommend splitting the sub output to both channels of the sub to get more gain from the sub amp. I think I’ll try that now that the amp isn’t shot.
There’s an Ask Slashdot about automated CD ripping. I couldn’t resist commenting telling them about abcde and this site. As Navin Johnson would say, “This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need!”