Audio Hardware – Absolutely Baching

Mission Accomplished!

Posted on 18th January 202421st January 2024 by hjr

My turn-of-the-year project to move this website off a vintage 2012 server running Ubuntu onto a slightly-less-vintage 2019 server running TrueNAS Core (an 'appliance' built on top of FreeBSD) is now complete. What's more, there's a backup of it running on a TrueNAS Scale server (another 'appliance' built on top of Debian), on a server I was gifted when the company I was working for in Australia in 2012 sold itself off to a rival and all the staff were made redundant. It's my oldest-ever server, I think: vintage 2010 or thereabouts, but I've specc'd it up with 2 12-thread Xeon CPUs (so, 24 threads in all) running at 2.8GHz, and with 192GB of RAM. So definitely old, but not exactly shabby -and more than capable of running the 30 or so virtual machines I need to test my software against most varieties of Linux and Windows, in addition to acting as my music, video and website backup server.

Apart from a couple of outages today as the final moves of the (very noisy!) servers into their designated loft space took place, I don't think anyone would have noticed much by way of change or disaster! In fact, 95% of the move was finished on January 1st, well before my own announced deadline. The other 5% has been getting the backup server configured properly, which took longer than I expected because I chose to upgrade the CPUs and the RAM... and then managed to buy two sticks of faulty RAM and had to wait for replacements to be shipped from Germany. [...]

My New Hardware Classical Music Player

Posted on 27th October 202327th October 2023 by hjr

Behold my "new" hardware classical music player!

Yeah: it's not exactly a beauty, nor redolent of tech-nerd sex appeal, I realise. It is, in fact, an HP T620 Flexible Thin Client and dates from 2013 or so. So I just bought myself a wheezingly underpowered ten year-old computer: what was I thinking?! [...]

An IT Tour

Posted on 20th August 202320th August 2023 by hjr

A recent correspondent put me in mind of the fact that, having at last settled into my new home, it was perhaps time to do a sort-of guided tour through it as far as explaining what, technologically speaking, makes my music play. I notice, for example, that just a few weeks ago I took a photo of my music 'cabinet' in which an Apple Mac Mini (vintage 2012) took pride of place as the music-producing PC. Well, that's not true these days (as regular readers will probably know, I suffer from a bad case of operating system re-installationitis, with consequent side-effects of PC moving-aroundism):

As you can see, I don't exactly do a lot of dusting! As you can also see, the Mac Mini has been replaced by my Raspberry Pi 4: though it can have a fan fitted to keep it cool, mine is housed within an aluminium case that acts as a very good passive heatsink. Temperatures are therefore seldom above 50°C, and I've accordingly not bothered to fit the fan: the Pi is completely silent in operation in consequence ...and that's a key requirement of any IT equipment that sits in my music listening room (for hopefully obvious reasons!) [...]

Sorted. Sort of.

Posted on 26th June 202328th June 2023 by hjr

The photograph you see at the left was taken on April 30th, 2023 -about four days after we've physically moved into our new house. You'll note that one of the rooms cannot really be walked into, since it is jam-packed with boxes and belongings! The rest of the house was never quite that bad, but it was pretty bad: there were 150+ boxes and on day four I think we'd unpacked about 4 of them 🙂

Around three weeks later (on May 24th, to be exact), the room destined to become my music room looked like this: [...]

The Giocoso Hardware Player

Posted on 28th February 20232nd March 2023 by hjr

At the left, in the thumbnail, you see my brand new media player. It's totally silent. It's a complete mess of cables and chaos. And it's smaller than a coke can.

I am, of course, using Giocoso as my software to play music. I've been doing that for a long time, using assorted standard PCs, small form factor PCs, tiny PCs, laptops and Lord knows what else. The trouble with all of those modes of playback: every single computing device has involved a fan somewhere. If not on the CPU itself, at least in its power supply. Now, fans make noise... and the one thing you definitely do not want in your music room is a source of noise. So for absolutely ages, I've been after a way to run Giocoso that's completely silent: what you see in the thumbnail to the left (which you can click on to get a full-sized version) is the first tentative steps on that road. [...]

PC Change... One More Time!

Posted on 19th February 202223rd February 2022 by hjr

Four months in, and for some unknown reason, my Minisforum UM250 running Kubuntu decided to go all graphical-glitchy on me, as it had previously done in Manjaro and Arch. It then seemed to get better after a while, before going all wonky once more. Currently, it's in an 'OK' phase, but who knows how long that will last! I assume some software got updated somewhere along the line -maybe a driver of some sort- and this introduced instabilities where there were none before. But, frankly, at this point I don't care any more: the Minisforum is destined to be retired from desktop duties and instead will be translated to the loft, where it can run something 'server-like' that doesn't require a GUI nor day-to-day interaction with it. I haven't thought what, precisely, it might end up doing, but I'm sure I'll think of something before too long!

It's a shame (not least, because it wasn't cheap!), but I can't be having my daily driver desktop doing random things at random times. [...]

CPU Shenannigans

Posted on 13th May 2021 by hjr

Fresh from my war with a new mini PC (which I lost, you'll recall), I remained determined to do something to upgrade my old workstation-class desktop PC. I bought it second-hand a few years ago: it's a Dell Precision T3610, which is a bit of a monster, and was originally constructed (I think) in around 2012 or 2013: its warranty says it started in February 2014 and expired in February 2017, so it's somewhere in that ball-park.

It shipped with a Xeon E5-1620 v2 CPU CPU, which was launched in the third quarter of 2013, so that also helps date the machine. That CPU has (inevitably, as far as Intel was concerned back then!) 4 cores and thus 8 threads when hyperthreading was enabled. Nothing too remarkable, but not exactly shabby, either. I think when I bought it, it came with 16GB of RAM: I soon bumped that up to 96GB. So, it's not memory constrained either! It also shipped with an Nvidia Quadro K4000, which was cutting edge at the time, but has long since been eclipsed by newer graphics cards: since I don't play games beyond Solitaire, however, I don't particularly care how out-of-date my graphics capabilities are! [...]

Universal Audio Converter - Updated

Posted on 2nd April 2021 by hjr

I have just updated the Absolutely Baching Universal Audio Converter (AUAC), bumping it to version 2.06.

This release adds quite a significant new feature: DSF is now accepted as an input format. [...]

Birthday Presents

Posted on 4th January 20214th January 2021 by hjr

It soon being my birthday (and Christmas having just been and gone), it seemed appropriate to buy myself some presents.

The results are as you see them on the left (which you can click on, to make bigger), which encapsulates the current state of my study's approach to things audio-visual. [...]