Screaming Monkey Research Laboratories

i have no words for this…

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The Creative X-fi (at the back left of the simpsons chess set) seems to be working fine.  I have it hooked into the front of the Marantz.  I’ll sort out the digital connection later.  I’ve a media center remote hooked up to it now.  Works nicely.

Presumably that is a volume control on the X-fi.  Doesn’t seem to work.  Maybe I should read the manual.

Edit: I bought a toslink cable for $15 at Microcenter.  The X-fi works fine with it.  The volume knob works if you install the creative software.  I warn you, however, that software ends up downloading about 500mb of updates.  Takes forever and who needs all that?

I’m doing just about everything except what I need to do today.

Other than I wonder what this was recorded on (more pops than I expect in the digital age) and that the songs are short enough that it almost feels like a sampler, this is a pretty amazing album.  Love her lyrics.  No brutal rhymes here.  Very cool.

It is the first album to knock Tanya Donelly’s Whiskey Tango Ghosts from continuous loop since I rediscovered that album.

It is $8 on Amazon MP3 Music download for the full album.  Find your favorite Amazon affiliate and buy it.

I’m pretty firmly of the opinion that Ticket To Ride is the best Beatles track ever.  (Although Helter Skelter is pretty close.)  Just found a Beatles album (1) that I had lost…

I love this one…

I’ve been working on my HTPC setup.

I swapped out the cable I purchased from Radio Shack the other day.  It connects nicely enough but it should really be a 75 ohm coax cable.  I found such a cable to MicroCenter which I attached to a single mono mini RCA plug.  So that works fine.

I eventually want to add a Blu-Ray drive.  The aging processor (AMD dual core 2 or 2.2 GHz Socket 939 I believe.) in my HTPC can’t decode Blu-Ray.  Just not powerful enough.  At 1GB of memory I’m probably hosed there, too.

Instead of updating memory, motherboard and cpu I picked up an AMD HD 4550 based video card.  $40 after $10 rebate.  If you don’t need gaming these things can be had for cheap.  I’d pay more than that for the audio alone. (AMD/ATI includes audio on their latest video cards.)  It is supposed to offload 100% of the video decode from the CPU.  I’m not sure if it will do it for everything but it claims to do so for Blu-Ray.

One area of immediate improvement is in reduced noise from the PC.  This is because the 4550 doesn’t require active cooling.  So I went from a pretty quiet video card to a silent one.  Because it has such a low power draw (Less than 25W under full load.) it just doesn’t generate that much heat.   The previous card was a power hungry (for its era) 6800.  That’s the card that baked a fan inside my PC case.  Just got too hot and the fan died.  Removing that heat source from the PC case should slow the other fans.  Now I just need to figure out how to silence the hard drive.  I think when I can get a Ocz vertex SSD disk for less than $100 I’ll put that in there.

I may end up with a digital cable or direct tv box but right now I only have a TV, receiver and PC in the room.  One wire from PC to the TV, another to the receiver and two from the TV to the receiver.  Pretty clean.

I’m driving this with J. River Media Center 13.   I have two zones setup.  One for TV that outputs to the 4550 and its built in audio.  The other for Audio that is connected to the digital out on the Audigy 2.  I’m leaning towards setting up a second audio zone that I’ll run to the basement.  (I wonder if I can dump the sound to separate channels on the Audigy 2’s digital outs and just run speakers to the basement off of the Marantz’s rear channels.)

This setup lets me :

• Play my entire music collection stored on a WD World Book NAS in my office.
• Play any video from there.
• Play other media like LensWork extended.
• Play Hulu.com or any other web hosted shows.
• Play DVD’s from the DVD ROM drive.
• Rip DVDs to the local disk for a much more silent setup.
• I can also use the whole thing to go online to check things out while watching TV.
• If I hooked up a TV Tuner card to the PC (and an antenna) I would even be able to use it as a DVR.

Pretty pleased so far.

The only problem with doing all this is that the PC is no longer the weakest link.  Now I’m looking at the TV, receiver and speakers.  Unfortunately any improvement there will cost me many times what I’ve currently spent to update this setup.  ($50 so far.)

It is just a mono minijack on the Soundblaster.  So a simple mono minijack to RCA phono plug is all you need.  Or you can just use the left channel of a stereo minijack to RCA cable.

Easy.

So far I quite like the new U2 album No Line On The Horizon.  This despite the fact that it sounds a wee bit like a cross between The Unforgettable Fire and Zooropa.  (As I seem to recall Zooropa was my favorite album ever for about 2 weeks.  I really don’t understand that at all.)  So far Magnificent and Moment of Surrender are my favs.

I bought ABBA Gold today.

I’m liking this Amazon MP3 Download store. I like this album more…