Re-using our HiFi in a Media Hub setup

One of my “nerdy” posts, written principally to explain to myself what I’ve done, why I’ve done it and how I achieved it.

For a long time we’ve had the TV (Samsung UE32D6530) with a Blu-Ray 2.1 Home Entertainment Centre (Samsung HT-D5200) in one room and our HiFi system in another room feeding two sets of speakers in rooms other than the one the TV is in. OK so far?

The BluRay sound output was OK but not that subtle and certainly I had problems with a) getting headphone output for late night listening to music concerts, and b) lip sync between the BluRay player and the TV, which could be very annoying and difficult to resolve in a time short enough to actually enjoy the music!! Coupled to that there was always the need to have the BluRay controller and the TV controller to watch TV. The first to control the audio, the second the HDMI sources.

Every project requires a driver. What happened was that we were thinking about knocking a couple of rooms together the effect of which would be to disturb where the HiFi was. “Why don’t you move it into the room with the TV?” – it was suggested. So … anticipating needing to buy an AV Receiver and lots of other stuff like a Soundbar, I went off to Richer Sounds (Cardiff) where Andie amazed me by advising I didn’t need to spend anything. My existing Marantz amp (PM 6005) had an Optical connection, so it could take the sound input from the TV which also had an Optical outpuut, as it had 4 HDMI ports, could act as the hub instead of needing to buy an AV Receiver. Amazing and what service too!

So I set it up. The four HDMI ports on the TV taking a MacMini, the BluRay player (now with its speakers disconnected), the Cable TV and a 3rd generation Apple TV. The amp taking input from a CD player (Cambridge Azur 540C) and a Tuner (Denon TU-260) – we’ll leave connecting the deck for another day. The TV and the amp connected by an optical cable. I tested it using an existing pair of speakers. Brilliant sound and everything worked. All problems resolved and much easier to use as the Marantz remote control handles all the sound, the TV remote controls all the video sources with of course the Cable TV controller being used for channel selection, etc.

I was getting excited. Perhaps I could benefit even more from a new pair of compact speakers, thus allowing me to leave the existing Bose Acoustimass 5 and Gale speakers in place. I was easily persuaded back at Richer Sounds to try out at home a demo pair of Monitor Audio Radius 90 speakers. After only a few plays of DVD, CD, iTunes, TV and BluRay media I was quickly persuaded this was the right choice and that’s the setup you see in the picture, with one additional hidden addition.

How might I integrate my digital music in a better way than I was currently doing it via the Apple TV, and iTunes on the MacMini? The answer … a Sonos Connect system with RCA output to the Marantz amp connected to the iTunes Media folder and a copy of the iTunes Library hosted on a USB-3 disk connected to an AirPort Extreme router. [The master iTunes Library is shared (using Dropbox) around the other 3 Macs in the house – a brilliant solution to avoid maintaining different iTunes Libraries.] I can now listen to the digital music in all three rooms.  Of course, now I have a Sonos Connect, I can stream to other Sonos Play speakers … but that’s for another day, which may actually come sooner rather than later.

HiFiSo there you have it, a Media Centre with Tuner and CD player; a MacMini, Cable TV, BluRay and an Apple TV all connected to the Smart TV, with the Apple Extreme Router and the Sonos Connect. There’s also a Time Machine backup disk connected to the MacMini which backs up the iTunes Media on the external USB disk.

Job done?!?

 

Just supposin’ … [Part 2]

Reaction to my previous post from an old colleague and friend Brian Kelly and the lack of response to my enquiry about using diaspora* and any of the Indieweb offerings has led me to put those ideas to sleep. However, having set the hare running, I need to close the issue with a short description of what cloud-based services I do use, and offer a justification of why – remembering that continuity and reliability are of huge importance to the individual who has no access to corporate systems.

Unlike Google, I recognise the value of RSS feeds so Feedly has become a really important part of my personal IT infrastructure. Being able to track the posts on a number of blogs and/or websites that I have chosen to follow places it for me above other services such as Flipboard, which I do use to create magazines of content I want to archive, but not as an RSS aggregator at which it is rather poor. Having farmed my RSS feeds, what do I do with them – well I tend to save them in Pocket which I can then access offline as well. [I should mention that it is essential for me to also have services that have an iOS app (for the iPhone/iPad) as well as being able to be accessible from a web browser.]

I think with these two I have chosen niche applications that have no stronger competitors and therefore I have a reasonable expectation that they will be around for a long time.

The same is the case with my next piece of “kit”. I’m ashamed to say I didn’t realise the significance of this until rather late on. I’m talking about Evernote.  It’s difficult to find a thing that Evernote cannot do. It’s not only a note taker, but it can hold clipped webpages, store video and audio clips and even do a reasonable job as a word-processor! If you don’t use it – give it a look. I just love the way you can share a note or a notebook with someone else. Such a convenient way of sharing ideas.

Of course I could use the services offered by Apple as all my kit is provided by them, but I’m not yet convinced by iCloud. Let me give you an example. One of my most-hated pieces of software is iTunes because of the limitations of its data base. Despite that I use it a lot – perhaps I shouldn’t, but I have invested a lot of time and effort in getting it to work for me and now it does, on multiple devices including my Apple TV, using an ingenious workaround that involves storing my iTunes Library in my Dropbox folder and the media on a separate external hard disk. Why don’t I use my iCloud Drive? Well I can’t get it to work on that drive because … would you believe it … iTunes can see my Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive folders but NOT my iCloud Drive!!!

In any case it makes sense to use multiple cloud storage services so I make use of all the main ones with subscriptions to Google Drive and Apple’s iCloud.

That just leaves collaboration and social media services. Until very recently I was convinced that Google had the service offering that was best for me. It provided the granularity, security and functionality that I wanted. It integrated with my main interest – photography – exceptionally well, and even provided a photo storage and editing facility that was as good as any other around. I’ve previously blogged about my discontent at the demise of Picassa, and the confusion of Google+ Photos and Google Photos. Well the latter is beginning to emerge as a nice piece of software but what has happened to Google+ is just not acceptable.  How can you expect a piece of software to develop when you take away functionality. It doesn’t make sense to me. So I’m now looking more seriously at returning to using Facebook more, after all I now know how to share Google Photo Albums on Facebook.

So that’s about it … my personal cloud-based infrastructure. If I’ve forgotten anything, or I change my mind, I’ll update this post at a later date. Bye for now :-).

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