ATX cases don't seem to exist which fit the bill. intel designed the ATX spec to have 7 available slots.
You're an audio guy. Computer cases are designed for computer people.
That said, check around at various case distributors (jinco.com comes to mind), and find something with knockouts that fit whatever SCSI connectors you need. These all seem to have fairly standard mounting, so it should be easy (trivial, even) to relocate the connector from the bracket to the back panel given some basic hand tools. It shouldn't be much (if any) different in cost from something without SCSI knockouts.
If that doesn't free up enough slots, try using different audio hardware. I'm not aware of anything with an external ADAT breakout box, but it might exist.;) If you're doing lots of analog I/O to the PC, plenty of things are available which connect via DB-25 (or similar) to a breakout box covered in jacks, thus consuming only one slot.
I've got a Lexicon core2 which does this, but it's somewhat limited (4 in/8 out in a box, ADAT in/out on the card).
If that's not an option, you'll need to be more creative, unfortunately - nothing off-the-shelf (short of a PCI bridge as another poster mentioned) exists.
Convert an old AT case to ATX. They're available with dozens of slots, for next-to-nothing.
Or, start punching/drilling holes in the back of an ATX box. Looking at the expansion bracket on an RME DIGI9652 (www.rme-audio.com/english/hammer/d9652.htm), it seems possible to mount to the back of any box given a drill bit and nuts for the BNC jacks, and some creative metalwork for the TOSLINK connectors.
If you're afraid of metalwork, any decent machine shop can knock this out, near-flawlessly, for much less than $100. Even a tinsmith would have no difficulty with the project (and would likely charge less). They'll have an easier time if you use a case made from light-guage steel (ie, cheap), or aluminum (bloody expensive).
If you've got money to burn, look into using a single-board computer. These guys fit a (typically) high-end intel chip, integrated video (ATI seems popular), and standard I/O onto a full-length (sometimes shorter) card, which then plugs into a backplane covered with huge numbers of PCI slots.
They're intended for industrial use, and are thus expensive. And the backplanes are typically constructed to fit into a specific rackmount (!) case. Search for SBC on google.
Those are the easy ways.
The difficult way involves impedance-matched cabling bundled into a snake, plugged in with some high-density monolithic connectors to a breakout box of your own construction. It would be nice, and not expensive at all, but I surmise that if you were willing to go that route, you'd have already done so.:)
While the aluminum is coated with laquer (and in some cases, lots of silk screen printing on top of that), it wouldn't take much of a pock mark in this laquer to allow salt-ladden moisture in. Once it's there, it will oxidize aluminum. Once the aluminum oxidizes, it will allow more salt and moisture within. The seawater might also have a detrimental effect on the laquer itself, exacerbating the issue, though this seems less likely.
If you don't want them to disappear in this manner again, simply don't take them with you. At least, leave the store-bought titles at home and bring CD-R backups. Some Kodak blanks have an extra layer on top, claimed to enhance durability. Others are available coated with a white substance, intended for direct-to-disc inkjet printing (I had some Maxell discs of this description, a couple of years ago). All of these are somewhat more expensive than regular dime-store blanks. The priciest of them (around $US 3 each, it seems) probably being Apogee Digital's brand, which has what they call
"DataSaver II" resin on top.
It is really a shame, at times, that "Blatant Misinformation" is not included among the moderators' choices.
That said, a CD (mass-produced, CD-R, -RW, whatever) starts out as a polycarbonate (the same stuff safety glasses are made from) disc, of familiar size. It contains microscopic grooves on the top surface - in the mass-produced case, this groove consists of binary pits, in the CD-R case, it's simply a spiral groove, with a bit of information about the disc (dye formulation, total time, whether it's been taxed for audio use, etc).
Why is there a groove on a CD-R? Because the burner needs something to track - it, unlike a cutting stylus for LPs, or the mastering machine for CDs, does not have the ability to move unguided. (To the naysayers: the difference between 74- and 80-minute blanks is the width of this groove.)
Moving right along. On a mass-produced CD, aluminum (or sometimes gold) is deposited by an evaporative process atop the aforementioned pits in the aforementioned polycarbonate, thus providing a reflective surface.
A CD-R is first coated (probably sprayed) with a dye, and then that is aluminized (or plated in gold, or silver, or some other such thing - CD-R makers are all about hype, these days).
A CD-ROM burner works by putting "holes" in this dye layer, thus providing an approximation of its mass-produced counterpart's physical pits, as the burned/unburned dye has different reflectivity than the aluminum.
After all that, the disc is sprayed with a very thin layer of laquer. Nothing magic, no fancy plastic - just transparent air-dry laquer, like people have been using for a long, long time for all manner of things. On most discs, one can see a thin bead of this stuff on the outside edge, due to slight overspray.
It is then silkscreened with UV-cured inks (to prevent the solvents in air-dry ink from dissolving the laquer, thus exposing aluminum to the atmosphere and allowing it to oxidize, ala 1980s Bit Rot), and sold.
A DVD with multiple layers is built as follows:
Polycarbonate|Partially reflective layer|Polycarbonate|More reflective layer|Laquer|Artwork
A DVD with multiple layers and multiple sides, is built as above, but sans artwork and with four layers of polycarbonate and reflective media (two semi-transparent, two opaque).
And for those who -still- just don't fucking understand how this bit of simple, decades-old technology is put together, I suggest you find a CD, a CD-R coaster, a sharp object, and a hammer. Take one apart and see for yourself.
And, having done that, if anyone reading this still believes that a CD is constructed differently, they're full of shit. Which would be fine, if the same people wouldn't proclaim otherwise.
For additional information on what a CD consists of and a really pretty animated GIF, start at http://www.disctronics.co.uk/cdref/cdbasics/cdbasi cs4.htm and read until your eyes bleed.
Re:I am afraid it is you who are mistaken
on
Insanely Audiophile
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· Score: 2
The vast majority of studios use Yamaha NS-10M speakers - some just as a stable reference (because they're -everywhere-), and others full-time (because they're -everywhere-, and why bother with more than one pair of monitor speakers in the same room?). Somewhat like Windows on a PC. Moving right a long...
By audiophile standards, it's a horrible speaker. Big, honky upper midrange - and no low bass. Limited low-level detail. Limited dynamic range.
Supposedly (and I'm not sure if I give them this much credit) Yamaha created the speaker with the idea of making something which sounded similar to what most real people have, but "good" enough to be used in a studio. Compared to most Circuit City wares, it's really not bad.
Whatever the case, modern rock (and techno, and rap, and...) is dynamically smashed, harmonically huge, and in some cases, artificially tuned, beaten, massaged, panned, and molested in completely disgusting ways, until it sounds good on a pair of abused Yamaha NS-10s.
If you're really interested in hearing what the engineer and producer hear (these folks have infinately more control of the final result than any member of the band), pick up a pair of NS-10s. If you don't like them, so what? Find something different that makes your music sound how -you- want it to sound, and/or adjust it to sound differently by way of an EQ, a BBE, and boosting the volume of a subwoofer. Throw a compressor in there. How about an expander? A noise gate! Why not fire up the reverb machine in your surround sound reciever? The mind boggles at the signal processing capabilities available today.
If you just want to listen to rock music, it doesn't matter that you're destroying the original signal with any one of these toys, because the signal has already been destroyed a thousand times before you got your hands on it. Tweak it until it suits -you-, because that's exactly what -they- did.
Incidentally, the same logic holds true of the audiophile mentality - except, their goal is to recreate sounds in a manner that -they- find realistic (this is supposedly objective), in the most simple way they can. Which can cost a fortune, and yield remarkable results with a similarly minimalist recording. As an aside, a good audiophile system can made some rock recordings sound particularly good - this is an accidental side-effect, and is in no way intended by the producer of the album.
The noise floor of a full auditorium is higher than 16-bit linear PCM, in a typical minimalist recording. Probably due to the sound of a few thousand breathing, shifting bodies.
If one can hear a sneeze from the mic position, it will thus be recorded. Similarly, for the zippo lighter.
If you cannot hear a sneeze from 16 rows (figure 2.5 feet per row, or just 40 feet overall) away, you've got problems. See a doctor. Your hearing damage might even be treatable.
For a further dose of reality, let's assume that a healthy sneeze produces a level of 85dBA at a point 1 foot in front of the sneezer's head, in anechoic free field. At 2 feet, this sneeze is at 79dBA, at four feet, 73dBA. Once we get up to 40 feet, the sneeze is just a little less than 55dBA. In reality, the sneeze will be somewhat louder, due to reverberation - but that's safe to ignore for the purposes of this argument.
Now, let's assume we've got a 16-bit DAT machine with a pair of good mics with good preamps that we're using to record an orchestral work. We've got the gain set such that levels of 120dBA at the microphones, which are at the front of the stage, do not induce clipping (and we're hoping that nothing louder than this occurs and destroys the recording).
Given this enviroment, the aforementioned sneeze would be 65dB below maximum. If 16-bit linear PCM has dynamic range of 96dB (it does), and the final product (a CD) is not fucked with at all (that is, it is bit-perfect from the original DAT), then this sneeze will be at a level of 31dB -above- the floor of the CD, which is also to say that the sneeze has a maximum of 31dB of dynamic range.
This is more than adequate to capture a sneeze - it far surpasses the dynamic potential of most modern rock music.
Oh. In case you missed it: This is completely devoid of being "tweaked all to hell" in the "mixing/mastering process", because such processes do not exist in this example - nor in great numbers of excellent classical recordings.
It's simple, really: Two microphones (surprise, surprise) match up beautifully with two speakers, and two ears. No need to do anything more except, on occasion, mess with levels. And obviously, in this instance, even that is not needed to "capture the level of detail" I describe.
The world of high-end audio is somewhat amiss from the norm of more money buying additional features. A high-end system is typically as -minimal- as possible - extra components are all destructive of the audio signal.
Rather than spending X thousands of dollars on, say, all-wheel drive in a new Audi, an audiophile will spend X thousands just for the assurance that a common feature (simple tone controls, for instance) is not present.
Those features which remain because they're needed for the system to function (crossovers in speakers, for instance) are so ghastly overbuilt, from such stuff as hand-rolled matched capacitors, flat-wire inductors made from.9999 silver, and other hugely-expensive, measurably (and marginally) better parts.
And still, the use of these parts is minimized - every component counts as another way to introduce distortion between the microphone in some music hall and the listener's ears in a different time and place.
Joe Consumer buys based on features, because that's what they're accustomed to doing while shopping for cars, electric ranges, and all manner of other expensive items. An automotive purist, in love with driving, will ignore the sticker price and associated list of flash, get behind the wheel and experience a vehicle, and then another, and another until he's found something with the correct balance for his taste. Issues of what color and material the seats are fall aside in favor of their ability to properly support the driver. If the cheapest, low-end fabric seats provide better posture than the supposed-high end, heated leather monstrosities, the choice is obvious and a cow's life is saved. That the buyer saved money is insubstantial.
Audiophiles don't buy components based on what "features" are present, as they can do nothing but color the sound in one way or another - something they're certainly not interested in while questing for absolute transparency. The best component is one which is not present.
Much as someone fixated on performance driving might like to feel every stone in the pavement through the chassis of the car, and would be comforted by the steering wheel reporting the exact condition of a road in an attempt to feel more connected, an audiophile seeks the same experience with music. If someone sneezes in the sixteenth row of a Bethoven performance, or a Zippo is lit in some smoke-filled jazz bar, they want to hear it - and hear it with enough character that they can visualize the person who sneezed, or identify the type of plating on the Zippo.
Whether or not they're insane for wanting such things is left as an exercise for the reader.
Be careful with that axe, Eugene. Them's fightin' words.
I now -expect- to see a patent filed for just such a thing, but generalized away from mp3. I can't think of any prior art, and besides, it wouldn't matter given the present state of the USPTO.
They want fees from people who accept money (directly or indirectly) for streaming, not just people who turn a profit. The fee schedule starts at $2,000.
Or do I have a different definition of "revenue" than the rest of the posters here?
From the anecdotes in the article, the only way to avoid paying Thomson is to eliminate all money from the picture. They want a peice of all stream-related revenue. Which is to say, that if you sell t-shirts to promote the stream, subsidize bandwidth, or equipment, or studio space, they want $2k/year (minimum), and 2% after that. This is from the revenue stream, not profit-after-expenses.
If you sell advertising, they offer a plan where you pay 3% of advertising revenue, with a $3k annual minimum. This, presumably, would also include income from any banner ads on the stream's web page.
It doesn't matter if you're making money hand over fist, or if you're just trying to gather support to keep the thing alive while working elsewhere full-time and running at a loss, just for a fun thing to do. They want a cut.
This will, should it come to pass, probably damage live365's already shaky business model to the point of complete failure.
It will mean that the low-budget streams will need to move to zero-budget, or find a source of income to cover the $2k annual minimum.
It, like so many other things, punishes the little guy. Selling a $10 hat with a inkjet-printed logo costs the seller ~$2k. I'll let the reader figure out how many $10 hats it takes annually to cover the licensing cost of the bloody ISO standard codec.
All conspiracy theories aside, I don't know that they'd be able to introduce this retroactively. I got my licensed-and-legit Fraunhoffer MP3 codec with Microsoft's Netshow. I didn't agree to pay them shit, and I'm never going to. *thumbs nose at Thomson Multimedia*
It makes sense, then, that it would only apply to the "new" MP3Pro codec.
MP3Pro, by the way, is absolutely fucking worthless - it compensates for high-frequency loss by introducing harmonic distortion and high-frequency noise. So, low-bitrate stuff sounds just as "bright" as it did before encoding. This "brightness" is entirely artificial, and entirely inaccurate with respect to the original recording.
Its only honest claim to fame, is that really-low-bitrate stuff might become tolerable (think 8-16Kbps) for voice work, and that it is backward-compatible with existing mp3 players (for the naysayers who will pop up claiming that mp3pro is god's gift to all mankind: it is this backward compatibility which requires its broken hack of a design.)
Incidentally, this works right now: Make a low-bitrate mp3 (the article says 80Kbps is good, so start there), and a high-bitrate (>224Kbps) mp3 of the same material. Grab a plugin for xmms, winamp, wmp, or whatever, that claims to boost (or "recreate" or "reproduce" or "restore") high-frequency sound. Play your low-bitrate mp3 through the plugin, for a demonstration of what MP3Pro can do. Play your high-bitrate mp3 without it, for enlightenment.
Perhaps the X Consortium (or the Open Group or whatever those officious corporate ass-sucking whores called themselves then) had something to do with it, when they changed their license to something less free along with the release of X11 R6.4 -- the first release with LBX and RX -- only to change it back some months later. This sort of thing tends to slow down development of projects like XFree86, while bittering people at the same time.
It's now three years later, XFree86 4.x is looking completely stable, along with LBX, RX, and a slew of other things that nobody ever uses. It is uncertain to me whether or not it will ever make a difference, at this point. At the time of LBX's birthing (early 1998), bandwidth was nearly nonexistant for everyone, and such a thing made sense for a great number of people.
That said, I'd like to use LBX. I want to run [gnutella|napster|mojonation|freenet] on a high-bandwidth linux box with a DDS-2 drive, while sitting at home behind a trio of 28.8 modems (ie, "As Good As It Gets In Rural Ohio"). Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Chevy Beretta filled to the brim with DAT carts.
I've used differential X (dxpc) with some success, but it uses particularly ugly methods of interfacing with the client software, and requires being set up before each session. I've also used ssh's gzip compression and X11 forwarding, which isn't anywhere near as fast, but is at least transparent in use.
LBX and RX/Broadway would seem to serve both purposes admirably. Too bad that in this chicken/egg scenario, the bird just won't lay any eggs.
Re:Why not use digital I/O on soundcards?
on
DSLBlaster?
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· Score: 3
For that matter, why not use ethernet?
I hear they've got ethernet cards which work at gigabit speeds. That's like, 100 megs a second!
Even better, I hear the PCI bus is good for 132 megs a second. Let's just build a PCI to PCI bridge, with 10 miles of telco copper in the middle!
It's digital. It must be better, right?
Nevermind that the telco line won't carry the signal. Nevermind that it wouldn't carry SP/DIF, either. The shit is made for analog signals. It's -good- at carrying analog signals. Thus, analog signals are the order of the day.
My experience with aquariums has taught me that heaters of the sort sold by Mouser are unreliable, showing widely varying temperature (without ever being touched). It's also $10 more expensive than other similar designs (justabout any of which can be cranked up to whatever temperature is desired).
A company named Rolf C Hagan makes a heater which is submersible and electronically controlled (ie, no metallic contacts to get welded together, arc, and be generally bothersome). It is ~$17 at petwarehouse.com (I'd link to them, but their URLs show no signs of being even vaguely static...), same as the "etchant" aquarium heater from Mouser.
The Hagan heater I have only shows adjustments to 93 degrees, so it might not be useful for color work. It -does- keep the temperature quite stable (within less than a degree), without adjustment, and has been doing so for years.
As another poster pointed out, most water cooling kits for home computers never lower the temperature below ambient. They're just fans, a big heatsink, some tubing, and a pump. They're also intended to be used all-out, all the time - the goal is to cool the water as much as possible, with no regard to thermal stability.
While not terribly common in use, there exists water chillers for use in aquaria. They're fairly accurate in terms of temperature control, as they're intended to keep fish alive -- many of which will simply die in the face of large temperature fluctuation.
They aren't cheap. $700-$1200, as sold at petwarehouse.com.
A less expensive, but geeky solution, which would certainly not be plug-and-play, might involve a small discarded fridge (easy to find for near nothing at college campuses across the US, right about now), some copper tubing, a pump, a resevoir, an electronic valve, a computer (running linux, of course), and some means of getting temperature data.:) Oh, and a bit of perl.
Or, dismantle the fridge. Use the guts to cool the water directly, recycle the thermostat to control temperature. Careful modification of the thermostat should allow fine control of on/off cycle times, and allow good temperature calibration. Some sort of resevoir (a large plastic bucket) might be ideal here, as well, to smooth out the transition between "cold" and "Texas" water. Also in the bucket, it might be good to have a small pump (an aquarium power head) to circulate the water, keeping it all at thermal equalibrium. A float valve (rescued from an old dishwasher, or from a toilet repair kit) will prevent it from overflowing. You'll have a few gallons of auto-cooled 69 degree water at your disposal at all times - and it might even stand up to continuous use, depending on how fast you go through water.
Except for a few special breeds (think ferroresonant transformers, motor-generators, or other solutions involving huge chunks of iron), all surge protection (including the much-touted APC stuff) consists of inexpensive varistors.
They operate by shunting to ground when voltage potential rises above a certain point (usually ~250VAC), which hopefully absorbes the spike until a circuit breaker or fuse pops, and hopefully even after that, should there be sufficient potential to arc across the fuse/breaker.
After a number of cycles of this, they eventually fail.
All of them.
And there is no method (at least, none that I've seen) which can accurately determine when they're no longer capable of conducting, short of physical examination (hint: if it's blown into bits, it doesn't work) or destructive tests (ie, hit it with 300VAC and see what happens).
That said, they're cheap. They're readily available (Mouser Electronics or Digikey). They're easily replaced if you're handy with a soldering iron. And, while periodic replacement of them will preserve the surge protection capability of the unit, it will also void any warranty or insurance you might have had before with your potentially-broken device.
(And, no, those little LEDs marked "Protected" on your surge protector are not functional. It's just a resistor and an LED across the power line, so it's absolutely nothing more than a power light. By design.)
As long as we're mentioning PC Power & Cooling, some years ago these people produced a tower-sized power supply with built-in batteries. It's a slightly large beast, and likely wouldn't fit into most of today's cases at all. It also provides no means of status updates, so a graceful shutdown during a blackout would be rather difficult.
But, the thing works. We've got one in an ancient full tower AT case at work, which had its batteries replaced a few years ago. No trouble to report about it.
If anyone wants one, scout the hamfest/flea market circuit or Ebay. If memory serves, the only external clues that it is a UPS are that it is painted black, and a good deal heavier than other similar supplies.
Appearently, the proper way to order a dry pair (or at least, proper enough for the phonemonkeys to understand) is to refer to it as an alarm circuit.
These have been available for decades, and aren't anything special (per requirements of simple-is-better alarm systems).
A couple of years ago, I helped a friend of mine set up some always-on connectivity between his house and his business using a pair of decent modems, and an Adtran line simulator. Which, incidentally, don't seem to be called what they are, either - the telco folks seem to know them as "Ring Generators".
Re: hum in a fairly complex, dual-zone enviroment:
The first step in creating a successful system like this seems to be consolidation of equipment. Put as much of the electronics as possible in the same place (same rack, pile, shelf, whatever). This keeps cables short, and minimizes the chance of ground loops. Plug everything into a single outlet if possible, or the same circuit, or (at the very least) the same transformer leg.
Second, keep things as simple as possible. You don't need to hear the TV in the bedroom, while using the computer at the other end of the house, and so you don't need cabling (or more to the point, antennae) for that. Ideally, the only long lines present would be for speakers, and in this situation those should probably have at least a ferrite bead clamped on, or maybe a small coil in series, to keep induced RF from pissing off the electronics.
Probably also, it does not serve you to listen to two different CDs in the same house at the same time. Throw a couple of hundred bucks at a changer that will contain your entire collection, if it suits you, and invest in some stuff from Xantech (http://www.xantech.com) or Channel Plus (mostly the same stuff) to repeat IR commands from a one place to equipment located elsewhere. This can also be used with VCRs, DVD players, and probably an LIRC-using MP3-playing Linux box.
Don't use a huge, burdensome mixer to negotiate different sources. Samson isn't particularly well-known for the quality of their gear, and that combined with long, unbalanced lines is probably the root of your whole-house AM reciever symptom. A dual-zone preamp or stereo reciever, or two normal stereo preamps/recievers (and a mess of Y cables) will serve well to differentiate sources for different zones, particularly when combined with a minimalistic Xantech system and a learning remote (or several, depending on needs). And, you get to remove lots of rather hideous electronics from the loop - no mixer is as transparent as a minimalist preamp.
I can hear you whine "But, then I wouldn't see the display on my CD player from the bedroom!" Realistically, when is the last time you actually used it? It's not as if you'll be doing cueing for post-production while laying in bed, watching TV.
I can also hear you whine "But, then I wouldn't be able to listen to the TV in stereo while in the bedroom!", which is similarly untrue. Forget about the tuner in the TV, and use the VCR, cable box, satellite reciever, or whatever you have in the computer room. Run 1 (one) drop of RG-whatever to provide video from this point to the remote TV. Control it with Xantech. If you choose a dual-zone A/V preamp, it will facilitate the switching of video sources.
And for the final whine: "But, with this configuration, I won't be able to hear my computer beep at me while I'm listening to a CD!" Well, if you eliminate all the present complexity and the 24-channel console, you won't be hearing your packet station whenever someone checks their email, either. At any rate, Midiman (http://www.midiman.com) sells a few small, minimalist stereo mixers. Use one in the computer room to combine the output of the zoned switching machine (whatever that may end up being) and the computer, again using the shortest cables possible. If that's not hi-fi enough for your tastes, scope out Ashly (http://www.ashly.com). Ashly equipment is not inexpensive, but the trouble it saves is invaluable.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but the problems you experience using a mix board as the heart of your audio system are precisely the reasons why they're best avoided if at all possible, and also a firm demonstration of the "less is more" phenominon.
I'd write more, but the power just went out, and I have no idea when it might be back. The UPS is howling.:)
[...]THE SOFTWARE IS COOL AND SUPPORTED BY SOMEONE I KNOW WILL BE THERE TOMORROW, versus OS projects that can disappear if the maintainer decides to ditch it. Apple's not going to ditch the core of their OS.
Right. Just like IBM isn't going to ditch OS/2. None of the other huge computer companies (Apple, MSFT, etc) are as bull-headed as IBM when it comes to supporting and maintaining forgotten things, but OS/2 is (by their own admission) quite dead.
Did I mention that it is closed-source, and thus the few nagging bugs which persist will very likely never be fixed at any point in the future?
Or, the Amiga OS (what was it, Workbench?). Commodore is at least six feet under right now, but at one time was seen as having no danger of folding, with one of the most competent desktop operating systems in existance to their name, and killer hardware to match. Much like OS/2, nobody can modify the OS to any genuinely useful extent, and so it has been stale for years.
I suppose it's nice that Darwin sources are available, but if Apple kicks the bucket, all the code in the world won't change the license restrictions into something which allows people the freedom to work independantly on the software and share their improvements with the world. It is therefore no better than the aforementioned worse-case closed-source scenarious.
First, let's define some terms. A UPS (in its most basic form) consists of a battery, a battery charger, and an inverter. For this discussion, we only care about the inverter, for that is what takes the low voltage DC provided by the battery and converts it into standard AC (at whatever voltage is typical where you live).
Switching power supplies (such as that in your PC) are, these days, remarkably unaffected by being powered with an odd waveform. At best, they work justfine. At worse the odd waveform confuses them to such an extent that they shut down harmlessly, or they just run a little warm. In theory, anyway.:^)
That said, what the electronics really want is a pure 60 or 50Hz sine wave. It is, after all, precisely what they were designed for.
I forget what sort of waveform my (old) APC Back-UPS 450 uses (sine, square, stepped square, sawtooth, whatever). I did at one point attempt to drive a relatively serious audio system, an aquarium, lava lamp, and a bunch of computers from it.
The computers worked fine. The stereo produced a low 60-cycle hum, but functioned otherwise. The flourescent lights in the aquarium got pissed and flickered. The pumps made noises of certain distress. The lava lamp produced a figure of startling likeness to Roseanne Bar, and was promptly disconnected.
I've done similar experiments with a Best Ferrups 800 that I happened across, which offers a real-live sinewave output. Nothing budged; no lights flickered, the aquarium filter continued to run silently, Roseanne Bar did not appear, and there was much rejoicing. I did note an increased buzzing sound from the Best box, but it was quickly overcome by the sounds of Iron Butterfly's Inna Gadda Da Vida (my 17-minute, 6-second treat for my otherwise dark, silent, and powerless neighbors during an inexplicable outage).
Given this experience, there's a -lot- of things I don't trust to a non-sine inverter like my Back-UPS. For this reason it sits disconnected in the corner of the room (also, because it once rebooted a machine as the power went out - hint, hint). On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing I would hesitate to plug into the Ferrups.
Most other good UPSs (mid-grade APC, Best, Tripplite seems OK) should fair about as well at powering whatever you feel like plugging them into, the key being that it output a sinewave.
[ObRant: it's presently more expensive to produce a high-current, high-voltage sinewave than any other waveform. In other words, all of these units are bloody expensive. And, it's the harmonics that make the rest of them so bothersome to use, but I'll leave those anecdotes to some other less-tired poster. Also, UPS makers have a bad habit of making a big deal out of the VA rating of a UPS, possibly the single most useless figure in a home computing enviroment, while they should be pushing battery size (in Amp-Hours) and inverter efficiency. Oh, and that too-good-to-be-true $99 super-whizbang 1.6kVa UPS you saw at some online discount whore really is too good to be true. If you can carry it around with one hand, it's not worth having, and is akin to replacing the battery in a car with a 12 volts worth of D-cell NiCads and expecting it to fire. Unless, of course, you've got some special application in mind that doesn't need much current, like keeping an ISDN line up during short blackouts or somesuch.]
It should be mentioned (I always try to mention this in such discussions...) that SCMS is easily defeated using extraordinarily low-cost gear.
The Zoltrix Nightingale sound card costs ~$30, and includes optical I/O, coax out, and pins for coaxial in. In addition to the normal sound card stuff (like quad analog outputs), this thing can route any digital input to any digital output, with optional SCMS stripping. It does this completely in hardware, and is bit-perfect (it's far too limited for resampling, which is good) aside from the SCMS mangling.
Good support under ALSA and Win98, usable support with stock Linux kernel drivers or the included (!) module source, and iffy support under OSS/Pay.
ObTopic: Since this thing can handle every consumer digital audio format without loss (SB Live! and related ilk all irrevocably resample to 48KHz and allow use of DSP for volume adjustment and such), it should be a trivial excercise to create bit-perfect copies of any 'protected' CD given an SP/DIF output on any CD player which can play the disc.
Just push [Play] and [Record] at the same time, and like the old days, music is copied.
During the planning stage of the Iridium project, it was spun off by Motorola to form a unique corporation. I've heard that this was at the insistance of the FCC (who didn't want to see a single company control both the hardware and service), but have nothing substantial to back that statement with.
Thus, Motorola made the phones, and Iridium provided the service.
So, Iridium is bankrupt. Its creditors, including Motorola and doubtless others, have collectively lost $4,975,000,000.
IANAA (I Am Not An Accountant). IA[also]NAL. But, being bankrupt means that your assets are liquidated to the highest bidder, the proceeds of which are fed to those you owe. The sale of assets may not cover the entirety of what you owe, and it doesn't really matter. Hence, the beauty of having unique corporate entities to do dirty work with.
Re:copyright-protected linux tv?
on
Linux TV
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· Score: 2
Uh.
The extent of the 'HDTV-ready'-ness of this television is the VGA input on the back. It is no more susceptable to copy protection than the monitor at which you're staring.
Please understand at least a -hint- of what you're talking about, before spreading FUD. Thanks.
Drilled and tapped rack rails are available from Parts Express, in Dayton, OH. Rails and all other specialized hardware required to build any manner of rack (from small road case, to floor-to-ceiling bolt-in varieties) can be found at TCH.
I've purchased from each, with good results. Though, for a small, portable rack, nothing beats the price of SKB's offerings.
As far as tricks go, it's fairly simple: used racks from a pawn shop; used racks from the local guitar store; used racks from Ebay (in that order).
Plus, my father may have a TiVO, and a DSS machine, but he still uses his PC to write letters, e-mail and browse the web. Find me one dedicated appliance that can do that and has any sort of discernable market share.
This system has nothing to do with copy protection.
If encrypted broadcasts / bit munging are wanted on the part of the producer, it will still occur. Sure, they'll only be able to cripple the digital signal. But if they're willing to do this, they'd likely have no qualms about TAKING AWAY the analog portion of that program in its entirety.
So, you're left with a protected digital signal, with no analog counterpart -- just like with existing HDTV standards.
End result: Issues of fair use and copyright protection are unaffected by this system. The war is not yet over. And you should be shedding tears, because this proposed system sucks.
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ATX cases don't seem to exist which fit the bill. intel designed the ATX spec to have 7 available slots.
;) If you're doing lots of analog I/O to the PC, plenty of things are available which connect via DB-25 (or similar) to a breakout box covered in jacks, thus consuming only one slot.
:)
You're an audio guy. Computer cases are designed for computer people.
That said, check around at various case distributors (jinco.com comes to mind), and find something with knockouts that fit whatever SCSI connectors you need. These all seem to have fairly standard mounting, so it should be easy (trivial, even) to relocate the connector from the bracket to the back panel given some basic hand tools. It shouldn't be much (if any) different in cost from something without SCSI knockouts.
If that doesn't free up enough slots, try using different audio hardware. I'm not aware of anything with an external ADAT breakout box, but it might exist.
I've got a Lexicon core2 which does this, but it's somewhat limited (4 in/8 out in a box, ADAT in/out on the card).
If that's not an option, you'll need to be more creative, unfortunately - nothing off-the-shelf (short of a PCI bridge as another poster mentioned) exists.
Convert an old AT case to ATX. They're available with dozens of slots, for next-to-nothing.
Or, start punching/drilling holes in the back of an ATX box. Looking at the expansion bracket on an RME DIGI9652 (www.rme-audio.com/english/hammer/d9652.htm), it seems possible to mount to the back of any box given a drill bit and nuts for the BNC jacks, and some creative metalwork for the TOSLINK connectors.
If you're afraid of metalwork, any decent machine shop can knock this out, near-flawlessly, for much less than $100. Even a tinsmith would have no difficulty with the project (and would likely charge less). They'll have an easier time if you use a case made from light-guage steel (ie, cheap), or aluminum (bloody expensive).
If you've got money to burn, look into using a single-board computer. These guys fit a (typically) high-end intel chip, integrated video (ATI seems popular), and standard I/O onto a full-length (sometimes shorter) card, which then plugs into a backplane covered with huge numbers of PCI slots.
They're intended for industrial use, and are thus expensive. And the backplanes are typically constructed to fit into a specific rackmount (!) case. Search for SBC on google.
Those are the easy ways.
The difficult way involves impedance-matched cabling bundled into a snake, plugged in with some high-density monolithic connectors to a breakout box of your own construction. It would be nice, and not expensive at all, but I surmise that if you were willing to go that route, you'd have already done so.
Good luck.
This wasn't fungi. This was just salt.
It destroys aluminum with tremendous speed.
While the aluminum is coated with laquer (and in some cases, lots of silk screen printing on top of that), it wouldn't take much of a pock mark in this laquer to allow salt-ladden moisture in. Once it's there, it will oxidize aluminum. Once the aluminum oxidizes, it will allow more salt and moisture within. The seawater might also have a detrimental effect on the laquer itself, exacerbating the issue, though this seems less likely.
If you don't want them to disappear in this manner again, simply don't take them with you. At least, leave the store-bought titles at home and bring CD-R backups. Some Kodak blanks have an extra layer on top, claimed to enhance durability. Others are available coated with a white substance, intended for direct-to-disc inkjet printing (I had some Maxell discs of this description, a couple of years ago). All of these are somewhat more expensive than regular dime-store blanks. The priciest of them (around $US 3 each, it seems) probably being Apogee Digital's brand, which has what they call
"DataSaver II" resin on top.
Good luck.
It is really a shame, at times, that "Blatant Misinformation" is not included among the moderators' choices.
i cs4.htm and read until your eyes bleed.
That said, a CD (mass-produced, CD-R, -RW, whatever) starts out as a polycarbonate (the same stuff safety glasses are made from) disc, of familiar size. It contains microscopic grooves on the top surface - in the mass-produced case, this groove consists of binary pits, in the CD-R case, it's simply a spiral groove, with a bit of information about the disc (dye formulation, total time, whether it's been taxed for audio use, etc).
Why is there a groove on a CD-R? Because the burner needs something to track - it, unlike a cutting stylus for LPs, or the mastering machine for CDs, does not have the ability to move unguided. (To the naysayers: the difference between 74- and 80-minute blanks is the width of this groove.)
Moving right along. On a mass-produced CD, aluminum (or sometimes gold) is deposited by an evaporative process atop the aforementioned pits in the aforementioned polycarbonate, thus providing a reflective surface.
A CD-R is first coated (probably sprayed) with a dye, and then that is aluminized (or plated in gold, or silver, or some other such thing - CD-R makers are all about hype, these days).
A CD-ROM burner works by putting "holes" in this dye layer, thus providing an approximation of its mass-produced counterpart's physical pits, as the burned/unburned dye has different reflectivity than the aluminum.
After all that, the disc is sprayed with a very thin layer of laquer. Nothing magic, no fancy plastic - just transparent air-dry laquer, like people have been using for a long, long time for all manner of things. On most discs, one can see a thin bead of this stuff on the outside edge, due to slight overspray.
It is then silkscreened with UV-cured inks (to prevent the solvents in air-dry ink from dissolving the laquer, thus exposing aluminum to the atmosphere and allowing it to oxidize, ala 1980s Bit Rot), and sold.
So. It's like this:
Polycarbonate|Reflective media|Laquer|Artwork
On a CD-R:
Polycarbonate|Dye layer|Reflective media|Laquer|Artwork
A laserdisc is built like a CD.
A DVD is built like a CD.
A DVD with multiple layers is built as follows:
Polycarbonate|Partially reflective layer|Polycarbonate|More reflective layer|Laquer|Artwork
A DVD with multiple layers and multiple sides, is built as above, but sans artwork and with four layers of polycarbonate and reflective media (two semi-transparent, two opaque).
And for those who -still- just don't fucking understand how this bit of simple, decades-old technology is put together, I suggest you find a CD, a CD-R coaster, a sharp object, and a hammer. Take one apart and see for yourself.
And, having done that, if anyone reading this still believes that a CD is constructed differently, they're full of shit. Which would be fine, if the same people wouldn't proclaim otherwise.
For additional information on what a CD consists of and a really pretty animated GIF, start at http://www.disctronics.co.uk/cdref/cdbasics/cdbas
The vast majority of studios use Yamaha NS-10M speakers - some just as a stable reference (because they're -everywhere-), and others full-time (because they're -everywhere-, and why bother with more than one pair of monitor speakers in the same room?). Somewhat like Windows on a PC. Moving right a long...
By audiophile standards, it's a horrible speaker. Big, honky upper midrange - and no low bass. Limited low-level detail. Limited dynamic range.
Supposedly (and I'm not sure if I give them this much credit) Yamaha created the speaker with the idea of making something which sounded similar to what most real people have, but "good" enough to be used in a studio. Compared to most Circuit City wares, it's really not bad.
Whatever the case, modern rock (and techno, and rap, and...) is dynamically smashed, harmonically huge, and in some cases, artificially tuned, beaten, massaged, panned, and molested in completely disgusting ways, until it sounds good on a pair of abused Yamaha NS-10s.
If you're really interested in hearing what the engineer and producer hear (these folks have infinately more control of the final result than any member of the band), pick up a pair of NS-10s. If you don't like them, so what? Find something different that makes your music sound how -you- want it to sound, and/or adjust it to sound differently by way of an EQ, a BBE, and boosting the volume of a subwoofer. Throw a compressor in there. How about an expander? A noise gate! Why not fire up the reverb machine in your surround sound reciever? The mind boggles at the signal processing capabilities available today.
If you just want to listen to rock music, it doesn't matter that you're destroying the original signal with any one of these toys, because the signal has already been destroyed a thousand times before you got your hands on it. Tweak it until it suits -you-, because that's exactly what -they- did.
Incidentally, the same logic holds true of the audiophile mentality - except, their goal is to recreate sounds in a manner that -they- find realistic (this is supposedly objective), in the most simple way they can. Which can cost a fortune, and yield remarkable results with a similarly minimalist recording. As an aside, a good audiophile system can made some rock recordings sound particularly good - this is an accidental side-effect, and is in no way intended by the producer of the album.
Heh.
I'm also a recording engineer.
The noise floor of a full auditorium is higher than 16-bit linear PCM, in a typical minimalist recording. Probably due to the sound of a few thousand breathing, shifting bodies.
If one can hear a sneeze from the mic position, it will thus be recorded. Similarly, for the zippo lighter.
If you cannot hear a sneeze from 16 rows (figure 2.5 feet per row, or just 40 feet overall) away, you've got problems. See a doctor. Your hearing damage might even be treatable.
For a further dose of reality, let's assume that a healthy sneeze produces a level of 85dBA at a point 1 foot in front of the sneezer's head, in anechoic free field. At 2 feet, this sneeze is at 79dBA, at four feet, 73dBA. Once we get up to 40 feet, the sneeze is just a little less than 55dBA. In reality, the sneeze will be somewhat louder, due to reverberation - but that's safe to ignore for the purposes of this argument.
Now, let's assume we've got a 16-bit DAT machine with a pair of good mics with good preamps that we're using to record an orchestral work. We've got the gain set such that levels of 120dBA at the microphones, which are at the front of the stage, do not induce clipping (and we're hoping that nothing louder than this occurs and destroys the recording).
Given this enviroment, the aforementioned sneeze would be 65dB below maximum. If 16-bit linear PCM has dynamic range of 96dB (it does), and the final product (a CD) is not fucked with at all (that is, it is bit-perfect from the original DAT), then this sneeze will be at a level of 31dB -above- the floor of the CD, which is also to say that the sneeze has a maximum of 31dB of dynamic range.
This is more than adequate to capture a sneeze - it far surpasses the dynamic potential of most modern rock music.
Oh. In case you missed it: This is completely devoid of being "tweaked all to hell" in the "mixing/mastering process", because such processes do not exist in this example - nor in great numbers of excellent classical recordings.
It's simple, really: Two microphones (surprise, surprise) match up beautifully with two speakers, and two ears. No need to do anything more except, on occasion, mess with levels. And obviously, in this instance, even that is not needed to "capture the level of detail" I describe.
What were you saying about transparency?
Heh.
.9999 silver, and other hugely-expensive, measurably (and marginally) better parts.
The world of high-end audio is somewhat amiss from the norm of more money buying additional features. A high-end system is typically as -minimal- as possible - extra components are all destructive of the audio signal.
Rather than spending X thousands of dollars on, say, all-wheel drive in a new Audi, an audiophile will spend X thousands just for the assurance that a common feature (simple tone controls, for instance) is not present.
Those features which remain because they're needed for the system to function (crossovers in speakers, for instance) are so ghastly overbuilt, from such stuff as hand-rolled matched capacitors, flat-wire inductors made from
And still, the use of these parts is minimized - every component counts as another way to introduce distortion between the microphone in some music hall and the listener's ears in a different time and place.
Joe Consumer buys based on features, because that's what they're accustomed to doing while shopping for cars, electric ranges, and all manner of other expensive items. An automotive purist, in love with driving, will ignore the sticker price and associated list of flash, get behind the wheel and experience a vehicle, and then another, and another until he's found something with the correct balance for his taste. Issues of what color and material the seats are fall aside in favor of their ability to properly support the driver. If the cheapest, low-end fabric seats provide better posture than the supposed-high end, heated leather monstrosities, the choice is obvious and a cow's life is saved. That the buyer saved money is insubstantial.
Audiophiles don't buy components based on what "features" are present, as they can do nothing but color the sound in one way or another - something they're certainly not interested in while questing for absolute transparency. The best component is one which is not present.
Much as someone fixated on performance driving might like to feel every stone in the pavement through the chassis of the car, and would be comforted by the steering wheel reporting the exact condition of a road in an attempt to feel more connected, an audiophile seeks the same experience with music. If someone sneezes in the sixteenth row of a Bethoven performance, or a Zippo is lit in some smoke-filled jazz bar, they want to hear it - and hear it with enough character that they can visualize the person who sneezed, or identify the type of plating on the Zippo.
Whether or not they're insane for wanting such things is left as an exercise for the reader.
>Thompson sure as fsck can't patent that.
Be careful with that axe, Eugene. Them's fightin' words.
I now -expect- to see a patent filed for just such a thing, but generalized away from mp3. I can't think of any prior art, and besides, it wouldn't matter given the present state of the USPTO.
They want fees from people who accept money (directly or indirectly) for streaming, not just people who turn a profit. The fee schedule starts at $2,000.
Or do I have a different definition of "revenue" than the rest of the posters here?
*sigh*
I read it somewhat differently.
From the anecdotes in the article, the only way to avoid paying Thomson is to eliminate all money from the picture. They want a peice of all stream-related revenue. Which is to say, that if you sell t-shirts to promote the stream, subsidize bandwidth, or equipment, or studio space, they want $2k/year (minimum), and 2% after that. This is from the revenue stream, not profit-after-expenses.
If you sell advertising, they offer a plan where you pay 3% of advertising revenue, with a $3k annual minimum. This, presumably, would also include income from any banner ads on the stream's web page.
It doesn't matter if you're making money hand over fist, or if you're just trying to gather support to keep the thing alive while working elsewhere full-time and running at a loss, just for a fun thing to do. They want a cut.
This will, should it come to pass, probably damage live365's already shaky business model to the point of complete failure.
It will mean that the low-budget streams will need to move to zero-budget, or find a source of income to cover the $2k annual minimum.
It, like so many other things, punishes the little guy. Selling a $10 hat with a inkjet-printed logo costs the seller ~$2k. I'll let the reader figure out how many $10 hats it takes annually to cover the licensing cost of the bloody ISO standard codec.
All conspiracy theories aside, I don't know that they'd be able to introduce this retroactively. I got my licensed-and-legit Fraunhoffer MP3 codec with Microsoft's Netshow. I didn't agree to pay them shit, and I'm never going to. *thumbs nose at Thomson Multimedia*
It makes sense, then, that it would only apply to the "new" MP3Pro codec.
MP3Pro, by the way, is absolutely fucking worthless - it compensates for high-frequency loss by introducing harmonic distortion and high-frequency noise. So, low-bitrate stuff sounds just as "bright" as it did before encoding. This "brightness" is entirely artificial, and entirely inaccurate with respect to the original recording.
Its only honest claim to fame, is that really-low-bitrate stuff might become tolerable (think 8-16Kbps) for voice work, and that it is backward-compatible with existing mp3 players (for the naysayers who will pop up claiming that mp3pro is god's gift to all mankind: it is this backward compatibility which requires its broken hack of a design.)
Incidentally, this works right now: Make a low-bitrate mp3 (the article says 80Kbps is good, so start there), and a high-bitrate (>224Kbps) mp3 of the same material. Grab a plugin for xmms, winamp, wmp, or whatever, that claims to boost (or "recreate" or "reproduce" or "restore") high-frequency sound. Play your low-bitrate mp3 through the plugin, for a demonstration of what MP3Pro can do. Play your high-bitrate mp3 without it, for enlightenment.
It's now three years later, XFree86 4.x is looking completely stable, along with LBX, RX, and a slew of other things that nobody ever uses. It is uncertain to me whether or not it will ever make a difference, at this point. At the time of LBX's birthing (early 1998), bandwidth was nearly nonexistant for everyone, and such a thing made sense for a great number of people.
That said, I'd like to use LBX. I want to run [gnutella|napster|mojonation|freenet] on a high-bandwidth linux box with a DDS-2 drive, while sitting at home behind a trio of 28.8 modems (ie, "As Good As It Gets In Rural Ohio"). Never underestimate the bandwidth of a Chevy Beretta filled to the brim with DAT carts.
I've used differential X (dxpc) with some success, but it uses particularly ugly methods of interfacing with the client software, and requires being set up before each session. I've also used ssh's gzip compression and X11 forwarding, which isn't anywhere near as fast, but is at least transparent in use.
LBX and RX/Broadway would seem to serve both purposes admirably. Too bad that in this chicken/egg scenario, the bird just won't lay any eggs.
For that matter, why not use ethernet?
I hear they've got ethernet cards which work at gigabit speeds. That's like, 100 megs a second!
Even better, I hear the PCI bus is good for 132 megs a second. Let's just build a PCI to PCI bridge, with 10 miles of telco copper in the middle!
It's digital. It must be better, right?
Nevermind that the telco line won't carry the signal. Nevermind that it wouldn't carry SP/DIF, either. The shit is made for analog signals. It's -good- at carrying analog signals. Thus, analog signals are the order of the day.
Gee, back to the drawing board.
(think first, post later. k?)
My experience with aquariums has taught me that heaters of the sort sold by Mouser are unreliable, showing widely varying temperature (without ever being touched). It's also $10 more expensive than other similar designs (justabout any of which can be cranked up to whatever temperature is desired).
A company named Rolf C Hagan makes a heater which is submersible and electronically controlled (ie, no metallic contacts to get welded together, arc, and be generally bothersome). It is ~$17 at petwarehouse.com (I'd link to them, but their URLs show no signs of being even vaguely static...), same as the "etchant" aquarium heater from Mouser.
The Hagan heater I have only shows adjustments to 93 degrees, so it might not be useful for color work. It -does- keep the temperature quite stable (within less than a degree), without adjustment, and has been doing so for years.
As another poster pointed out, most water cooling kits for home computers never lower the temperature below ambient. They're just fans, a big heatsink, some tubing, and a pump. They're also intended to be used all-out, all the time - the goal is to cool the water as much as possible, with no regard to thermal stability.
:) Oh, and a bit of perl.
While not terribly common in use, there exists water chillers for use in aquaria. They're fairly accurate in terms of temperature control, as they're intended to keep fish alive -- many of which will simply die in the face of large temperature fluctuation.
They aren't cheap. $700-$1200, as sold at petwarehouse.com.
A less expensive, but geeky solution, which would certainly not be plug-and-play, might involve a small discarded fridge (easy to find for near nothing at college campuses across the US, right about now), some copper tubing, a pump, a resevoir, an electronic valve, a computer (running linux, of course), and some means of getting temperature data.
Or, dismantle the fridge. Use the guts to cool the water directly, recycle the thermostat to control temperature. Careful modification of the thermostat should allow fine control of on/off cycle times, and allow good temperature calibration. Some sort of resevoir (a large plastic bucket) might be ideal here, as well, to smooth out the transition between "cold" and "Texas" water. Also in the bucket, it might be good to have a small pump (an aquarium power head) to circulate the water, keeping it all at thermal equalibrium. A float valve (rescued from an old dishwasher, or from a toilet repair kit) will prevent it from overflowing. You'll have a few gallons of auto-cooled 69 degree water at your disposal at all times - and it might even stand up to continuous use, depending on how fast you go through water.
Except for a few special breeds (think ferroresonant transformers, motor-generators, or other solutions involving huge chunks of iron), all surge protection (including the much-touted APC stuff) consists of inexpensive varistors.
They operate by shunting to ground when voltage potential rises above a certain point (usually ~250VAC), which hopefully absorbes the spike until a circuit breaker or fuse pops, and hopefully even after that, should there be sufficient potential to arc across the fuse/breaker.
After a number of cycles of this, they eventually fail.
All of them.
And there is no method (at least, none that I've seen) which can accurately determine when they're no longer capable of conducting, short of physical examination (hint: if it's blown into bits, it doesn't work) or destructive tests (ie, hit it with 300VAC and see what happens).
That said, they're cheap. They're readily available (Mouser Electronics or Digikey). They're easily replaced if you're handy with a soldering iron. And, while periodic replacement of them will preserve the surge protection capability of the unit, it will also void any warranty or insurance you might have had before with your potentially-broken device.
(And, no, those little LEDs marked "Protected" on your surge protector are not functional. It's just a resistor and an LED across the power line, so it's absolutely nothing more than a power light. By design.)
No magic, here.
As long as we're mentioning PC Power & Cooling, some years ago these people produced a tower-sized power supply with built-in batteries. It's a slightly large beast, and likely wouldn't fit into most of today's cases at all. It also provides no means of status updates, so a graceful shutdown during a blackout would be rather difficult.
But, the thing works. We've got one in an ancient full tower AT case at work, which had its batteries replaced a few years ago. No trouble to report about it.
If anyone wants one, scout the hamfest/flea market circuit or Ebay. If memory serves, the only external clues that it is a UPS are that it is painted black, and a good deal heavier than other similar supplies.
Appearently, the proper way to order a dry pair (or at least, proper enough for the phonemonkeys to understand) is to refer to it as an alarm circuit.
These have been available for decades, and aren't anything special (per requirements of simple-is-better alarm systems).
A couple of years ago, I helped a friend of mine set up some always-on connectivity between his house and his business using a pair of decent modems, and an Adtran line simulator. Which, incidentally, don't seem to be called what they are, either - the telco folks seem to know them as "Ring Generators".
Re: hum in a fairly complex, dual-zone enviroment:
:)
The first step in creating a successful system like this seems to be consolidation of equipment. Put as much of the electronics as possible in the same place (same rack, pile, shelf, whatever). This keeps cables short, and minimizes the chance of ground loops. Plug everything into a single outlet if possible, or the same circuit, or (at the very least) the same transformer leg.
Second, keep things as simple as possible. You don't need to hear the TV in the bedroom, while using the computer at the other end of the house, and so you don't need cabling (or more to the point, antennae) for that. Ideally, the only long lines present would be for speakers, and in this situation those should probably have at least a ferrite bead clamped on, or maybe a small coil in series, to keep induced RF from pissing off the electronics.
Probably also, it does not serve you to listen to two different CDs in the same house at the same time. Throw a couple of hundred bucks at a changer that will contain your entire collection, if it suits you, and invest in some stuff from Xantech (http://www.xantech.com) or Channel Plus (mostly the same stuff) to repeat IR commands from a one place to equipment located elsewhere. This can also be used with VCRs, DVD players, and probably an LIRC-using MP3-playing Linux box.
Don't use a huge, burdensome mixer to negotiate different sources. Samson isn't particularly well-known for the quality of their gear, and that combined with long, unbalanced lines is probably the root of your whole-house AM reciever symptom. A dual-zone preamp or stereo reciever, or two normal stereo preamps/recievers (and a mess of Y cables) will serve well to differentiate sources for different zones, particularly when combined with a minimalistic Xantech system and a learning remote (or several, depending on needs). And, you get to remove lots of rather hideous electronics from the loop - no mixer is as transparent as a minimalist preamp.
I can hear you whine "But, then I wouldn't see the display on my CD player from the bedroom!" Realistically, when is the last time you actually used it? It's not as if you'll be doing cueing for post-production while laying in bed, watching TV.
I can also hear you whine "But, then I wouldn't be able to listen to the TV in stereo while in the bedroom!", which is similarly untrue. Forget about the tuner in the TV, and use the VCR, cable box, satellite reciever, or whatever you have in the computer room. Run 1 (one) drop of RG-whatever to provide video from this point to the remote TV. Control it with Xantech. If you choose a dual-zone A/V preamp, it will facilitate the switching of video sources.
And for the final whine: "But, with this configuration, I won't be able to hear my computer beep at me while I'm listening to a CD!" Well, if you eliminate all the present complexity and the 24-channel console, you won't be hearing your packet station whenever someone checks their email, either. At any rate, Midiman (http://www.midiman.com) sells a few small, minimalist stereo mixers. Use one in the computer room to combine the output of the zoned switching machine (whatever that may end up being) and the computer, again using the shortest cables possible. If that's not hi-fi enough for your tastes, scope out Ashly (http://www.ashly.com). Ashly equipment is not inexpensive, but the trouble it saves is invaluable.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but the problems you experience using a mix board as the heart of your audio system are precisely the reasons why they're best avoided if at all possible, and also a firm demonstration of the "less is more" phenominon.
I'd write more, but the power just went out, and I have no idea when it might be back. The UPS is howling.
Right. Just like IBM isn't going to ditch OS/2. None of the other huge computer companies (Apple, MSFT, etc) are as bull-headed as IBM when it comes to supporting and maintaining forgotten things, but OS/2 is (by their own admission) quite dead.
Did I mention that it is closed-source, and thus the few nagging bugs which persist will very likely never be fixed at any point in the future?
Or, the Amiga OS (what was it, Workbench?). Commodore is at least six feet under right now, but at one time was seen as having no danger of folding, with one of the most competent desktop operating systems in existance to their name, and killer hardware to match. Much like OS/2, nobody can modify the OS to any genuinely useful extent, and so it has been stale for years.
I suppose it's nice that Darwin sources are available, but if Apple kicks the bucket, all the code in the world won't change the license restrictions into something which allows people the freedom to work independantly on the software and share their improvements with the world. It is therefore no better than the aforementioned worse-case closed-source scenarious.
First, let's define some terms. A UPS (in its most basic form) consists of a battery, a battery charger, and an inverter. For this discussion, we only care about the inverter, for that is what takes the low voltage DC provided by the battery and converts it into standard AC (at whatever voltage is typical where you live).
:^)
Switching power supplies (such as that in your PC) are, these days, remarkably unaffected by being powered with an odd waveform. At best, they work justfine. At worse the odd waveform confuses them to such an extent that they shut down harmlessly, or they just run a little warm. In theory, anyway.
That said, what the electronics really want is a pure 60 or 50Hz sine wave. It is, after all, precisely what they were designed for.
I forget what sort of waveform my (old) APC Back-UPS 450 uses (sine, square, stepped square, sawtooth, whatever). I did at one point attempt to drive a relatively serious audio system, an aquarium, lava lamp, and a bunch of computers from it.
The computers worked fine. The stereo produced a low 60-cycle hum, but functioned otherwise. The flourescent lights in the aquarium got pissed and flickered. The pumps made noises of certain distress. The lava lamp produced a figure of startling likeness to Roseanne Bar, and was promptly disconnected.
I've done similar experiments with a Best Ferrups 800 that I happened across, which offers a real-live sinewave output. Nothing budged; no lights flickered, the aquarium filter continued to run silently, Roseanne Bar did not appear, and there was much rejoicing. I did note an increased buzzing sound from the Best box, but it was quickly overcome by the sounds of Iron Butterfly's Inna Gadda Da Vida (my 17-minute, 6-second treat for my otherwise dark, silent, and powerless neighbors during an inexplicable outage).
Given this experience, there's a -lot- of things I don't trust to a non-sine inverter like my Back-UPS. For this reason it sits disconnected in the corner of the room (also, because it once rebooted a machine as the power went out - hint, hint). On the other hand, there's absolutely nothing I would hesitate to plug into the Ferrups.
Most other good UPSs (mid-grade APC, Best, Tripplite seems OK) should fair about as well at powering whatever you feel like plugging them into, the key being that it output a sinewave.
[ObRant: it's presently more expensive to produce a high-current, high-voltage sinewave than any other waveform. In other words, all of these units are bloody expensive. And, it's the harmonics that make the rest of them so bothersome to use, but I'll leave those anecdotes to some other less-tired poster. Also, UPS makers have a bad habit of making a big deal out of the VA rating of a UPS, possibly the single most useless figure in a home computing enviroment, while they should be pushing battery size (in Amp-Hours) and inverter efficiency. Oh, and that too-good-to-be-true $99 super-whizbang 1.6kVa UPS you saw at some online discount whore really is too good to be true. If you can carry it around with one hand, it's not worth having, and is akin to replacing the battery in a car with a 12 volts worth of D-cell NiCads and expecting it to fire. Unless, of course, you've got some special application in mind that doesn't need much current, like keeping an ISDN line up during short blackouts or somesuch.]
ObFreedom:
It should be mentioned (I always try to mention this in such discussions...) that SCMS is easily defeated using extraordinarily low-cost gear.
The Zoltrix Nightingale sound card costs ~$30, and includes optical I/O, coax out, and pins for coaxial in. In addition to the normal sound card stuff (like quad analog outputs), this thing can route any digital input to any digital output, with optional SCMS stripping. It does this completely in hardware, and is bit-perfect (it's far too limited for resampling, which is good) aside from the SCMS mangling.
Good support under ALSA and Win98, usable support with stock Linux kernel drivers or the included (!) module source, and iffy support under OSS/Pay.
ObTopic: Since this thing can handle every consumer digital audio format without loss (SB Live! and related ilk all irrevocably resample to 48KHz and allow use of DSP for volume adjustment and such), it should be a trivial excercise to create bit-perfect copies of any 'protected' CD given an SP/DIF output on any CD player which can play the disc.
Just push [Play] and [Record] at the same time, and like the old days, music is copied.
During the planning stage of the Iridium project, it was spun off by Motorola to form a unique corporation. I've heard that this was at the insistance of the FCC (who didn't want to see a single company control both the hardware and service), but have nothing substantial to back that statement with.
Thus, Motorola made the phones, and Iridium provided the service.
So, Iridium is bankrupt. Its creditors, including Motorola and doubtless others, have collectively lost $4,975,000,000.
IANAA (I Am Not An Accountant). IA[also]NAL. But, being bankrupt means that your assets are liquidated to the highest bidder, the proceeds of which are fed to those you owe. The sale of assets may not cover the entirety of what you owe, and it doesn't really matter. Hence, the beauty of having unique corporate entities to do dirty work with.
Uh.
The extent of the 'HDTV-ready'-ness of this television is the VGA input on the back. It is no more susceptable to copy protection than the monitor at which you're staring.
Please understand at least a -hint- of what you're talking about, before spreading FUD. Thanks.
I've purchased from each, with good results. Though, for a small, portable rack, nothing beats the price of SKB's offerings.
As far as tricks go, it's fairly simple: used racks from a pawn shop; used racks from the local guitar store; used racks from Ebay (in that order).
One company. One product. One solution.
The Microsoft X-box.
*shudder*
This system has nothing to do with copy protection.
If encrypted broadcasts / bit munging are wanted on the part of the producer, it will still occur. Sure, they'll only be able to cripple the digital signal. But if they're willing to do this, they'd likely have no qualms about TAKING AWAY the analog portion of that program in its entirety.
So, you're left with a protected digital signal, with no analog counterpart -- just like with existing HDTV standards.
End result: Issues of fair use and copyright protection are unaffected by this system. The war is not yet over. And you should be shedding tears, because this proposed system sucks.