Tuesday, November 15
DeathStar - Part Two
by
Billy Goat
on Tue 15 Nov 2011 10:59 GMT
Thursday, November 10
DeathStar - Part One
by
Billy Goat
on Thu 10 Nov 2011 11:33 GMT
I started digitising my life over a decade ago as I could see the way things were going, it started with converting all my music to high quality MP3, drifted into digitising TV recordings, DVD's, movies etc. etc. I like the idea of having everything in one place, at my fingertips so to speak (via a Remote Control) and also the ability to copy stuff to my car, my phone or my MP3 player as I wished.
As a result of this it was only a matter of time before I reached Critical Mass and I ran out of places to store stuff, that time is NOW...My Media Centre had 4TB of storage (1TB for films, 1TB for TV episodes, 1TB for music/photos and 1TB for recording TV) but the problem was I was running out of space AND it was getting too big to backup......enter Project DeathStar or in plain English - Network Attached StorageI've had to wait a while to do this, mainly because I needed technology to catch up with my wishes, and that was for HUGE hard drives to be invented because what I wanted was something L-A-R-G-E. It needed to automatically backup and synchronise my Media Centre, my PC, my Netbook and two Android phones and still have some space for 'future growth' so I splashed for a Synology Diskstation DS411. This thing will do all of the above plus loads of other neat stuff like CCTV, Mail Server, FTP etc.You buy this thing 'empty' so you can stuff whatever hard disks you fancy inside it. In my world there is only one hard disk vendor and that is Hitachi Global Storage, they are always at the forefront of product design and their stuff never goes wrong (unlike Western Digital or other crap). I can speak with authority on this because I have personally built several hundred PC's for corporate use that get spanked 8 hours a day and they are all still working years later.Anyway, I won't bore you with the techno babble, if you want to find out more about Synology go to their site, they make loads of different NAS solutions to suit every budget. Here's some pictures of Part One of my NAS build (Part Two to follow):    Nasty flash shot but I wanted to show you inside Bags of storage :-)  Disk Trays Full of disks The front panel lights
Tuesday, June 15
A Black Box
by
Billy Goat
on Tue 15 Jun 2010 15:32 BST
Thursday, June 3
More Power...!!
by
Billy Goat
on Thu 03 Jun 2010 13:14 BST
Wednesday, May 19
Red Light District...
by
Billy Goat
on Wed 19 May 2010 10:02 BST
If you can cast your mind back to February when I bought these toys for my Home Cinema, you might recall me talking about an issue I had with the Kef KUBE-2 Subwoofer....or maybe I never posted this up here  .Anyway, there is a fairly well known issue with Onkyo AV Receivers and KEF Subs, maybe other subs too (just try Googling 'Kef Kube red light issue') so I've been suffering with this for a few months. Basically you turn all the kit on, the Kef KUBE-2 sits there with a red light on it (not working!!) and about 20 minutes later it realises its purpose in life and starts delivering the deep rumbling bass it was designed to do. I roughly understood what was happening but I didn't know how to fix it....basically the KUBE-2 was consuming lots of signal and the Onky amp wasn't giving it what it needed. Me being lazy just posted up a question on an internet AV forum and forgot about it after adding it to my 'chores list'. You see, I have a Zen like approach to my chores list, just like every self respecting male should have. My chores list just 'Is' (If you have Zen figured then you will understand this phrase  ), things appear on the list (normally added my Mrs Billy Goat !) and they just 'are'  . Eventually someone replied to my post and this is the official line from KEF:In the test tone menu of your AV receiver, set the subwoofer output to
maximum, then you can come out of the AV receiver's menu.
On the back of the subwoofer itself, set the crossover to maximum and
put the volume at a level which you are comfortable with as some people
prefer a bass heavy setup, but some prefer it more subtle, at the end of
the day it is personal preference. Set the phase to either 0 or 180,
whichever sounds the loudest. The 'Bass Boost' switch is also down to
personal preference and room conditions. What it will do is give you
either a flat response through the subwoofers frequency range, or give
you a raise of +6db or +12db at around 40hz.
This should then stop your subwoofer from going into standby as the
signal output from the AV receiver will be higher.On the Onkyo 607 OSD menu's you go to Speaker Setup>Level Calibration, scroll down to the sub and up the db (try starting at +10), then drop the volume on the KUBE-2 itself. Well, this works for sure, in fact the way I first had it set was
insane...the whole house was shaking  .I'll tweak the bass levels over the next few days and fine tune it but the problem is now finally over.  
Friday, January 22
Home Theatre Makeover Project 1
by
Billy Goat
on Fri 22 Jan 2010 10:10 GMT
Apart from bikes I've always been a big fan of Microsoft Media Center and have been using it for years and years, in fact I'm still running MCE 2005, having avoided Vista Media Center at all costs. Technology improves however, particularly hardware and this year its time to totally rebuild my Media Center box with some serious horsepower  Currently I have an old Pentium IV with 2gb RAM, 160gb system disk for the OS and 4 x 1TB drives for media content (1Tb for Recorded TV (700 hours capacity), 1TB for DiVX/AVI movies, 1TB for TV Caps and 1TB for Music and Pictures), 1 DVD ROM, 1 X Plextor DVDRW, Card Reader, Gigabit Ethernet, Hauppauge TV-Nova PCI TV card and a 512MB HDMI out graphics card. This is hooked directly into a Samsung Series 9 46" LCD TV and the sound runs into a fairly low rent 5.1 Surround Sound.The stuff that's gonna get changed is as follows:Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME which is an Intel Core-i7 X58-Express board with DDR3 RAM.CPU - Intel® Core i7-920 Processor (8M Cache, 2.66 GHz)RAM - Kingston KHX16000D3T1K3/6GX DDR3TV Tuner - Hauppauge PCI Express Dual Tuner WinTV-HVR-2200 MCAMP - Onkyo TX-SR 607 AV Receiver (Full 7.1 HD Audio/HDMI Outputs)Speakers - Kef 3005SE K2's in gloss blackAcquisition wise I already have the mobo and RAM and hopefully next week will have the KEF's and Onkyo. Most likely I'll use the Onky and KEF's immediately on my current system until I splash for the i7 CPU, at which point I can rebuild my Media Center and reload it with Windows 7 Ultimate. I'll post up some more pix when there's a bit more progress but below is some of the kit that's either coming or already in use at Billy Goat Towers.KEF 'Eggs' Samsung Series 9 46" LCD (LE46A956D1MXXU) Onkyo TX-SR 607 - Front
Onkyo TX-SR 607 - Rear
The 'Onk' has plenty of future proofing built in, I can add two more satellite speakers and turn it into a 7.1 system or I could add these, plus a second sub and have a full 7.2 system (my neighbours would hate me though ). There's several extra HDMI inputs here that could be used for Games Consoles, Blu-Ray players etc, it also handles Sirius Satellite Radio too and has fill support for all of the current HD Audio standards!
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