2015 — 29 November: Sunday
Yesterday evening's batch of audio adventures1 only resumed after the next double dose of "The Bridge" (obviously). At this point I'm not sure which is more baffling; the string of potential suspects, the aggregate total of seemingly pointless murders, or the vagaries of Linux audio. I've long since given up trying to get both video and audio reliably on to both the Kuro and the hi-fi since the interactions with my desktop display were maddening enough under Windows without risking upsetting or destabilising a working Linux system.
I have another trick up my sleeve... revert to analogue audio "which" (a guru was assuring me last night) has "come a long way" since the bad old days when moving your mouse around produced audible crackles through your speakers. Working through this "problem" is far too boring to clutter up a diary page any further, so I'm documenting it elsewhere instead. Feel free to see how (un)far I get...
In the real world...
... I'm now contemplating both breakfast and some overdue crockpot-stuffing. I've also arranged a visit from said Linux guru this afternoon. He is confident he can "sort me out". We shall see!
Time to shut out the cheerful chirping of my little robin, too. It's rapidly become too cold (19C) in here to carry on with the patio door wide open. Brrr.
The recently-completed...
... vegetative dicing and slicing has been to the accompaniment of the horrible "tinkle, tinkle, plink, plink" noises of what some choose (mistakenly) to call 12-tone music. My feeling is that if you can't whistle the damn' "tune" after hearing the "music" then it fails my basic test of being music. But that's just me, no doubt. "I knows what I likes." It sounds like "Something decomposed by Satie after a very bad night on the absinthe" says one listener. I absolutely agree!
I had another...
... mildly amusing audio-related thought. Sitting upstairs in my little reading room is a modern, fully 4K-capable, A/V amplifier that can go for easily a month or more without even being switched on. I guess I could haul it downstairs and see if it plays nice with a Linux system of dubious audio characteristics.
An afternoon of...
... sometimes frustrating experiments has shown several things:
- My Marantz A/V amp plays better with HDMI (and, possibly, hdcp) than the Audiolab pre-amp does
- The Linux sound system must stop prioritising audio delivery on DisplayPort above HDMI
- The Creative X-Fi soundcard has gone (we couldn't work out what was causing its occasional episodes of "forgetfulness")
- Audio from the Radeon graphics card is well-behaved, but only when the Dell screen isn't also in the equation
- I'm looking forward to my crockpot!
My next task is to re-build a working sound system paying no attention to the fact that there happens to be a Linux PC at the other end of the room. HDMI audio from the PC can then be added back in at some later stage (I hope!) And that means discovering where I've put the User Manual for the Marantz so that I can sort out how to assign its audio inputs. It is not intuitive.
[Pause]
How odd that, precisely one year ago, I was contemplating that same manual and pondering a little "gotcha" — the pair of phono sockets on the back, labelled "Pre-out". At the time, I'd hoped to be able to hook them up to the minidisc recorder for recording purposes. Although there's precisely one diagram that highlights these sockets...
... nowhere in the manual is there any further mention. Happily, these sockets carry a variable-level signal that allows me to use the Marantz as a pre-amp for the Rotel power amp (just like the Audiolab pre-amp does). This is goodness.
It is — obviously — impossible...
... for me to last very long without cracking, and re-fitting the X-Fi soundcard for the sake of having easy access to all my music while the gurus ponder ways and means of getting HDMI audio to take precedence over DisplayPort. Sound and picture quality both seem impeccable, which is very encouraging. The remote control for the Marantz will take a while to get used to (but the one for the Audiolab is so grotesque I don't really care).
I've completely removed both the Audiolab pre-amp and the NAD CD player from the system. Plumbed in the Oppo Blu-ray player and the Humax HD Freesat PVR directly to their own HDMI inputs on the back of the Marantz. Plumbed the optical digital from the PC's X-Fi soundcard into the single SP/DIF input. Tried out both a Blu-ray and a hi-def satellite TV channel before it dawned on me that I needed to reconfigure the Marantz to tell it that, no, it no longer has a centre speaker (and can I thus please have my dialogue track divvied up between front left and front right channels?).
And become steadily hungrier.
So before I reconnect the minidisc recorder and the cassette deck (both playback-only these days) I shall now empty (some of) my crockpot. [Pause] Very tasty. Blimey, it's both cold and very dark out there. And still no sign of that promised "Logistics" delivery (a pair of CDs that were already auto-ripped for me).
Tonight's...
... "Drama on 3" is utterly mesmerising.