Graham White: My Notes

While working out how to string together my new audio solution I decided to replace my faithful old Aiwa NSX-S505 stereo system. The Aiwa has been a good servant over the years and seen a lot of action, but with the volume knob broken and one of the two tape players knackered, when the CD player refused to play a CD enough was enough.

I've always loved Denon kit as being simple yet very good quality, stylish and innovative at the same time, so I was immediately drawn to them for a new stereo. I was looking at the Denon D-M35DAB system as my choice item but before I purchased it used it as the bar for a quick shop-around.


While reading reviews I discovered Onkyo which was a company I'd heard of before but never really heard anyone buying their kit. I came across their direct competitor to the Denon model I was looking at, the CS-515 which has pretty much the exact same feature set. I'm no audiophile so I take great note of what the professional reviewers have to say, and with What Hi-Fi product of the year award, and Best Hi-Fi under £500 awarded to it I had to look much more seriously at the Onkyo. It was, eventually, to be the model I decided on based purely on Internet shopping having never touched or listened to either the Onkyo or the Denon before.

I have pretty simple requirements for a stereo. It has to have enough inputs for me to connect my various devices (Media Centre, possibly TV, etc), I wanted something quite small in terms of height so it would sit in my TV cabinet, and something of a better sound quality than the Aiwa (which really was an excellent buy for what I paid for it many years ago). Feature wise, I wasn't bothered about a tape player any more (we ditched our tapes a while ago), so just a simple CD player and digital radio would be good enough. Conveniently, both of the systems I found fitted these.


When I purchased the Onkyo I didn't go for the CS-515, but rather the CR-515 which is exactly the same unit minus the speakers. The Onkyo speakers are reviewed as being an excellent set, particularly for ones that are shipped as a standard set of speakers with a hi-fi system. However, I decided to go with the professional opinion once again and opted for the current set of award-winning small-sized speakers, the Tannoy Mercury F1 bookshelf speaker set. They're slightly larger than the Denon SCM-50 bookshelf speaker set I have in the kitchen, which are fantastic so the Tannoy's had a lot to live up to. I'm pleased to report they sound really quite nice when attached to the Onkyo, although my first sound test was somewhat inhibited by Beth vacuuming the rest of the house at the time!

Related to my previous post "Out with the old" I have been thinking about what's next for me in terms of a home media solution. I've also been spurred on by my recent purchase of a Current Cost meter which I can hook up to a computer, but more about that another time. Similar to my old system, I'm not bothered about video so this is purely an audio solution.

There are some things I took into consideration when building the old system that I don't consider to be so important this time around. I'm not bothered about browsing the Internet on my TV and I'm prepared to spend a bit more cash, for example. But rather than concentrate on those points, here's a list of things I would like to include in the new system:

• Switchable speakers in different rooms (kitchen and living room)
  
• Connection to my stereo amplifier
  
• Access to my mp3 collection without leaving my PC powered on
  
• Access to Internet music (podcasts, radio, etc)
  
• Remotely controlled
  
• Separate screen (from the TV)
  

After much research, here's what I've come up with:
Click to enlarge.

I'm going to use a Linksys NSLU2 (a.k.a. a SLUG) which can be modified to run Linux so I can hack it into submission to be my low powered music server. The SLUG will provide my music collection over my wireless network to a Slim Devices Squeezebox Duet system. The Squeezebox is also able to access all the Internet services I want and similar to the SLUG runs open source software so has a fantastic community of users. The Duet comes with a wifi remote control with built-in LCD screen so I can interact with the system from anywhere in the house. From the Squeezebox is an audio connection to the amplifier which, similarly to my old system, is connected to a speaker switcher box.

That little lot should keep me busy for a while and give me all I want from music at home. As I mentioned, a lot of research went into deciding which components to choose. The weak link here will likely be the SLUG because it's such a small box with only 32Mb RAM and a relatively slow processor (just 264 bogomips) but it should do for the time being. Here's my component list:

• Onkyo CR-515 (stereo micro-system)
  
• Tannoy Mercury F1 (living room speakers)
  
• Denon SCM-50 (kitchen speakers)
  
• SqueezeBox Duet (media streamer)
  
• Linksys NSLU2 (music storage)
  
• Freecom Mobile Drive (USB hard disk)
  
• QED MA17 (2 way speaker switcher)
  

I moved house pretty much spot on 6 months ago now and we're still settling into the new house. Aside from decorating, emptying boxes and all the other things you have to do at the time, it's also an opportunity for re-thinking some of the technology used in our previous house. To that end, one of the things I want to update is my audio solution. I shy away from saying media centre as that seems to brew up ideas of full on PVR systems for most people which would include recording television; something I don't care about as I have a commercial hard disk recorder I'm very happy with.

My current solution was documented at the time on Eight Bar as a description using an IBM Thinkpad built as a media centre with more details of the process, also on Eight Bar. This solution worked extremely well while having its problems at the same time. My requirements for putting the solution together were cost (it was experimental and needed a good wife acceptance factor so price was all important), fast start-up, easy and remotely controllable, and integrated with my current home stereo and speaker arrangement. I think I achieved this, it cost about 20 quid for the cables and keyboard, the Thinkpad was borrowed from work, I used the Amarok music player which made things very easy, hooked up my stereo remote control to the Thinkpad and integrated it nicely. See the no-expense-spared diagram below...

Click to enlarge.
It's running Fedora Linux on the Thinkpad, with a KDE desktop and Amarok as I mentioned. I don't have a huge music collection so all my mp3s fit on the Thinkpad hard disk. I configured Linux to suspend to RAM and thus boot extremely quickly with auto-login to the KDE desktop and auto-start of various programs including the music player should a cold boot be required. The thinkpad has a serial port so I was able to hook up a serial IR receiver using LIRC to receive signals, with the audio cables going to my stereo using the minidisk port. With no minidisk attached I had spare keys on the remote control (such as play/pause/stop/next/previous) that had no effect when pointed at the stereo while other controls (such as volume) function as expected. This means I can program the spare keys to be picked up by the laptop IR receiver instead, in order to operate Amarok, and with no interference with normal operation of my stereo (so only one remote control needed for the whole solution). A nice bonus of this set up was the ability to display the screen on the television via the thinkpad s-video port. With a radio controlled keyboard and built-in mouse it's easy to sit on your sofa browsing the Internet or e-mailing with the convenience of your TV and wireless broadband.

This is all sounding marvelous and when described like that I wonder why I think about replacing it, but it does have issues. Browsing the web on your TV is great, but it's not particularly convenient when someone else wants to use the TV for its main purpose in life. Niether is it convenient browsing the Internet in 800x600 which is the highest resolution my CRT TV can cope with, then there's the wireless keyboard which is slightly fiddly but I'm just being picky now. The next major problem is a bug with the thinkpad firmware that causes the wireless to stay disconnected after a certain amount of uptime, which is unresolvable and requires a full reboot to temporarily fix until the next time it goes down. Another slight usability issue is user feedback. Browsing songs, playlists, podcasts and all in Amarok is stupidly easy, but controlling from a remote control when you can't see the screen (that was another idea for putting it on the TV) is not easy. It's great you've got the secondary screen you can use if necessary, but if you're trying to do something else or not in the same room it becomes much more difficult.

So, all these little niggles to what is in theory quite a nice setup have got me thinking of a better way to solve my requirements.