Got these in advance of the current pair wearing out.
June 25, 2014
New external HDD
4TB USB 3 drive to reorganise and back up stuff from my 3TB Firewire 800 drive which is nearly full.
Used to be Hitachi Global Storage Technologies now part of Western Digital. The very similar TOURO DX3 uses the greener 5400 RPM drive.
TOURO Desk PRO.
Optical Splitter
I got this optical splitter to take the single digital optical audio out from my TV and split it two ways, one for the 5.1 home theatre amplifier and one for the headphones. I also got a D/A converter and a headphone amplifier.
New Headphone Amplifier
Because my TV only has optical out and I didn’t want to plug/unplug the headphones from the front of my Yamaha 5.1 receiver all the time. So I got an optical splitter, a D/A converter and this.
Package from Singapore.
SMSL sApII
UK plug for the 24V PSU.
S.M.S.L sAp II Headphone amplifier. (SMSL sApII)
Swiss Army Knife for comparison. The volume knob has some tasteful blue LED lighting behind it. Wired up and working. The sound seems good – a nice tight bass.
June 17, 2014
Game of Thrones Season Four
That was the best season so far. I was pleased that they included the final scene with Arya as I was wondering if they were going to get that far along with her story this season. It seems like Benioff and Weiss are closer to my view on which are the most important characters and plot-lines than some other viewers. Since they are adapting with the collaboration of GRRM it’s canonical – they are paring it down to the essential story lines. This is a bit spoilerish for readers since we now know which plot lines in the forthcoming books aren’t important.
As a reader I think the three main characters are Tyrion, Arya and Daenerys. Several other characters are crucial to the plot of course, such as Jon Snow and Brandon Stark, but I could never get that interested in their stories in the books.
Next season should be very interesting with Arya in Braavos and scenes in Dorne as well it seems. Just ten months to wait… I got the Blu-ray of the first three seasons and season four is saved on my DVR so I can re-watch one episode a week just in time for the start of season five!
June 5, 2014
New Home Theatre
The DVD player in my old HTIB packed in again and since spares are no longer available it was time to upgrade. New 5.1 speakers with an active subwoofer, an amplifier with four hdmi in and one hdmi out and two optical digital in (my SKY box doesn’t do Dolby over HDMI so I need an optical link for that. And my TV doesn’t do ARC over HDMI so I need an optical link for that too.) And a blu-ray player. And 50 metres of speaker cable, fourteen banana plugs and a subwoofer cable. It all finally arrived by yesterday and I spent some hours unpacking and assembling it.
Three boxes of speakers making HTS201 system.
Some stands for the rear speakers.
100W active subwoofer. 8” down firing ported variety.
Two front towers with spike feet.
Center and two rear speakers.
Rears on stands. The connectors take banana plugs.
Front speaker with cover off and on.
Sub with dog hairs. That’s a Tannoy HTS201 speaker system.
Sub cable and some banana plugs. Both by Fisual.
Amplifier. Yamaha RX-V375.
Blu-ray player. LG BP325.
Set up. I actually tidied up all the wiring before I began but I ended up with another mess. The TV, the SKY box and the blu-ray have wired internet connections so it was handy the switch I bought ages ago had enough ports. The blu-ray promptly downloaded a software update as soon as it was wired up.
The system self-calibrated with the included microphone with the sub at -10dB which might be a little low for my liking. I’ll see about tweaking it all after it’s run in a little.