Gadget Review Of The Year - 2012

Well, it's that time again. Seems like only a couple of months ago that I was writing the 2011 version of this post, but here we are at the end of 2012. My good intentions of posting more frequently on this blog have gone by the board, but at least I haven't abandoned it entirely. Anyway, I suppose I had better get on and tell you about the gadget comings-and-goings at Low Fidelity Towers over the past twelve months.



At the start of the year, we embarked on the grand Home Cinema project. You've probably seen the photos that I posted (here and here) documenting its conversion, but needless to say it was quite an exciting time. We completely revolutionised the room, turning it into a proper cosy home cinema complete with full 5.1 sound. I used the amp and speakers that I already owned, but the new gadgets came in the form of a Samsung 40-inch UE40D5520 TV and a new Sony BDP-S380 Blu-ray player.



After that fairly hefty financial outlay, things remained quiet on the gadget front until April, when I purchased a first-gen iPad from a friend. I couldn't justify buying a brand new one, but this was the perfect antidote to keep my iPad desire at bay (at least for a while).

After getting rid of a few old bits on the mighty eBay, I decided to get a USB MIDI keyboard to try and kickstart some music-making. I've not really done a lot of music in the past few years, and I decided it was time to try and get back into it. I bought the M-Audio Keystation 88es, which has semi-weighted full size keys and it has been a good purchase. I don't think a "proper" pianist would think much of it, but it's ideal for me to tinker on.

I bought a new digital-to-analogue converter to use with my hi-fi in September. I had been using my Firestone Audio Fubar IV, but I felt that the system would benefit from a proper, dedicated DAC to handle the audio conversion between my Apple TV and separates. I opted for the Arcam rLink - it's a very simple device, but it works very well, and it's so small you can hide it away behind your other components. I was so pleased with it all, I splashed out on a very nice hi-fi rack to put it all on.



Speaking of the Apple TV, as you may know I had two of these for Airplay duties - one in the lounge and one in the bedroom. They were second-generation ones, and I hadn't ever seen the need to upgrade them to the latest 3rd-gen ones, as I didn't really need the extra 1080p capability. However, when Twitter friend Sam told me that she had sold her 2nd-gen Apple TV for £150 (substantially more than the original £99 RRP) I decided to follow suit and sell both of mine. (In case you're wondering, the 2nd-gen is sought after because it is possible to jailbreak it, something that I was never interested in). I re-purchased two new 3rd-gen Apple TVs and sat there with a tidy £100 profit in the bank, and an urge to spend it on yet more gadgets!



The opportunity to spend it came in the form of the iPad Mini. As soon as I saw it announced at the keynote in October, I knew that it would be mine (oh yes, it would be mine). I had the £100 from my Apple TV sales, but where would I get the remainder from? I decided that the first-gen iPad that I had bought back in April would have to make way for the Mini, so I stuck it on eBay. Within an amazing 13 minutes of listing it, it had sold, and there I was with enough cash to buy the Mini. After much internet searching, I finally (just before Christmas) managed to secure the black 16GB wifi model, and it found its way under the tree to be unveiled on the big day.

The final gadgets of the year also came at Christmas, in the form of a Focusrite Scarlett 2i2 audio interface and a Behringer C1 condenser microphone. Alongside the MIDI keyboard, I'm now all set up to make some music and hopefully this will bear fruit in 2013.

Anyway, happy new year to you all. Thanks for reading, and hope 2013 is a good one.

Moving on up

I've recently noticed that my last blog post was way back in February, and now we're in the middle of June - so let me apologise for my lengthy absence. I do have a good excuse though.

It would appear, that after much stress, we're moving house at the end of this week. We put our house on the market at the beginning of March, and finally, last weekend we exchanged contracts on our new property.

I hadn't realised quite what an all-consuming exercise moving house would turn out to be. Between that and work I've done nothing else in the meantime. There have been no new gadgets, and no new projects at all - obviously they've all been on hold pending the move.

What this does mean - now that we're finally going - is that the new house will present all kinds of new opportunities for gadgets, tech and tinkering. I'm very much looking forward to it.

Some ideas that I've had so far:

• A wired gigabit whole-house network


• A dedicated home cinema room, possibly with a projector


• A Network Attached Storage media library


• An Apple TV and Airport Express house-wide audio/video system


• A new, upgraded, bigger, better lounge hi-fi

I dare say there will have to be some decorating and general DIY that will have to come before any of these projects, but it's nice to have a plan isn't it?

As a starter for ten, I've got the Virgin Media engineer coming on Monday to install my new Tivo system so at least that's one new gadget to be getting on with. I've also got a new Fatman iTube valve amplifier/iPod dock system on the way courtesy of Audio Affair, which I won in one of their Twitter competitions last week. Once I've unpacked all those cardboard boxes I'll try and blog about both these additions to my gadget world. Stay tuned, and bear with me please... this may take some time!

The art of fettling

I've had my new home cinema toys for a few weeks now, and I've had a very enjoyable time getting everything up and running and configured just the way I like it. Sometimes that is the best part of getting new kit - once it's all sorted out, there's very little to do with it (which is nice in itself) but the gadget freak in me likes to mess about with settings and make sure everything is as good as it can get.

Whilst the new AV receiver (the Sony STR-DA2400ES) has automatic calibration, it didn't get the levels quite right as far as I was concerned. Not enough centre channel, too much sub and rear effects. With a bit of fettling, I'm now much happier with it - so the moral is to not necessarily blindly trust the microchip, because undoubtedly your ears are better than an algorithm.

My next issue was that I had acquired a very low level hum from the subwoofer. It was never there before with the old amp. With a bit of Googling, I found out that it was most likely a ground loop hum - and this was backed up by the fact that my old amp only had live and neutral wires in the plug (the earth pin was plastic) whereas this new amp has all three pins wired up - essentially this creates one great big circuit around the earth loop, which adversely affects the sensitive audio circuitry. I don't fully understand the physics of it (maybe Olitee will stop by and explain it) but as far as I could tell, the common solution was to wire the ground pin on the back of the amp (usually used to ground record players) to a metallic part of the subwoofer casing.

I went out to Maplins, bought a packet of ring terminals and a couple of metres of thin wire (total cost, £2.38), soldered it together and then sanded the paint off a small portion of the sub's metal backplate. Then I attached the wire between the amp and that part of the sub, and hey presto, no humming. As far as I'm concerned there's some sort of witchcraft going on there, but if it works, I'm happy.

Another bit of fiddling (as I alluded to last time) has been getting this new system to play digital video files successfully. I've discovered that the Blu-Ray player will happily playback my MP4 files that I've encoded with Handbrake, and even better it will also decode the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks from these files as well. However, it will only work with storage attached directly to one of its two USB ports - not over the network (despite the fact that it is connected to it). This has made me hanker after some kind of dedicated solution for playback of video files, because the Blu-Ray interface is, at best, slow and clunky. It works, but it ain't elegant.

This got me thinking about investing in some kind of small Nvidia Ion-based computer to run a combination of Ubuntu and either XBMC or Boxee. Both have their advantages, and having tested both out on my iMac, I can see that this would be a superb solution. However, we're looking at around £200 for a capable computer like the Acer Revo or similar, and when there are a lots of rumours buzzing around about an imminent new AppleTV (allegedly much cheaper than the current one) I would be daft to invest now. I'll hang on.

Finally, I've just found out that Lovefilm have added four hours per month of digital movie streaming to my current package at no extra cost, and rather pleasingly I can use this via the Blu-Ray player. I haven't tried it yet, but I shall report back.