Drinking12many

 A Forgotten Upgrade Funny to say it but I realized I hadn't posted something else I did to my theater system last year. Simple answer a dedicated LCR Amplifier. I hadn't see a ton about the OSD Nero amps other than a few YouTube videos and it is solid for the price. I got my XA3200 for around 450 on a sale and I put it in, reran Audyssey and it just worked... Mostly sounds the same until you get medium volume to loud but that's hardly surprising. A good amp shouldn't really change the way it sounds.  However, I did have a slight accident a few weeks after getting it. I somehow turned it all the way up after I left the house (Likely through Spotify app) later came home and was like "Why can I hear it outside?" Normally I leave the volume limiter on 80, but removed it when I plugged the new amp in. So I got inside and it was basically all the way up, I found several drivers blown in my SVS Pinnacles, it was in stereo so those were the only 2 running minus subwo...

 There have been a few more changes to my little theater, but today I am only covering the replacement of my last Polk component in the theater the subwoofer (PSW-505) still worked for the most part but I wanted another big sub for movie duty. Monoprice was having a sale on the Monolith 15 for 1050. At first I was just going to get a 3rd 12 inch but I figured I had the space why not. 1000w RMS 1800 or so Max and can hit nearly 120DB at some frequencies.  https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=42851  Just a bit of a size difference...lol 

 Finally replaced my last 2 Polk T-15 surrounds with SVS satellites, not a huge improvement in any way but call it my OCD I like having all the base channels the same. SVS was having a sale on them for 124 each in Piano black. The post on their outlet said they were missing threads on the back, but I can't see anything wrong with them and they have the wall mounting hardware on them...soooo i dunno maybe just a bit overstocked and wanted to get rid of some. I do need to find some better stands as the stands I have do not close tight enough to hold them. I just took some of the cloth from the box and wrapped some door/window shims with it to hold them for now until I find something better.  But it took the better part of 2 years slowly buying the pieces but my main stereo has all been upgraded.  SVS Prime Pinnacles - Piano Black SVS Prime Center - Black ash SVS Prime Elevation - Black ash SVS Satellites - Piano Black 2 Monolith 12 inch Subwoofers - Black ash 1 Polk 12 PSW-...

 It had been awhile since I updated the blog, as always busy with life, but many changes have been made since my last updates. I am slowly working toward making all my normal speaker channels SVS speakers. as such I got a pretty good open box pair of Piano Black Prime Pinnacles to replace my trusty Polk Monitor 70s. These were a great upgrade. The highs sound more natural than the Polks, with quite a bit more detail and better mids overall. I wouldn't say they are light years better than the Polks in medium volume scenarios where they come alive is when turning it up and they just stay much more composed and less muddy.  So after that I went even further in the subwoofer department and caught a sale on the V2 Monoliths 12. At first I thought I would completely replace the Polk PSW505 with it and I still may get something to replace that 12 but it is now behind my couch. It adds a much more tactile feel than anything while watching movies. I may eventually but another Monolith ...

 I have been busy like normal with the holidays and all but I have made a few more changes to my home theater in the last few months and just haven't had a chance to post about it.  I have added Vinyl back to my listening and I have went full in with Atmos and added a couple speakers attached to my ceiling.  I wanted to go a bit above a basic turntable to start with but, also not too expensive. Somewhere in the middle so that I could get the full experience while yet not going so cheap that I was disappointed with the results. I ended up going with a Fluance RT81, overall it had good reviews and features for the price point and overall I have been extremely happy with it. Though my entertainment center is full so my girlfriend had an old stereo shelf I felt I could use to house it. Not ideal but as I have mentioned in the past my room is not ideal so it works for now.  https://www.whathifi.com/fluance/rt81/review https://theaudiophileman.com/rt81-turntable-review-flu...

I love watching movies and listening to music. I think I can trace my love of music easily back to my dad who loved to listen at unreasonable volumes even when I was young. He used to have 4 large Kenwood speakers that were just amazing to me as a kid. It was all late 70s early 80s stuff that he spent hours cranking out AC/DC, Foreigner, Boston, Pink Floyd etc and ever since I moved out on my own I have continued that tradition with my own equipment.  Over the years I have had a few different setups. My first "big boy" stereo was a Kenwood Receiver with 4 Infinity Studio Monitor speakers and an 8-inch Infinity subwoofer. Years later those speakers got a bit worn (foam surrounds went) and I started upgrading to a newer 5.1 setup which supported newer audio formats that movies were using. I have also had a 6 disk Onkyo CD changer for quite awhile, though with streaming (Spotify/Plex) it gets used a lot less than it used to.  That upgrade (not quite all at once) went to an Onkyo...

 Like most I have been super busy, but one of my passions I have never posted about is home audio/theater. Here soon I will do more of a write-up of my full system as I want to expand the topics so I have more content (even if few ever see it...lol) . My room isn't the greatest since I live in an old house and I am stuck within a lot of the constraints of it. Today though I am just going to post the following.  After nearly 20 years I finally am giving another center channel speaker a chance vs my old reliable Klipsch KSC-1. I have literally changed every other speaker in some cases more than once while it was here. SVS Prime center gets the nod for the attempt and with their 45 day no questions asked returns I figured why not. It doesn't fully fit under my TV and I knew it wouldn't but I knew it also wouldn't be in the way. So far just listening to music it sounds pretty comparable to the Klipsch though maybe a bit fuller during stringed instruments sections. Sensitivi...

 Been a busy time around here the last few days. I have been tweaking and adjusting the 3700x I put in my desktop. As I updated in the blog before I managed to get my DDR4-3000 to run DDR-3200 I didn't have to adjust the timing at all...just set it to 3200 and boom on its way.  Easy enough... Ok, So next I started to play with the new tool "ClockTuner for Ryzen 1.0r by 1usmus" I really hadn't thought much about overclocking this CPU but in the end I just couldn't help myself. So after a bit of playing with that letting it first run the "diagnostics" portion it came back and I had a "gold" cpu.... sweet lets see what that can do! Well again after some more playing I easily got it to run at an All-Core overclock of 4.425GHZ..... oh hell yeah! That is 800 MHZ above the stock clock. So far it has been perfectly stable and honestly it doesn't even run hot. I tried it as high as 4.475 and it seemed ok. I also tried it at 5.0 GHZ and that crashed ...

 Hadn't had much to update lately, but today I got a new CPU, I updated the BIOS to the newest version a couple weeks ago hopeful that even though my board is an X370 that it would play nice with a new Ryzen 3000 series... Yes, I know the 4000s are not far off, but I figure I probably will not upgrade again until the 5000s or whatever are out and need DDR5. My current CPU is a Ryzen 7 1700 and it has a Corsair H100i AIO cooler. It has always run basically stable at 3.6 GHZ vs the 3.0 default and for the most part, has done very well. The only complaint I have really had was that my DDR4-3000 never would run above 2800, but I had heard this was a common problem with either the X370 or the Gen 1 Ryzen. Honestly I tried to get it to run faster a couple times occasionally it would run for a short time at 2933 but then usually would crash. I couldn't even really get it to boot normally at 2800 until the newest F50d BIOS for my board came out (Gigabyte AX370-Gaming). So, my brother i...

Automated Cluster setup script I wrote. I found that there were already scripts out there that did pieces of it, but none I found that ran the test parsed it and then continue to building it. It could probably be better and there are probably more "status codes" it could throw, but it has worked well enough for us so far. I won't post the whole thing as there is some stuff I would have to rip out for proprietary reasons, but at least the portion that looks at the report and continues. Logwrite is a custom function we use to write a log file. We are setting up AOA clusters with no shared storage so that is why we use the -nostorage during the cluster build. ###################################################################### #    Configure Cluster ###################################################################### LogWrite "Testing cluster configuration this will take a few minutes on $arrcomputers" -color white Test-Cluster -node $ArrComputers -Rep...

I don't quite want to cough up the cash for a 10Gb switch yet, though I have been looking. What I did want to do though was keep an eye on 10Gb cards to do direct connects between my 2 ESX Hosts and FreeNas box. So after a reasonable amount of looking I found some NICs which are supported on both ESX 6.5 and on FreeNAS (more on this later) Solarflare 10Gb NICs at only 17 dollars each ****BINGO*** https://www.ebay.com/itm/SFN5322F-SOLARFLARE-2-PORT-10GB-s-PCI-E-2-0-x8-ETHERNET-ENTERPRISE-NIC-ADAPTER/223666120333?ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT&_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649 So I also ordered a couple Finisar SFPs at 10 dollars each to fill them out. I only had 2 Cisco 10Gb SFPs in a drawer, but I have used both at work in the past and never had an issue. Both of these seem to work fine in these cards. Now the problem...one of the 3 I ordered was bad. I am sure they will fix it, but it did cause me some headaches because I put both good ones in my ESX boxes loaded the VIB fil...

I have been looking at many people's Ubiquiti installs for a bit, and while I am not in a hurry to rush headlong into it due to funds etc I figured it was about time to at least start. Part of this decision was driven by the fact I have a Wireless N extender which was like 20 dollars which has always been a bit problematic. It has served fairly well, but it is at least 6 years old now and I thought I should jump to something that supports 802.11 AC since my main Linksys router does. I went with Ubiquiti vs another extender because I would like to over time at least move my wireless to their stuff and I have been debating eventually getting a mini-pc of some sort to turn into a Pfsense router or possibly a Ubiquiti Security Gateway. My only issue with the security gateway is that in order to keep the price lower Ubiquiti seems to have used a pretty slow CPU which seems to have issues in some instances with some of the unofficial add-ons. I would like to eventually move my OpenVPN se...

The new FreeNas box has been working great. I have decided to play with Organizr a bit more and have added Monitorr. I tried to get it to work in a FreeNas jail, but honestly got pissed at the whole process. So I decided to install a RancherOS VM in my ESX and play with that. I am still trying to understand how to use docker better, but I have Monitorr running in a container there. Its been a bit painful, but got to learn sometime. I then added the monitorr service status bar to my organizr using various tutorials. I may go back at some point and either install RancherOS on my FreeNas or try a jail again but its good enough for now :) I have also added a Tautulli jail but there isn't much to say about that other than it works to gather some stats on my Plex, easy enough to look into on your own. I have also added a cheap $16 light bulb camera to my Zoneminder install. The camera isn't super great but for the cost I can't really complain and its only watching a small ...

As I mentioned in my last post I was tired of having a folder full of bookmarks to get to everything on my network...I have a bunch of stuff and it sucks. So I had seen someone discussing Organizr ( https://organizr.app/ ) a while back and thought yep its time to make this work. So I set up a new jail on my new FreeNas server as I mentioned in the last post and got to work. So after quite a bit of experimentation, reading, playing, downloading custom JPEGs etc this is where I ended up at. A landing page with all my links that can be easily updated as needed. There are some people out there doing some awesome things with it and I may add more things over time. So here is a few screenshots etc. Some items do not like being in an iframe and some I just let pop out to their own windows. Just depends on how they act.  As I also mentioned the other day I finally got around to getting Lidarr installed in a jail as well. ( https://lidarr.audio/ ) I have been a...