Graves On SOHO VoIP

A few weeks after the Behringer monitors had arrived I learned of the mating subwoofer, Behringer’s B2092A. This was also a comparable bargain, so I bought two. Yes, stereo subwoofers. Such decadence.

The B2092A is beautiful in a way that many people will not appreciate. It’s a device built to a task with little concern for superficial things like aesthetics. It’s a 4th order double-tuned bandpass enclosure housing two long throw 8” drivers, their amplifier and crossover electronics. The built-in amp provides 360 watts rms below 80Hz with a range of adjustments to compensate for level and placement in the room.

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These arrived Friday last week. They were known to be refurbished as they were discontinued last year some time. Even so, they were shipped poorly packaged and one arrived significantly damaged so I’m going to try and get it replaced.

And don’t get me started about UPS. At least in Houston they suck.

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This post has been swirling around in my head for many months. This morning my wife and I decided to have breakfast at a nearby French cafe. In the cafe there were all manner of people. Large people*, small people, rich people, not-so-rich-people**, singles and couples. It was a typical River Oaks Houston crowd.

And then there was one guy wearing a Bluetooth headset. Huh?! It’s 9:30am on a Sunday morning and you’re at breakfast with your wife/girlfriend/mistress. What’s with the Lt. Uhura fashion sense?

I mean, how terribly important a person he must be to be that much in demand. To need such immediate access to his cell phone. Sunday. Over breakfast.

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When last year it was announced that Houston was to get municipal wifi network I had to applaude Mayor Bill White for his vision and drive. There are vast number of people in this city for whom the internet is not readily accessible.

Houston is a huge city with a more pronounced digital divide than many other places. It’s the kind of place where opportunity presented to low income neighborhoods can make a big difference in the lives of people.

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Matt Brunk is apparently getting a sample of the new Cisco/Linksys IP310. In the comment trail to his blog post he notes that, yes it looks like an 802.11 b/g device. The real question is its support for WMM, which can occasionally be found in the latest generation of 802.11g devices.

This is interesting to me as I have a couple of older Linksys WAP54G access points that I’ve been meaning to replace. These were the first generation hardware and have been a little flaky the past few months.

If I’m going to replace them then I’d like to know that I’m choosing APs that are well adapted to VoWifi should I later go that route. I also want POE capable APs so that I can mount them more located for more ideal range.

Wow! Today’s Voip Users Conference call on Astlinux was great! It’s just what I was hoping this group would evolve into. The last five or six of the weekly calls have been very good, and they seem to be getting better as time goes on.

Good host…kudos to Randy! Good guests…many thanks to Kristian, Darrick & the Astlinux crowd. Good participation by a well rounded group of people. It went long, but it didn’t seem like it. I learned some useful stuff. It was time well spent.

If you weren’t on the call you owe it to yourself to listen to the recording, here.

Speakers + Amps = Powered Monitors

Powered monitors make sense for a lot of reasons. Except for very small models they are generally bi-amped, with an active line level crossover filter dividing the high & low frequencies before the amplifier stage. Then a separate amplifier is provided for each driver. In the case of Behringer’s B2031A, there is 150 watts for the woofer and 75 watts for the tweeter.

This approach allows the designer to tailor each amplifier design to suit the specific driver in question. Amplifier/driver interaction is one of the more complicated things in audio reproduction and optimization here can bring big performance improvements. With the amps right in the cabinets there’s effectively no speaker leads to further complicate the amp/driver relationship.

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Not to belabor the point, but SIP Wifi handsets have been a pretty rotten product segment thus far along their evolution. While the concept is good the implementations have been lackluster. I suffered through 6 months with a Hitachi Cable WIP5000 some time ago before pursuing a SIP-DECT as a better solution.

The problems of prior offerings have been well enough described elsewhere. So when Cisco/Linksys issued a release about a new SIP Wifi offering, the iPhone Wireless-G IP310, it was easy enough to just ignore it as yet another bad idea. However, this product was announced many months back and only now finding its way into release. That’s certainly intriguing. And of course Cisco knows networks…wired or wireless.

Matt Brunk over at CMPs No Jitter blogged about this device today and reports that the device is capable of using 802.11 b/g/n wifi networks. Type B and G has been done before…type N is something new in a SIP handset. Type N wifi has provision for the wireless equivalent of QoS, which is known as WMM…for Wifi Multimedia. This is a key technology in providing workable high bandwidth streaming media over wifi networks.

Apparently Matt has a sample device to try in real-world testing. That will certainly be very interesting to follow.

Update: With little digging on the Linksys site I found this, which indicates 802.11b/g…but not n or WMM capability.