All VoIP and no play makes Michael a dull boy. My wife would argue that much of my VoIP-ish activity is play, but that’s another story. If you’ve been reading things around here for a bit you already know that we love our Squeezeboxen! When the music flows here, it flows through these, and we do have a few of them here and there.
Some time ago I published a project about How To: DIY Music Server Using FreeNAS, SlimNAS and an H-P T5700. This remains one of the more popular items around here, generating over 6,000 page views in the past 12 months alone.
A couple of new posts to a related thread over in the forum at Small Net Builder points me to a new take on the project. Kevin Hanson has reworked it to address…How to: Building a Squeezebox Server for under $100… Yes, it can be done…
I do a lot of my holiday shopping online. I have done for many years. Today I found a deal that I can't use but I think I should share. Ecost.com is offering the Logitech Clear Chat Pro USB headset…
This is a very neat video of salt on a vibrating surface. The surface is being excited by a transducer of some sort across a range of audible frequencies. The salt reacts to this energy. The pattern of the salt…
We do love our Squeezeboxen. In fact, we love ’em enough that we have four of the little beasties scattered around here. They are at the core of our strategy for “whole house audio.”
The strategy is simple, nothing fancy or even built-in. In each room where we like to listen to music or internet radio we have a Squeezebox3 and a pair of self-powered monitor speakers. When we entertain a crowd, we sync up the whole shebang so that we have music throughout the property but independent control of volume in each room.
Ok, this is me diving into the deep-end of something that very possibly literally no-one in the world cares about. That’s just so typical of me. Actually, I know that a few people are starting to clue in about this because I’ve heard it come up here and there in conversation, most recently at the Sept 15th HDComms event in NYC.
This post is actually the third in a series. In the first (Pink Floyd: The Making Of Money & Directionality) I took a quick look at pop music recording practices and specifically the practice of recording things “close-mic’d” the adding ambience through synthetic means. In the second in the series (Codecs, Wideband & Stereo: A Conversation At Amoocon) I followed a conversation in the hallway at AMOOCON 2009, noting aspects of the discussion pertaining to “stereo” or the conveyance of directionality.
Once we get beyond PSTN audio quality, when wideband is accepted as normal, then “dimensional” or “immersive” audio becomes a new frontier for exploration in telephony. In fact, in some limited ways we’re already doing this in larger video conference room & telepresence suites.