I've written up this most recent project of mine for the folks at www.smallnetbuilder.com. It's a complete How-To that describes running FreeNAS, SlimNAS & SqueezeCenter on a recycled HP T5700 thin client. I also modify the T5700 by adding a…
My rebuilt SlimNAS device is now operational. The little 2.5" HD is installed inside the T5700 case. I used the expansion chassis just to ensure that there's enough air flow now that there is a IDE ribbon cable blocking airflow…
I have a 2.5" 250 GB IDE hard drive to form the basis of my rebuilt SlimNAS server. I also have the HP T5700 host platform. As week or so back I ordered a 40 pin IDE cable on Ebay…
The new HD for my SlimNAS box arrived last Friday. So the time to rebuild my SlimServer system is fast approaching. Right now it’s running on a 2.8 GHz Pentium 4, but since I’ve abandoned the idea of the Inguz on-the fly room correction in software it just doesn’t need all that CPU power. Nor does it need to be making all that heat & noise.
However, I don’t expect that the simplest solution will work. The T5700 has a 44 pin connector for the flash “disk-on-module” that it normally boots from. A reader in Denmark has indicated that he had some trouble getting the small HD to power-up when connected here.
I see that the newer Squeeze Center, which is actually Slim Server v7, is available as a FreeNAS module. This means that it might be a good time to upgrade my T5700 based music server.
I haven’t actually been using this server for a few months. A while back I decided to try a “room correction” plugin from Inguz for Slim Server. This does some DSP transformations on the music stream on-the-fly, basically effecting some equalization. This plugin required more CPU power than a lowly T5700 could provide, so I’ve been using and old P4-2.8 as my music server these past months.
This past weekend a friend and I spent an afternoon listening comparatively to a collection of powered audio monitors. It was by no means a scientific study, just a casual session of listing to music in a focused manner.
We used three Slim Devices Squeezebox 3s as sources, all playing in sync from a music server. The SB3s were running Squeeze Center v7. We setup a playlist of music we both knew well then switched between monitors in pairs.