And I am (finally) back in business. What a crappy set of issues that slowed me down for a while.

Outside of the Anthem receiver taking forever to get to Anthem and for them to send me a replacement, which I got on Monday, April 4th, I was heading out of town on Tuesday, April 5th for work.

I didn't have much time to do anything but hook up the MRX-1120, listen to about 5 minutes of uncalibrated audio, run the firmware update, run ARC (room correction) and listen to about 5 more minutes of audio.

The Anthem, out of the box, was much cleaner audio than the Onkyo, that is at least how it sounded. Precise, and revitalizing on my Axioms. After ARC it was utterly amazing.

Best part, no power-down (or other) receiver issue. YAY.

I am about to show my wife and youngest daughter a couple of movie demos, and I go to movie selections and notice a whole chunk of movies are missing. Wait, what? Yup, the media server crapped a drive. Thanks to RAID5, I am not dead in the water, but I might as well be. I need to get a replacement drive before I want to use the server any more. I file a warranty claim with Toshiba for a new drive, and they basically say that they are going to send me a debit card for $150. OK. Fine. I look up hard drive prices at Micro Center (since I am going to be near one on my work trip). They have the exact same drive for $70. I plan on picking up 2. One replacement, and one for more storage... I get there on Tuesday and end up buying 3 of them for that price.

Then when I got back later in the week, it was busy, busy, busy... My kids (LOL, kids... They are 17 and 22) had stuff going on that brought family in to town. I stayed up really late Friday night after getting back from some late family stuff, and was running some system updates on the HTPC and starting the RAID5 repair on with the new hard drive in the server. The server was humming along fine, but the HTPC was giving me a couple of (minor) issues. No big deal, I would let it sit until morning.

Saturday morning rolls around, the server rebuilt the drive perfectly fine. I power it off as I plan to add the other 2 drives later, and I kick off the updates again on the HTPC, and seriously 30 seconds later, BOOM. I hear this sound, and power goes out in the house. I find out it is the entire neighborhood. Some backhoe hit a power line somewhere nearby. No big deal, I will finish later.

Well, later comes and.... The HTPC is stuck in a reboot loop claiming that an update failed to install one reboot, and then that Windows files are corrupt. Darn power outage. I try repairing, and tinkering around for a couple of minutes, and then the relatives show up. I guess no demo on Saturday. Then we are out of town Sunday all day, and Monday we head out of town right after work to buy a new (to me) car that was 2 hours away. That took all night. Through in some more "to do" items for my daughter's upcoming wedding Tuesday night. I do, somehow, manage to get the other 2 drives added to the server and kick off the RAID5 update process (which took about 11 hours).

Wednesday, I look at the HTPC again, and start getting some life back into it, but have a new problem. I can't get it to display on the projector. It displays on a monitor and even the TV in the room next door, but not the projector. I monkey around with driver uninstalls and reinstalls, and no luck as soon as I put the driver back on. I end up using VNC to remotely connect to the HTPC when it is connected to the projector and for some reason the resolution is set to something that the projector can't display. I blame the driver install/power outage because I didn't change it. After a few hours, I just quit for the night.

On Thursday I decide to just reinstall Windows and my apps on the HTPC as it will probably be faster than repairing anything at this point as I am still having app issues, like Atmos not working. Yay, reinstall finishes, video works, playback software tuned and tweaked for video, but no audio above "Multi-PCM" on the receiver. I just start messing with settings and, POP (and I mean, bolt of lightning right behind me kind of pop)... I turn around, and smell this nasty burnt smell and the projector has error lights blinking. Crap. 1500 hours on the bulb and it blew...

I happen to have a spare (thank you JVC bulb warranty for sending me a spare back in December 2012) that is 2 revisions newer in design. I put it in, and hope for the best. I got the best. The picture, in low lamp mode, is SO much brighter than when I was in high lamp mode on the original bulb due to dimming. Yeah... And bed time.

Now brings me to today. I finally get some time to work on things again, and just simply missed 1 setting that was preventing proper audio (DTS-HD MA, TrueHD, and Atmos) from being played back. It was a simply issue that dawned on me at work today... The Windows audio playback device setting was set to stereo. I changed it to 7.1 in Windows, and made sure that I had JRiver set to bitstream audio (which it did) and woohoo, full audio again, including Atmos.

So it was a crazy journey, but I am finally back in business. Now I am just tweaking my Harmony One to control the Anthem receiver. It is working, but I want to adjust some of the touchscreen buttons.

So it has been a tough few weeks.
1) Anthem receiver has an out of the box issue and takes over 3 weeks from reporting the problem until I have a replacement in hand.
2) Running speaker wires, painting the M3s, getting things mounted, and other room setup just took a long time, but was fairly problem free (minus me cutting part of my LED lighting which I still need to fix).
3) Media server crapping a hard drive.
4) HTPC needing a full reinstall.
5) Projector bulb blowing.
6) Needing to reprogram the Harmony One remote
7) Other setup issues along the way.

I hope to enjoy a movie either later tonight or tomorrow.

Farewell - June 4, 2020