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Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418200 03/27/16 11:24 PM
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So this morning I got up early, did a touch of sanding, and another light coat of drywall mud before heading out of town to visit family for Easter.

Just got home, and things were ready for texture. Sprayed the texture, and now just waiting for it to dry really well before paint, but we are going out for dinner and then talking with my daughter and her fiance about wedding stuff (just a couple of months away and we need to finalize a few things) so I probably won't get around to paint until tomorrow...

I should get all ceiling speakers mounted by the end of the day, and hopefully have all of the drywall dust and misc tools and "junk" (masking tape, string for fishing wires, etc) all cleaned up. I don't know if I will get the other equipment back into the rack (probably not as that takes a chunk of time), but we'll see.


Farewell - June 4, 2020
Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418211 03/28/16 01:57 PM
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Ceiling work was painted this morning before leaving for work. We will see what tonight brings for time to get things done. I just found out that I have to do an interview for an opening on my team at 4:30 today offsite. Considering that I normally work until 4:00, this will set me back a solid 90 minutes tonight and I have something else to go to from 7:00-8:30... Feel like I am loosing a ton of my evening now. Oh well. I should be able to get the speakers up, and maybe even tested (I never even plugged them in when I got them to just make sure that they work... I sure hope so, LOL...


Farewell - June 4, 2020
Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418238 03/29/16 01:43 PM
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So the overhead speakers are (finally) up and the layout looks "scientifically" correct. I am still not a huge fan of how far down the front speakers hang in order to get the angles correct for 2 rows of seats, but at least they are no longer blocking the image (doh).

I got them all up last night, and then decided that I should test them out, which I should have done when the speakers first arrived.

I plugged in one of my "patch cables" from my Onkyo into the overhead wall panel, which the wiring also had never been tested either. Right off the bat, something was wrong with the first speaker. All highs, no lows, thought for a minute that it must be Bose... Ok, so let me try another... Same thing. OK, let me try one of my regular surrounds, and they sounded fine. OK. I knew already what the problem was...

Upon reassembly, I connected the woofer to the tweeter connections and the tweeter was connected to the woofer wiring inside the speakers. I knew that I should have 1) noted which color wires went to which (tweeter vs woofer), 2) when I wasn't sure, I should have looked at the labels on the crossover itself (which is labeled) instead of trusting which wires happened to be closer to the tweeter hole and which were closer to the woofer hole, which obviously got jostled around during the painting process.

Anyway, it wasn't difficult, but it was a pain to swap the wiring around a bit just due to needing an extra set of hands (one to hold the woofer, and the other set to make the connections), but about 40 minutes later, everything was connected as it should be.

Fired up the Onkyo again, and sure enough, 1000% better. All 4 speakers and their wiring worked wonderfully.

So tonight starts out with a massive cleaning of the room. Most of the tools have been removed, but the drywall dust will take a while. I am going to grab the shop vac so suck up as much as possible, then use my air compressor and a nozzle and blow air along the ceiling, walls, and work my way down. Let things settle a bit, and vacuum the floor a few times depending on how much gets kicked up. The last thing will be wiping down surfaces... Dry wiping of the walls, and probably a wet wipe down of the seats, which will take a few times to get all of the dust as that stuff gets everywhere, and when it gets wet it just smears around.

Anyway, here is a snapshot from about midnight last night just to show the side surrounds and overheads. It is a slight panoramic image, so there is obviously some distortion. Oh, and yes, I should have removed the popcorn machine before working in there. That will be fun to clean too.



Lastly, the Anthem MRX-1120 should FINALLY make it back to me from Canada. A replacement was supposed to be picked up from the Anthem/Paradigm factory last Thursday, but there was an ice storm which caused them to lose power and they were closed because of it, they were also closed for Good Friday, it was picked up yesterday only to find out that the Canadian postal service is closed for "Easter Monday." But today should be the day that it heads my way. Hopefully I will have it by Friday.


Farewell - June 4, 2020
Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418248 03/30/16 01:41 AM
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Congrats Nick,
Looks great hopefully all the dust has settled before your Anthem's return. I hate that powder just keep on dusting and vacuuming.

Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418250 03/30/16 03:58 AM
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Everything has been cleaned in the room, from top to bottom.

All speakers are up.

Acoustical panels are back up too.

Tomorrow I start putting the equipment rack back together.

If there is enough time, I will also pick up all of the mess in the game room and get it set back up. Just leaving the LED lights to fix, and then putting the Anthem MRX-1120 in place when it arrives.... Although, I was told that it would ship today, but I never got a "hey, it shipped" email, so we'll see.


Farewell - June 4, 2020
Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418613 04/16/16 02:33 AM
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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
Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418615 04/16/16 05:24 AM
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lol



Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418619 04/16/16 11:47 AM
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And that my friend is why I have a whole wack of UPS's to protect and power all my computer devices.

As for your RAID. have you considered setting up as RAID6, or even if your RAID5 can have a hot standby?

Did you put on the 044 firmware onto your Anthem? I don't know what is different between the 039 that I had, but hope it fixes something more that i didn't know i had.


Anthem: AVM60, Fosi DAC-Q5
Axiom: ADA1500, LFR1100 Actiive, QS8, EP500, M3, M3comp, M5
Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418621 04/16/16 01:27 PM
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I did replace my older Zotac HTPC's with a newer Intel NUC.

I ended up buying two of them. I got one of the cheeper 5CPYH that is the celeron 2 core unit, that is about the same processing power as my older AtomD2700 but the integrated graphics can do 4k and has hardware h264 & h265. With version of OpenELEC all my videos look much better now on my 4K screen as they are being unpressed to 4k. Well, the older SD stuff looks pretty bad, but everything from 720 and 1080 looks great. And it supports DTS-MA and Dolby TrueHD with Atmos.

I also grabbed on of the 5PGYH pentium 4 core units. it comes pre-installed with a 32gb eMM with Win10 loaded on it. I pulled the 2gb ram that comes with the unit and put that into the celeron and bought an 8gb stick for it. Am running my FooBar, BeyondTV and the Anthem ARC software.

Just a thought if you HTPC is getting a bit long in tooth.

Last edited by oakvillematt; 04/16/16 01:29 PM.

Anthem: AVM60, Fosi DAC-Q5
Axiom: ADA1500, LFR1100 Actiive, QS8, EP500, M3, M3comp, M5
Re: Maybe I should start a v4.0 build thread somewhere
nickbuol #418623 04/16/16 02:37 PM
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Not sure about the "lol", but ok...

I am on v39 of the firmware, which is still greater than the v35 that is STILL on their website. Not sure why they haven't released a newer version for the general population.

As for the HTPC getting a bit old, it is actually the most powerful computer I have in the house (which is saying quite a bit). I spent a good chunk of money on it. My 3 most powerful computers, in order, in the house are:
#1 - HTPC
#2 - Media Server (way overpowered for what it does)
#3 - My primary desktop where I do photo and some video editing

SO I should be good there for a while. smile


Farewell - June 4, 2020
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