Monthly Archives: January 2023

Adding a second Sonos Sub

Home theater

Whoa!

I mentioned that the sound system in the home theater is all Sonos. Easy to install, mostly wireless and more than loud enough for the medium sized room which is 20’9″ long, 13’11” wide and 9’2″ high, with a flat ceiling. The latter is the preferred configuration for Dolby Atmos, which the Sonos Arc sound bar supports, as selected upward firing speakers bounce the height information off that ceiling to the listener.

The speakers – the sound bar, the two rear surrounds and the sub – have internal amplifiers and wireless data connectivity for all but the sound bar, so that all that is needed is a power source for each. The sound bar is hard wired to the UST projector with an HDMI cable. That makes for an easy installation.

Even with the one Sub the sound is smooth with no obnoxious peaks or valleys. I generally find that +6 to +8 on the rear surrounds makes for the best sound stage and the bass is not lacking. Response curves show it is smooth down to 25Hz. Late last year Sonos enhanced their iPhone app to permit use of two Subs and reviews suggest that two are better than one. However, at a costly $750 for a Sub, there may be some confirmation bias at work here. Keeping the Subs away from the walls avoids the usual resonance hump in bass response, which avoidance is desirable for smooth reproduction.

So I sprang for a second Sub:



Two are better than one. The Sonos system
makes for an elegant, uncluttered installation.
The rear surround speakers are not shown.

Packaging and installation are very much ‘Apple quality’. The iPhone app walks you though the process of adding the second Sub and once done you run the Trueplay function which has the speakers emitting sounds for 60 seconds while you walk around with the iPhone, waving it this way and that. This captures the sound stage and tunes the system for best results. (If your cell phone is an Android one you will have to borrow an iPhone or iPad as the function works on iOS only).

And yes, the bass is now smoother and cleaner and the mid range is further cleaned up. The image above is from the opening minutes of Damian Chazelle’s ‘First Man‘, the Neil Armstrong story, where he is piloting the experimental Bell aircraft into space and, yes, the effect is earth shattering.

Recommended, if not cheap.

An old Mac Mini for the home theater

Hardware, Home theater, Macintosh

A tremendous value.

When crafting my home theater the default assumption was that the enormous 55lb. energy quaffing Mac Pro would be the computer of choice. This has served me faultlessly for many years and one of the really nice benefits was that four large hard drives could be accommodated within the chassis where many movies were stored. For perfect streaming nothing beats hard wiring, no wi-fi to go down.

Interested in saving power and cutting intrusive bulk, I was reading about the latest M1 and M2 CPU-eqipped Mini’s and quickly realized that this was far more computing power than was required for the simple job of streaming movies. (The Mac Pro, of course, is total overkill, but it’s so inexpensive nowadays that economics are not an issue). So I searched around and came across this rather ancient 2014 Mac Mini on Amazon which, in its base configuration, ran me just $126. Sure it has no internal additional hard drive storage, but that was easily side-stepped with a cheap Probox like the ones I have been using for years. The old Mini is blessed with no fewer than four USB 3.0 sockets and a Probox is connected to each, meaning 16 external hard drives are accessible.

By the way, the availability of these old Minis on Amazon is spotty but keep checking and they crop up. You do not need more than 4GB RAM or the costly SSD option for streaming movies. The advertised image is incorrect – the 2014 Mini I received does not have a slot loading DVD drive. Mine came with a fresh installation of OS X Catalina (10.15). Here are the connection options on the machine:



Abundant connectivity.

Note the presence of an HDMI socket which is used to connect to the UST projector in the home theater.

The Mini has several advantages over the huge Mac Pro in this application. It uses far less power (6 watts idle, 85 watts max, compared with 125/285 for the Mac Pro), is easy to hide (you really do not want ugly computer boxes cluttering up a home theater), has HDMI built in (the Pro needs a suitably equipped graphics card) and, most importantly, comes with excellent Bluetooth 4.0 sensitivity. The BT in the Mac Pro is simply awful. Why is this important? Because you can hide the Mini away in a credenza, no status lights showing, and it responds perfectly to a Bluetooth mouse at 15 feet, where the Pro really struggles, even with an external Bluetooth ‘dongle’.

So if you are looking for an inexpensive, elegant computer solution for your home theater installation, this old Mini is just the ticket. Mine arrived in absolutely mint condition from a vendor named ‘iSpyDeals’. And should the small 500GB hard drive fail, it’s easily replaced. Why, you could even install a cheap SSD for even snappier performance. Just do not make the mistake of thinking that you can use this computer for heavy video processing ….

Here are the specifications and options for the 2014 Mac Mini which is still supported by Apple, if you like spending hours on the phone with a clueless ‘technical advisor’, one whose native tongue is anything but English:



Specifications.

Data Rescue …. to the rescue

Software

150 Blu Ray movies recovered.

One of the most frustrating aspects of Mac desktop computer ownership is Cupertino’s planned obsolescence policy, one which manifests itself in the endless – and mindless – ‘upgrades’ to the OS X operating system. These provide ‘features’ no one needs and ensure that old application versions cease working.

My movie HDD boxes, which contain some 20GB of movies plus 20GB of back ups had one of the 4 TB hard drives fail so I quickly procured a replacement and set to restoring it from the backup drive. The only snag is that the backup refused to mount on my desktop 2010 Mac Pro. Panic.

I fired up Disk Drill only to be told that my version of Disk Drill was outdated and required updating. I did as instructed only to be told after the update that now my OS was outdated and required updating. Some idiot at Disk Drill decided to share this requirement after the point of no return because, dear reader, I cannot update High Sierra as that’s as high as my Mac Pro will go without resorting to aftermarket hacks, something I very much do not want to do. I’m on OS X High Sierra, 10.13.6.

But I happened to have the old version of Disk Drill running on another Mac Pro so I inserted the apparently faulty backup disk in that machine, being sure to update nothing, and after 72 hours (!) Disk Drill told me it could maybe recover 15 of the 150 Blu Ray movies somewhere on that drive. Useless. I did run the recovery process out of curiosity and the recovered movies were but cut outs of the whole thing. Doubly useless. Yes, I know, Disk Drill will tell me how superior the latest version is but if they could also explain how I can actually run the thing I would be deliriously happy. So hasta la vista to another failed product, due to the raw stupidity of the developer.

I checked around for other recovery apps, suspecting that all that was wrong with my back up drive was a corrupted or lost file directory, as the disk was spinning away happily even though it would not mount in Disk Utility, and chanced upon Data Rescue which comes in both Mac and Windows versions. The Mac version is stated to work with OS 10.12 (Sierra) and later, so I downloaded a copy and ran ‘deep scan’ on the back up drive. A day later, lo and behold, all 150 movies were disclosed – even with the drive not mounted – and Prosoft hosed me down for $99 for a ‘single disk recovery’ version which I fired up immediately.



Data Rescue ‘deep scan’ gets under way.

$99 is a whole lot less than re-ripping 150 files whose average size for a Blu Ray movie is some 27 GB. 9 hours and fifteen minutes later I had the new WD HDD full with 149 of the 150 Blu Ray movies. Just one had gone AWOL. Checking a handful showed the content to be full and uncorrupted and the new disk drive was back in service, allowing us to watch Hitchcock’s ‘To Catch a Thief’ in all its glory on the 120″ home theater screen.



Data Rescue has recovered almost everything some 9+ hours later.

As for inflation, the last WD Red 4TB drive I bought 6 years ago ran me an inflation adjusted $183, whereas the new one was just $75. Not everything inflates in price! I use 5400rpm Western Digital drives; the 50% premium for 7200 rpm drives is money wasted for this application. Also, the less costly SMR drives are just fine. CMR is not needed in this simple use scenario. The differences are explained here.

So, if you are on Sierra or later then Data Rescue is recommended, based on my experience.

As for hard drives, statistically significant data (meaning thousands of samples) confirm that Western Digital drives, especially the ‘Red’ version, are far more reliable than those from competitor Seagate by a factor of 2x and, as luck would have it, the failed drive – it was completely locked up and would not spin – was a Seagate. So I’m sticking with WD in future.