Philipp Höhn

Hi again!

Finally I’m back here and writing something for my weblog. I know it took me quite a long time to push myself and really do something else but hanging around and enjoying my free time. But here I am, back again. There are many things I want to say, mostly just things that happened but also a new piece of hardware which I bought and which I am currently enjoying very much. Read on and see some nice pictures of the new hardware and everything around it.

As I mentioned before, I reached my A-Levels: Three weeks ago I had my last exams and on Saturday the 23rd of June I received my final grade certificate (if anyone of the 121 others gets here, feel welcomed ). In the next days I used my new free time to realize that I really finished school which was pretty hard to understand. Today I think I’ve gotten used to this situation and I’m looking forward to moving away from this strange place that I’m still calling my home and starting studying at university. Read more about this later.

A friend of mine who regularly seems to seduce me to buy new hardware (thank you for this ) somehow influenced me, willingly or not, to use some money and buy myself an AV-receiver. He was the one who once recommended me the Teufel Concept E Magnum, a set of 5 speakers and a subwoofer with an incredible sound for “just” 150€ which was practically one of the best things I have ever bought! Already having this 5.1 set including a 5.1 sound card (for the linux users: Terratec Aureon 5.1 Fun – works perfectly under Alsa) I use this speaker set for my computer mainly to listen to music, watch DVDs and stuff like that. Unfortunately I never had the chance of using these speakers for my TV and radio. But with my new Denon AVR-1507 AV-receiver this works just fine. I”ve got my speakers and my subwoofer directly connected to it and I have the impression that the sound even improved by using this new receiver. I bought it via amazon and got an allowance between 30-40€ because the package it was originally shipped in was damaged. Well, thank you Mr. and Mrs carrier . I still paid a lot for it though: a bit more than 200€. Experts may say that this is quite a low price for an AV-receiver but for me it still looks like a lot of money…

Being happy about my new receiver I then had to find a place for it and connect it to nearly everything electronic in this room. This was fun but believe me, I nearly went crazy with all these small cables and wires! I’ve now got my TV, my DVD player, my computer and even my laptop connected to this receiver and to the 5.1 surround sound. Let me just say: This rocks!

Because of all these new connections I had to replace my three cables with which I had connected my computer to my subwoofer and the speakers with a new optical one. Have a look at the funny picture on the left showing two of them in comparison. Just guess which of them costed 3€ and which of them made me pay nearly 40€

Having installed all cables I finally had to set up my computer to use the optical cable. I guess it might be interesting for people willing to use these cables to know how I got this to work. I did a bit of research and somewhere in a forum I found a thread about this. I just had to use the alsamixer to activate “IEC958 Out” which practically enables this port. After this I disabled “IEC958 Loop” to prevent the digital output from only using signals from the digital input – at least that’’s what was written there. At last I edited my ~/.asoundrc and replaced pcm “hw:0,1″ with pcm “hw:0,0″.

A funny experience I made was, after having moved my computer from the left side of my screen to the right to connect it to the new cable, my mother’s Ubuntu machine from one floor above recently had a much faster internet connection than before. I guess my computer standing between the router and my mother’s computer somehow blocked or at least slowed the wireless network down. This fixed she enjoys reading her emails in real time without having to do housework or read a book while loading the incoming mail. I”m sure she now agrees that my new AV-receiver was a good investment.

There’s now only one problem left: I didn’t manage to configure neither Alsa, mplayer nor vlc to do exactly what I want yet. When watching a DVD I can’t just use its sound options and let them control whether I hear stereo or surround sound. I have to do this through my av-receiver which is actually a loss of quality. I hope to find a solution to this soon but I”m sure that somewhere out in the ubuntuforums (did I ever mention them before? ) there’ll be a friendly linux user knowing what to do. By the way, if you are the one, please let me know how to do this and comment on this post.

As promised, some more pictures of the new AC-Receiver and my whole sound- and computer-system:

Before I’ll come to end, there a few things to mention. Remember? It was “News, news, news”

Yesterday I talked to a guy called “OldPink” on IRC Freenode. Well, let’s not make any jokes about his name but come to the point :p. He told me he had a blog, too, so I read some of his posts and I was really impressed. I especially like the length and the style of them, it’s just how I wish them to be. So, perhaps you”d like to have a look at his website at mbhoy.com.

I forgot to mention that Issue #2 of the full circle magazine has been released. But I’m sure you’ve already registered for the fcm-newsletter to receive notifications on upcoming releases.

So, that’s it for the moment. I’ll try to post here more regularly so I don”t have to throw everything together and write about so many different themes in one post. I”d be pleased if you gave me some feedback about whether you liked this sort of mingling different themes because I’m really not sure if this is the way I want it to be.

Thanks for reading and see you soon!

Tags: free software, internet, personal, Ubuntu