Model numbers and a new description of fault.. was Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

Interestingly, I've got a Linn Mimik on the bench at the moment. Think it
is the one which Linn made all the song and dance about - they'd
eventually made a CD which sounded as good as their Sondek. ;-)

It's an amazing device. Pretty well twice the size of the Philips 104 and
densely packed too. It has a toroidal mains transformer the size of which
wouldn't disgrace many a power amp. ;-) No wonder it was expensive.

The fault with this one was flaky reaction to a push button. I've given
them a clean and it seems to be fixed. I'll have a good listen to it
before returning it. To see if it's as good as claimed. ;-)

--
*A bicycle can't stand alone because it's two tyred.*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

On Mon, 25 Jan 2016 14:24:08 +0000, Jim Lesurf wrote:

In article , Bob Latham
wrote:

Minimserver provides UPnP services, so in theory any player that is
UPnP compatible can use Minimserver.

Which software/hardware do you use to access the tracks and play
them?
As I say, the DS Audio application/NP30 is fine for me - except on
the matter of gapless playback.

There are 3 Sonos portable devices in our house and these use their own
app running on iPads and Samsung phones. Sonos is not UPnP it just
needs an SMB share from the NAS.


FWIW I just treat the NAS as part of the filing system on my machines
and run files to play them just as I would if they were on a given
machine's HDs. No need for any UPnP, etc.

Although NAS4Free has a DLNA/UPnP server amongst the many optional
services, I've never been impressed by it whenever I've enabled it and
let it rebuild the database to try my media streaming box on. The ten
foot interface seems no easier to use than if I disable the DLNA/UPnP
service and rely simply on browsing the media folders from the
Mediaplayer's explorer interface.

In fact, using a laptop with with win2k offers a far slicker experience
than any of the media streaming boxes I've tried (just two, mind you!) so
I can well understand your choice. :-) And, of course, there's the upside
that you can shut off an unnecessary service (UPnP), not that that
represents a heavy load on resources (unless you make the mistake of
enabling transcoding on-the-fly which can bring a NAS to its knees - just
make sure that whatever you use to act as a media streaming player can
play whatever media file formats you've elected to store your media
collection in without reliance on any such transcoding services).

--
Johnny B Good

Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 09:48:15 +0000, RJH wrote:

On 21/01/2016 22:03, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 06:17:48 +0000, Bob Latham wrote:

In article ,
Johnny B Good wrote:

Ouch! or Yikes! How often do you upgrade or swap out failing disk
drives, I wonder?

I have 3 NAS boxes, one of them off site. The oldest is from 2010 and
none of them has ever given any indication of a problem with their
hard drive. Rightly or wrongly I use Western Digital REDS.

Rightly, imo, provided you've addressed the 8 second head unload
timeout
issue (which the lack of failure of the oldest drive could imply except
I don't know whether this is simply because you're only spinning them
for just a few hours per day).

As long as you steer clear of the Seagate rubbish, you shouldn't
suffer
too many problems especially if you check the SMART stats every other
week or so and don't *just* rely on smartmonctrl sending you an email
about imminent failure. :-)


I've read your posts on the unreliability of HDs, and (lack of) wisdom
in allowing systems to 'sleep'.

I'm afraid I simply don't follow a lot of what you say, and have relied
on buying what seem to be be decent brands - WD Reds for my last upgrade
a couple of years' back. I let the system sleep - basically because it's
not that accessible (in a cellar), is not used anything like 24/7 -
maybe 4 hours/day on average, and the electricity savings seem
worthwhile.

I use the old disks (2TB WD-somethings I think, in the old NAS box) for
backup. I've not had a single failure - but then maybe I've been lucky.

Apologies for the late response, real life, such as it is, got in the
way.

There's no hard and fast rule regarding the use of spin down power
saving in a SoHo or home NAS box but, unless you're really only making
infrequent use of the NAS, it's always best to avoid lots of spin up
events per day (most home desktop PCs are typically power cycled just one
or two times a day which keeps the spin up event count nice and low,
assuming that distraction known as spin down power saving in the OS has
been completely disabled in order to preserve the operator's sanity).

It's worth keeping in mind that this is a *power saving* feature (in
reality, an energy consumption saving strategy) with no thought to
whatever consequences there might be in regard of the drive's
reliability. Seagate must be the only drive manufacturer stupid enough to
confuse power saving with temperature reduction if their FreeAgent
'specials' were anything to go by.

Spinning down a modern HDD typically reduces power consumption by around
7 to 10 watts per drive as observed in the energy consumed at the mains
socket. Each watt year of energy consumed equates to about a quid's worth
on the annual electricity bill. That represents 8.766 KWH units of
electricity used per year. You can check your actual unit costs and
calculate a more exact annual cost per watt's worth of 24/7 consumption.

If you're running the NAS 24/7 and just using spin down power saving to
minimise its running expenses, you can estimate just how much of a saving
this contributes by calculating the hours of spin down 'sleep' time each
drive enjoys per day. For example, a pair of drives allowed to 'sleep'
overnight may get anywhere from 8 to 16 hours of repose per day,
depending on how often you access the files on the NAS box and the timeout
period you've selected before the drives spin down.

For arguments sake, I'll assume an average of 12 hours per day of spin
down sleep for both drives and an effective energy saving at the socket
of 10 watts each, 20 watts in total making for a saving of 240 watt hours
per day. this represents a total of 87.66 units of electrical consumption
saved over the year. Assuming 15p per unit, this would represent £13.15
savings on the yearly electricity bill.

This doesn't strike me as a worthy enough saving to place the drives
under the additional thermal cycling stresses introduced by such a power
saving strategy. However,in the case of a four drive setup, the savings
would be double that and look a more attractive proposition (at £26.30 a
year). In my opinion, that's still not enough to justify such a strategy
but I'm not you and you may feel differently about the added risk factor.
Also, your usage pattern may allow for an even longer (unbroken) 'sleep'
period per day and your electricity costs may be higher than the 'ball
park' 15 pence a unit figure I trotted out.

One way to minimise spin down cycles is to choose a long time out
period. When I toyed with spin down power saving I chose a 3 hour timeout
to 'sleep' on the basis that during the day the drives would remain spun
up and only after I taken to my bed would the drives finally spin down
for maybe as much as 8 hours worth of 'sleep', effectively no worse than
if they'd been used in a desktop PC being power cycled once or twice a
day without any spin down power saving to stress them (or me) any further.

In my case, the savings on all four drives only amounted to some 28
watts and I soon decided the potential savings in my case weren't enough
to justify the extra stress of even an additional one or two spin down
cycles per day for the sake of letting them sleep for just 6 to 8 hours
per night (I'm generally using the desktop PC for around 16 hours per day
which is often left running 24/7). Assuming an average 'sleep' time per
day of 8 hours this would represent a mere £12.27 a year, assuming 15p
per unit cost (I can't recall the actual unit cost offhand).

Whatever the actual savings figure proved to be, it didn't strike me as
enough justification to subject the drives to any spin down cycling at
all so I gave up on the idea of chasing after such savings, especially as
I was burning up some 70 odd quid's worth in electricty per year just
keeping my collection of UPSes powered up.

I was able to save 20 quid a year alone just by decommissioning a
SmartUPS700. Now, the only UPS maintenance loads I have are the
BackUPS500's 3 watts load (protecting the NAS box) and the 7 or 8 watts
of an ancient Emerson30 450VA rated UPS which sits in the basement
'protecting' the VM Superhub II cable modem/router with what I suspect is
a well cooked set of 7AH SLAs which wouldn't last 5 seconds should the
mains disappear unexpectedly (I really ought to check it out one of these
days).

Bearing in mind what I was already spending to protect against an event
that last occurred over quarter of a century ago, you can well understand
my reluctance to increase the risk (even if only slight) of premature
disk failure for the sake of a saving that was a mere fraction of what I
was already squandering on UPS maintenance costs.

If you can optimise the spin down power saving time out period to keep
the average spin up cycles per day below 5 or 6 (you can check this in
the SMART logs) and still accumulate enough spin down sleep hours to make
a worthwhile saving, then go for it otherwise you might be better off
avoiding spin down power saving altogether. It's hard to know where the
'tipping point' between unwarranted risk and useful energy savings lies
with such a strategy.

My guess (and it's only a guess) would be no more than 5 or 6 a day on
average. I think a close look at the more detailed specs on the hard
drive might offer up a clue in terms of the maximum spin down cycles
lifetime rating which the manufacturer may or may not have opted to
publish. If you can't find such a figure for the models of drives you're
actually using, you can always look for such a figure for *any* model
*or* make to get some idea of at least one manufacturer's take on this
particular aspect of drive reliability. I think I may even have seen such
a figure but I can't recall which brand or model or even what the figure
was - It would have held no interest for me seeing as how I was avoiding
spin down for reasons beyond the matter of mere power saving.

--
Johnny B Good

Model numbers and a new description of fault.. was Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

You mean somebody actually bought one? These tend t o be based around
somebody elses unit.
Brian

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
Interestingly, I've got a Linn Mimik on the bench at the moment. Think it
is the one which Linn made all the song and dance about - they'd
eventually made a CD which sounded as good as their Sondek. ;-)

It's an amazing device. Pretty well twice the size of the Philips 104 and
densely packed too. It has a toroidal mains transformer the size of which
wouldn't disgrace many a power amp. ;-) No wonder it was expensive.

The fault with this one was flaky reaction to a push button. I've given
them a clean and it seems to be fixed. I'll have a good listen to it
before returning it. To see if it's as good as claimed. ;-)

--
*A bicycle can't stand alone because it's two tyred.*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

--
----- -
This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from...
The Sofa of Brian Gaff...

Blind user, so no pictures please!

Model numbers and a new description of fault.. was Couple ofcd queries, model numbers later
 

On 02/02/2016 12:13, Brian Gaff wrote:
Marantz
CD6000 Ose
Has issues now with cdrs particularly detecting them and track starts
manually selected unless selected by going backwards through the disc.
Lens cleaned with only marginal improvement.
Dropouts on cdrws.

Panasonic
DVD s500
Has poor software when used as a cd player.
It does not seem to allow gap free playing of continuous cds with track
markers. Acts like its doing track at once rather then disc at once if
we are talking recording, but this is on playback. Seems its a firmware
issue from new.
Wondered if anyone knew if it was updated via a cd or something.
it was very cheap so cannot really complain. it has a wonderful sound on
cds though, better than the Marantz.

Just get another twenty quid DVD player from the supermarket.
That will play CDs, CD-Rs and CD-RWs properly with a wonderful sound,
better than a Marantz OSE. Though if you want it better than a KI Signature,
you'll need a Russ Andrews SCART to phono audio interconnect. :-)

--
Eiron.

Model numbers and a new description of fault.. was Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

In article ,
Brian Gaff wrote:
You mean somebody actually bought one? These tend t o be based around
somebody elses unit.
Brian

The CD drive mechanism is obviously bought in. The rest appears to be
original Linn. Although they may well use industry standard ICs for much
of it.

"Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message
...
Interestingly, I've got a Linn Mimik on the bench at the moment. Think it
is the one which Linn made all the song and dance about - they'd
eventually made a CD which sounded as good as their Sondek. ;-)

It's an amazing device. Pretty well twice the size of the Philips 104 and
densely packed too. It has a toroidal mains transformer the size of which
wouldn't disgrace many a power amp. ;-) No wonder it was expensive.

The fault with this one was flaky reaction to a push button. I've given
them a clean and it seems to be fixed. I'll have a good listen to it
before returning it. To see if it's as good as claimed. ;-)

--
*Virtual reality is its own reward *

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Model numbers and a new description of fault.. was Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

In article ,
Eiron wrote:
Just get another twenty quid DVD player from the supermarket. That will
play CDs, CD-Rs and CD-RWs properly with a wonderful sound, better than
a Marantz OSE. Though if you want it better than a KI Signature, you'll
need a Russ Andrews SCART to phono audio interconnect. :-)

You might find it difficult to find one which gives the usual CD
facilities like showing which track it's playing etc without being
connected to a TV screen. And might be remote control only. Oh - a phono
output could be considered an essential too, although you could derive it
from a SCART.

And I've never been convinced all CD players sound the same...

--
*If you don't pay your exorcist you get repossessed.*

Dave Plowman London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.

Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

On 03/02/2016 02:25, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Mon, 25 Jan 2016 14:24:08 +0000, Jim Lesurf wrote:

In article , Bob Latham
wrote:

Minimserver provides UPnP services, so in theory any player that is
UPnP compatible can use Minimserver.

Which software/hardware do you use to access the tracks and play
them?
As I say, the DS Audio application/NP30 is fine for me - except on
the matter of gapless playback.

There are 3 Sonos portable devices in our house and these use their own
app running on iPads and Samsung phones. Sonos is not UPnP it just
needs an SMB share from the NAS.


FWIW I just treat the NAS as part of the filing system on my machines
and run files to play them just as I would if they were on a given
machine's HDs. No need for any UPnP, etc.

Although NAS4Free has a DLNA/UPnP server amongst the many optional
services, I've never been impressed by it whenever I've enabled it and
let it rebuild the database to try my media streaming box on. The ten
foot interface seems no easier to use than if I disable the DLNA/UPnP
service and rely simply on browsing the media folders from the
Mediaplayer's explorer interface.


Yeahbut - at least IME an option of DLNA is folder view. Just use that,
and pick options as needed? I'd find it tricky without the search
nowadays ;-)

--
Cheers, Rob

Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

On 03/02/2016 04:47, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 09:48:15 +0000, RJH wrote:

On 21/01/2016 22:03, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Thu, 21 Jan 2016 06:17:48 +0000, Bob Latham wrote:

In article ,
Johnny B Good wrote:

Ouch! or Yikes! How often do you upgrade or swap out failing disk
drives, I wonder?

I have 3 NAS boxes, one of them off site. The oldest is from 2010 and
none of them has ever given any indication of a problem with their
hard drive. Rightly or wrongly I use Western Digital REDS.

Rightly, imo, provided you've addressed the 8 second head unload
timeout
issue (which the lack of failure of the oldest drive could imply except
I don't know whether this is simply because you're only spinning them
for just a few hours per day).

As long as you steer clear of the Seagate rubbish, you shouldn't
suffer
too many problems especially if you check the SMART stats every other
week or so and don't *just* rely on smartmonctrl sending you an email
about imminent failure. :-)


I've read your posts on the unreliability of HDs, and (lack of) wisdom
in allowing systems to 'sleep'.

I'm afraid I simply don't follow a lot of what you say, and have relied
on buying what seem to be be decent brands - WD Reds for my last upgrade
a couple of years' back. I let the system sleep - basically because it's
not that accessible (in a cellar), is not used anything like 24/7 -
maybe 4 hours/day on average, and the electricity savings seem
worthwhile.

I use the old disks (2TB WD-somethings I think, in the old NAS box) for
backup. I've not had a single failure - but then maybe I've been lucky.

Apologies for the late response, real life, such as it is, got in the
way.


Not a problem!

There's no hard and fast rule regarding the use of spin down power
saving in a SoHo or home NAS box but, unless you're really only making
infrequent use of the NAS, it's always best to avoid lots of spin up
events per day (most home desktop PCs are typically power cycled just one
or two times a day which keeps the spin up event count nice and low,
assuming that distraction known as spin down power saving in the OS has
been completely disabled in order to preserve the operator's sanity).

It's worth keeping in mind that this is a *power saving* feature (in
reality, an energy consumption saving strategy) with no thought to
whatever consequences there might be in regard of the drive's
reliability. Seagate must be the only drive manufacturer stupid enough to
confuse power saving with temperature reduction if their FreeAgent
'specials' were anything to go by.

Spinning down a modern HDD typically reduces power consumption by around
7 to 10 watts per drive as observed in the energy consumed at the mains
socket. Each watt year of energy consumed equates to about a quid's worth
on the annual electricity bill. That represents 8.766 KWH units of
electricity used per year. You can check your actual unit costs and
calculate a more exact annual cost per watt's worth of 24/7 consumption.

If you're running the NAS 24/7 and just using spin down power saving to
minimise its running expenses, you can estimate just how much of a saving
this contributes by calculating the hours of spin down 'sleep' time each
drive enjoys per day. For example, a pair of drives allowed to 'sleep'
overnight may get anywhere from 8 to 16 hours of repose per day,
depending on how often you access the files on the NAS box and the timeout
period you've selected before the drives spin down.

For arguments sake, I'll assume an average of 12 hours per day of spin
down sleep for both drives and an effective energy saving at the socket
of 10 watts each, 20 watts in total making for a saving of 240 watt hours
per day. this represents a total of 87.66 units of electrical consumption
saved over the year. Assuming 15p per unit, this would represent £13.15
savings on the yearly electricity bill.

This doesn't strike me as a worthy enough saving to place the drives
under the additional thermal cycling stresses introduced by such a power
saving strategy. However,in the case of a four drive setup, the savings
would be double that and look a more attractive proposition (at £26.30 a
year). In my opinion, that's still not enough to justify such a strategy
but I'm not you and you may feel differently about the added risk factor.
Also, your usage pattern may allow for an even longer (unbroken) 'sleep'
period per day and your electricity costs may be higher than the 'ball
park' 15 pence a unit figure I trotted out.


More than happy to accept those figures. But how do you know this
'thermal cycling' is so damaging?

One way to minimise spin down cycles is to choose a long time out
period. When I toyed with spin down power saving I chose a 3 hour timeout
to 'sleep' on the basis that during the day the drives would remain spun
up and only after I taken to my bed would the drives finally spin down
for maybe as much as 8 hours worth of 'sleep', effectively no worse than
if they'd been used in a desktop PC being power cycled once or twice a
day without any spin down power saving to stress them (or me) any further.

In my case, the savings on all four drives only amounted to some 28
watts and I soon decided the potential savings in my case weren't enough
to justify the extra stress of even an additional one or two spin down
cycles per day for the sake of letting them sleep for just 6 to 8 hours
per night (I'm generally using the desktop PC for around 16 hours per day
which is often left running 24/7). Assuming an average 'sleep' time per
day of 8 hours this would represent a mere £12.27 a year, assuming 15p
per unit cost (I can't recall the actual unit cost offhand).


Now, I have looked at that - and changed the spin-down triggers to 1 hour.

You have mentioned unofficial firmware patches in the past - and I'm not
too happy with that, must say.

Whatever the actual savings figure proved to be, it didn't strike me as
enough justification to subject the drives to any spin down cycling at
all so I gave up on the idea of chasing after such savings, especially as
I was burning up some 70 odd quid's worth in electricty per year just
keeping my collection of UPSes powered up.

I was able to save 20 quid a year alone just by decommissioning a
SmartUPS700. Now, the only UPS maintenance loads I have are the
BackUPS500's 3 watts load (protecting the NAS box) and the 7 or 8 watts
of an ancient Emerson30 450VA rated UPS which sits in the basement
'protecting' the VM Superhub II cable modem/router with what I suspect is
a well cooked set of 7AH SLAs which wouldn't last 5 seconds should the
mains disappear unexpectedly (I really ought to check it out one of these
days).

Bearing in mind what I was already spending to protect against an event
that last occurred over quarter of a century ago, you can well understand
my reluctance to increase the risk (even if only slight) of premature
disk failure for the sake of a saving that was a mere fraction of what I
was already squandering on UPS maintenance costs.

If you can optimise the spin down power saving time out period to keep
the average spin up cycles per day below 5 or 6 (you can check this in
the SMART logs) and still accumulate enough spin down sleep hours to make
a worthwhile saving, then go for it otherwise you might be better off
avoiding spin down power saving altogether. It's hard to know where the
'tipping point' between unwarranted risk and useful energy savings lies
with such a strategy.

My guess (and it's only a guess) would be no more than 5 or 6 a day on
average. I think a close look at the more detailed specs on the hard
drive might offer up a clue in terms of the maximum spin down cycles
lifetime rating which the manufacturer may or may not have opted to
publish. If you can't find such a figure for the models of drives you're
actually using, you can always look for such a figure for *any* model
*or* make to get some idea of at least one manufacturer's take on this
particular aspect of drive reliability. I think I may even have seen such
a figure but I can't recall which brand or model or even what the figure
was - It would have held no interest for me seeing as how I was avoiding
spin down for reasons beyond the matter of mere power saving.


Nothing of mine is that critical. In fact, I'm beginning to wonder if
90% of my data is actually required. Just photos and documents (which
are also cloud stored). Most of the rest (music and video) I could
download, or call on friends for their copies. I'd need a database,
obviously.

So while my reasons are not that thought through, the consequences of
total loss are not that serious.

I think what you're saying is that potential problems are easily
avoided, but I'm afraid I'm stuck thinking that the failure event is
statistically unlikely, and the energy/money saving is worthwhile.

Not knocking you - just saying!


--
Cheers, Rob

Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
 

On 25/01/2016 13:16, Bob Latham wrote:
In article ,
RJH wrote:
On 24/01/2016 10:19, Bob Latham wrote:

Minimserver doesn't add data to mine, it keeps its data to itself.

I can't see any extra files - the audio folders and files all look
untouched. But of course, it must store the databases somewhere.

It has hidden files and folders or at least mine did when I tried it.
These become visible when you an artist's folder onto a fat32 USB drive.

Gapless playback is fine.


I access the tracks using the DS Audio iOS app, and an iPhone or iPad.
The only one that I can see that might be compatible with Minimserver is
XMBC - and I'm not a big fan. It'll also do my Roberts network radio -
but again, the Synology iOS app will tap into that and play back
anything.

Minimserver provides UPnP services, so in theory any player that is UPnP
compatible can use Minimserver.

Which software/hardware do you use to access the tracks and play them?
As I say, the DS Audio application/NP30 is fine for me - except on the
matter of gapless playback.

There are 3 Sonos portable devices in our house and these use their own
app running on iPads and Samsung phones. Sonos is not UPnP it just needs
an SMB share from the NAS.

There is also a RaspberryPi player and a Linn Akurate DS (2015 variant).
These all use UPnP and Minimserver and Linn's Kinsky and Kazzo iPad
control apps.


Ah - way out of my league. I just use the Cambridge NP30, and generally
use an iPhone to control it. Although the remote is fine as the
display's half decent.

I tried Minimserver - works great. The only problem (apart from lacking
DS Audio's features) is the gapless playback - still doesn't work.

So it looks like I'm stuck with Cambridge's rubbish software to play
back gapless material. They seemingly place a flag in gapless recordings
which the DS Audio and Minmserver don't?


--
Cheers, Rob