|
|
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 2016-01-26 13:45:30 +0000, Jim Lesurf said:
In article , Dave Plowman (News) wrote: It was an issue some UK broadcast engineers noticed IIRC. They were aware of it because a lot of radio and TV listening was in mono. Broadcasters were using this player? Swap cart for horse. :-) My recollection is seeing reports that some had considered it, but rejected it because mono listeners would get rolled away HF when mono CDs were played into the programme. So the correct description is that the *avoided* using it when the realised what would happen. Jim Just for fun, some nummbers: The response of the comb filter caused by the delay d, relative to simple summing is sqr( ( 1.0 + cos ( omega * d ) ) / 2.0 ) For 11.3 us this gives -0.56dB at 10kHz, -1.3dB at 15kHz Arthur -- real email arthur at bellacat dot com |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 26/01/2016 16:17, Arthur Quinn wrote:
For 11.3 us this gives -0.56dB at 10kHz, -1.3dB at 15kHz As if you would notice on AM or even FM. -- Eiron. |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Eiron
wrote: On 26/01/2016 16:17, Arthur Quinn wrote: For 11.3 us this gives -0.56dB at 10kHz, -1.3dB at 15kHz As if you would notice on AM or even FM. Can't say I dissagree. But I assume the reaction at the time was simply that, "Other CD players are available that don't do it, so might as well avoid the Sony and use an alternative". That's what I think I read at the time, anyway. I'm just reporting what I recall being said. Others outside the UK may have reacted quite differently for all I know. I suspect NHK might have favoured Sony over Philips. 8-] However, the original x4 chipset of Philips was a neat idea and worked nicely. So not exactly a bad choice. My 1st gen Marantz player using the same chipset worked nicely for decades. May still do so, although its been in a box in the shed for ages, which may have upset it by now. Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article ,
Jim Lesurf wrote: Can't say I dissagree. But I assume the reaction at the time was simply that, "Other CD players are available that don't do it, so might as well avoid the Sony and use an alternative". That's what I think I read at the time, anyway. I'm just reporting what I recall being said. Others outside the UK may have reacted quite differently for all I know. I suspect NHK might have favoured Sony over Philips. 8-] I doubt any broadcaster would have used a domestic product anyway. A pro machine would have needed things like remote start facilities even then. And balanced outputs, etc. Think the first pro CD player I saw was Denon. Or possibly Studer. No idea what chipset they used. -- *Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough sense to be lazy * Dave Plowman London SW To e-mail, change noise into sound. |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 26/01/2016 15:58, Dave Plowman (News) wrote:
In article , Graeme Wall wrote: On 26/01/2016 13:54, Jim Lesurf wrote: Afraid that in those days broadcasters - particularly at the BBC were expected to obsess about the OGP. i.e. the Old Granny Problem of the listeners who use older kit, or the older recordings to be played out. A problem that has plagued those of us on the picture side right up to the digital switch-over! I take it you're referring to aspect ratio? Yup, shoot widescreen but "protect" for 4:3 and don't forget 14:9. Not sure I like the modern solution - simply ignore it. So end up with archive material being broadcast in the wrong aspect ratio, when an insert to a prog. Would never do to have some of that 60" screen with borders to the sides. ;-) Quite agree And ARCing it is often no better. Trouble is they tend to just ARC into the middle of the picture rather than take the time to reframe the pictures appropriately. -- Graeme Wall This account not read. |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
Jim Lesurf wrote:
It was an issue some UK broadcast engineers noticed IIRC. They were aware of it because a lot of radio and TV listening was in mono. ** That is simply non credible. But the reality in the UK at the time. ** Shame you have no proof and it makes no sense. 1) Many listeners to FM radio in the UK were were listening in mono, ** On portables which would not show any effect. 2) Many older recordings were mono, even when re-released on Audio CD. ** But very few CDs were ever released in mono and it makes ZERO difference when played on a stereo system. Given the availability of CD players that didn't time-offset the channels it was easy to avoid the risk of problems.. ** So far you have not described the "problem" at all. If you want to argue, you'd need a Tardis to go back and argue with the broadcasters of the time. I just recall reading about it at the time. ** But where did you read this? In hi-fi rags ?? But it would cause treble roll-off for mono radio reception. ** But only with a mono CD in use. See (2) above. What does "mono radio" mean ? See (1) above. ** So you have no actual answers. ..... Phil |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
Jim Lesurf wrote:
It was an issue some UK broadcast engineers noticed IIRC. They were aware of it because a lot of radio and TV listening was in mono. Broadcasters were using this player? Swap cart for horse. :-) My recollection is seeing reports that some had considered it, but rejected it because mono listeners would get rolled away HF when mono CDs were played into the programme. So the correct description is that the *avoided* using it when the realised what would happen. ** So there was no trial to see if the hypothesis was real. FYI: Stereo tape recorders, even good R to R ones, typically have greater channel to channel time errors than 11uS - especially when playing tapes from other machines. Nearly all LPs were made from stereo tapes, with the same problem cut into the vinyl. ..... Phil ..... Phil |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Bob Latham
wrote: In article , Jim Lesurf wrote: The big advantage of using ethernet-based 'just a filing system' methods is that you can dodge such nonsense. But may then not know if the actual playout device *is* playing without tampering with the samples. Depends, as ever, on the device and its design. I know Sonos Connect doesn't re-sample as enough people have done bit perfect tests on it from its digital out. OK. :-) My Linn Akurate does re-sample everything up to I think, 384KHz before feeding its DAC. That doesn't concern me as TBH I love the thing. The Linn upsampling to 384k is unlikely to give any problems with sound quality. The main problems tend to be in consumer kit that blindly does needless conversions like 44.1k - 48k at low resolutions. As a general rule, the lower the input and output rates and the 'closer' and more awkward their ratio, the harder it is to do a good conversion. The chalk and cheese here is : 1) Modern DACs and ADCs of good quality often 'upsample' to high rates (and these days many-bit values). This lets them work with great accuracy. 2) Crappy consumer kit may simply do little better than linear interpolations with low rates and low resolutions. This makes the results poor. Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Huge
scribeth thus On 2016-01-24, Phil Allison wrote: [17 lines snipped] Any shortcomings in sound quality from a CD is not the fault of the disk or the 16bit/ 44.1kHz PCM format - but rather the recording industry that still only gets it right on occasion. *applause* Agreed too!... -- Tony Sayer |
Model numbers and a new description of fault.. was Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
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. Other foibles is that it has a tendency to clip the ends and starts of mp3 files on cD or ram stick . If Panasonic did a cd player with the same sound as this device I'd buy one tomorrow, assuming no firmware glitches. Brian "Brian Gaff" wrote in message ... Well I've had the to off, moved the laser to the outside of a disc, and then turned the power off, manually removed the disc and cleaned the lens with a ipa soaked cotton bud and dried it. It is better but still not right. The lens to me seems to have some back and forward play as if a toothed gear is not meshed very well. Surely its not worn out already, its done far less hours than some of the dvd players bought for little money, and the cd100 which has had massive use over the years. Some people think lasers age over time so this could be another thing to consider. I've always thought in the rush to get new models out there, very little is known about the aging of components used in them any more. People just trust what the makers say and use them. Capacitors are a case in point, as are PIR sensors, all of which seem to have a very short life. In a sub woofer I have the bridge rectifier has had to be replaced with a bigger one as it kept on trashing the ones fitted as they simply war not rated for the surge current at switch on charging up all the capacitors. Bad design, making things as cheap as possible and people making decisions who are not technical enough. Brian "Eiron" wrote in message ... On 24/01/2016 10:39, Brian-Gaff wrote: No I'm darn sorf, in surrey. I think in the past it was sometimes an adjustment on the pcb, but there seem to be none on this unit. I suppose another machine might in the end be the answer. the innards of these devices seem to be very empty these days, Hardly high density pcbs though there is a fairly large mains transformer which has started to buzz a little when on. You can adjust it if you have a manual, an oscilloscope and the correct test disc. But the test disc will be unobtainable. I got a nice Denon CD player for 20 quid from the British Heart Foundation shop in Mitcham. Almost Surrey, very musical, plays home-made CDs, can't complain. The Marantz in the garage, on the other hand, stopped working last week. I suspect it was sulking after my earlier comments. Warming it up didn't help but taking the cover off and blowing out a load of dust did. That's very musical too, just like every other CD player since about 1990. My first DVD player, an expensive Marantz, always missed the first half second or so of a CD track. I don't know what happened to it but it's long gone. -- Eiron. -- ----- - This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from... The Sofa of Brian Gaff... Blind user, so no pictures please! -- ----- - 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 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 |
Model numbers and a new description of fault.. was Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
and no doubt one of his more recent mains plugs.
I'd dispute the supermarket cd player sounding better, as they do tend to sound brash and bright, which is not how this Panasonic sounds at all, its detailed has good dynamic range and avoids the tendency to gurgle subtly on strings that occasionally comes on the Marantz. Brian "Eiron" wrote in message ... 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. -- ----- - 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 of cd queries, model numbers later
They most certainly do not sound the same. I think much of the problems is
in the error correction and the later analogue circuits. Some sound dull and a bit like some fm tuners with over zealous mpx filters that phase shift like mad. Bit like when Eurovision used to come via analogue land lines. This panasonic even plays some of the very early first generation AAD Philips cds better than I've heard them. No harsh gritty bits, though of course some still lack deep bass as its just not on the disc. However when I play really good discs such as the early Telarc ones its amazing if only it actually played them without gaps! Brian "Dave Plowman (News)" wrote in message ... 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. -- ----- - This newsgroup posting comes to you directly from... The Sofa of Brian Gaff... Blind user, so no pictures please! |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Bob Latham
wrote: In addition, what my I ask is a gapless recording? Never heard of one of those before. Gapless is a playback issue for the player nothing to do with either the UPnP server or the flac files provided they've been ripped correctly. I must admit that I was puzzled when I first encountered people reporting file replay with 'gaps'. I can't decide if this happens because of: 1) Deliberate choice of the player desiger who assumed all users would *want* gaps between files/tracks because they'd all be a serious of pop singles. 2) Due to the player's buffer system. In effect, playing the material as if it filled an integer number of buffer fills. Then when it doesn't adding silence from the end of the last - underfilled - buffer. 3) Taking ages to find and start playing the next file. (1) seems like idiocy or lazyness. Anthing like this would be OK as a user *option*, but not as an imposed default. (3) shouldn't happen these days. Systems should be quick enough. Given a decent bufferring arrangement the start of the next file should be found and loaded ready in time. (2) seems like the kind of amateur programming I'd do! Not what I'd expect from a serious programmer. So which is it - or is it something else? I ripped some ancient CD-R recordings I made ages ago using some very elementary software of the period. Some of these showed 'track at once' problems where the writing software had added needless 2-sec bursts of silence between tracks. But I've not seen any software that couldn't do 'disc at once' without this in well over a decade. I'd have hopes that modern programmers wouldn't make such errors. Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On Thu, 04 Feb 2016 10:02:10 +0000 (GMT), Jim Lesurf
wrote: In article , Bob Latham wrote: In addition, what my I ask is a gapless recording? Never heard of one of those before. Gapless is a playback issue for the player nothing to do with either the UPnP server or the flac files provided they've been ripped correctly. I must admit that I was puzzled when I first encountered people reporting file replay with 'gaps'. I can't decide if this happens because of: 1) Deliberate choice of the player desiger who assumed all users would *want* gaps between files/tracks because they'd all be a serious of pop singles. 2) Due to the player's buffer system. In effect, playing the material as if it filled an integer number of buffer fills. Then when it doesn't adding silence from the end of the last - underfilled - buffer. 3) Taking ages to find and start playing the next file. (1) seems like idiocy or lazyness. Anthing like this would be OK as a user *option*, but not as an imposed default. (3) shouldn't happen these days. Systems should be quick enough. Given a decent bufferring arrangement the start of the next file should be found and loaded ready in time. (2) seems like the kind of amateur programming I'd do! Not what I'd expect from a serious programmer. So which is it - or is it something else? I ripped some ancient CD-R recordings I made ages ago using some very elementary software of the period. Some of these showed 'track at once' problems where the writing software had added needless 2-sec bursts of silence between tracks. But I've not seen any software that couldn't do 'disc at once' without this in well over a decade. I'd have hopes that modern programmers wouldn't make such errors. Jim It may be due to the variability of DLNA(UPNP) implementations. Apparently a renderer should support a characteristic called SetNextAVTransportURI if it is to play gaplessly when files are pushed to it by a controlle and not all of them do, as it's an optional feature of DLNA. |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Bill Taylor
wrote: It may be due to the variability of DLNA(UPNP) implementations. Ah. Interesting... Apparently a renderer should support a characteristic called SetNextAVTransportURI if it is to play gaplessly when files are pushed to it by a controlle and not all of them do, as it's an optional feature of DLNA. OK. I've used and don't bother with DLNA/uPnP. I just play files using standard filers, etc. Seems an odd trap for items that say they work via DLNA, etc, to fall into. But not something I'd encounter. Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Bob Latham
wrote: I must admit that I was puzzled when I first encountered people reporting file replay with 'gaps'. I can't decide if this happens because of: I had always thought it was the players inability to open two files simultaneously and that the buffer size in the player was insufficient to sustain music playback whilst one file is closed and another opened and read. It shouldn't matter if the player can't open two files overlappingly for reading in. The key requirement is to have a buffered playout that it can keep refilling and giving to the output before the previous buffer fill(s) has/have been 'used up'. Indeed the whole point of buffering systems is to give the player a chance to keep up and avoid 'gaps' the output stream. There are various ways to present this to the player. But in general they should give it somewhere to write the next lot of data and 'send' it long before the previous data it has sent has all been played out. Given the speeds of modern machines it shouldn't be a problem if the player is designed to handle it. Matter of careful programming. There can be silence added to the end of tracks at the time of recording but that is to give an intentional gap between tracks. Nothing to do with gapless playback as the silence is intentional by the record company and the track is "playing" during the silence. Yes. From what Bill wrote it may be something else that's causing the problem. Afraid I know zero about DLNA, etc. Just how standard filer and buffer methods can work as a technique. Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On Wed, 03 Feb 2016 20:05:25 +0000, RJH wrote:
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? I know because, barring silly manufacturing defects or system design errors that expose the silicon to electrical stresses beyond their design limits, thermal expansion/contraction introduces mechanical cycling fatigue induced stresses on the silicon die as well as in circuit board through plated holes. Apart from when the silicon is being run right on its upper temperature limit (125 deg C) where today's modern silicon chips are prey to an effect known as electro-migration(?), this thermal cycling effect is the prime cause of post infant mortality failure in the HDD controller system. Modern HDDs over at least the past decade subject the spindle motor and its drive electronics to far less startup stress than the drives of old which could subject the PSU, motor windings and electronics to as much as 4 to 5 times the on-speed current demand (which is why the spin up time was only a matter of 3 or 4 seconds as opposed to the 10 to 12 seconds it takes with a modern drive on account the startup current is limited to a mere 1.5 to 2 times the on-speed current - kinder all round on both the drive and the PSU). The fact that the google stats showed only a weak correlation between failure rates and temperature (other than for right up to the extreme limit) on drives spinning 24/7 strongly suggests that it's thermal cycling rather than absolute temperature that contributes to high failure rates. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be any published test data on the effects of such thermal cycling (at least not in the case of commodity HDDs as used in desktop PCs). Googling "effects of thermal cycling on silicon chips" throws up plenty of research publications in this particular field which suggests that such thermal cycling effects are an important consideration in the service life of micro-electronic components. Sadly, googling "hdd spin down life rating figures" and variations of this phrase in the hopes of being taken directly to a manufacturer's spec sheet (or an article with such links) only produced discussions in various web fora on the pros and cons of spin down power saving where the only 'nuggets' were ill informed opinion best described as "Pearls of Wiz- Dumb" 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. That seems a more reasonable compromise between MSFT's choice of 20 minutes and my own of 2 or 3 hours. The ideal to aim for is to set it so it doesn't spin down (too often) during your daily sessions at the computer but does spin down when you're safely tucked up in your bed. When you mentioned a 4 hour per day figure of usage, it's not clear whether this was a single 4 hour session or just an estimate over a longer 8 to 16 hour period. If you were talking about single 4 hour session, that one hour spin down time out should certainly do the trick. You have mentioned unofficial firmware patches in the past - and I'm not too happy with that, must say. I'm afraid you've lost me there. I've *never* recommended unofficial firmware patches... *ever*! I've certainly recommended the use of Western Digital's own officially sanctioned WDIDLE3 tool to increase the head parking time out from its insanely short 8 second default to a more useful 300 seconds value (and acknowledged the existence of *nix equivilents used by the Linux and BSD fraternity). Perhaps it was my mention of the *nix version of WDIDLE3 that you are referring to? 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! Well, of course, only you know what is best for your particular scenario. I was simply pointing out that such power saving strategies are usually not in tune with a strategy based on reliability considerations. I suppose, if the drives aren't running particularly hot and only go through a modest number of spin up cycles per day, there probably isn't very much in it (perhaps the difference between getting 4 years rather than 5 years of service life which becomes a bit academic if you're planning on replacing them every 2 or 3 years anyway). As you've mentioned, reliability is very much a matter of statistical probability. As long as you're prepared to deal with any sudden disk failure, you're in the same boat as the rest of us. Unless your data storage needs are quite modest, even the cheapest backup strategy (another set of HDDs) is still a significant extra investment over and above the bare NAS box on its own (and no, RAID is not (and never has been) a substitute for a proper backup strategy). -- Johnny B Good |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 08:33:51 +0000 (GMT), Bob Latham
wrote: In article , Jim Lesurf wrote: In article , Bob Latham wrote: I had always thought it was the players inability to open two files simultaneously and that the buffer size in the player was insufficient to sustain music playback whilst one file is closed and another opened and read. It shouldn't matter if the player can't open two files overlappingly for reading in. The key requirement is to have a buffered playout that it can keep refilling and giving to the output before the previous buffer fill(s) has/have been 'used up'. Indeed the whole point of buffering systems is to give the player a chance to keep up and avoid 'gaps' the output stream. There are various ways to present this to the player. But in general they should give it somewhere to write the next lot of data and 'send' it long before the previous data it has sent has all been played out. Given the speeds of modern machines it shouldn't be a problem if the player is designed to handle it. Matter of careful programming. I can't really see how that differs significantly from my comment of "the buffer size in the player was insufficient to sustain music playback whilst ....." but anyway. There can be silence added to the end of tracks at the time of recording but that is to give an intentional gap between tracks. Nothing to do with gapless playback as the silence is intentional by the record company and the track is "playing" during the silence. Yes. From what Bill wrote it may be something else that's causing the problem. Afraid I know zero about DLNA, etc. Just how standard filer and buffer methods can work as a technique. It may well indeed be that but in that case it is poor code in the player that is causing the issue and not DLNA/UPnP which I can assure you does not cause any gapless problems. Bob. That's a bit of a phiosophical question. Is a player that complies with the basic DLNA spec but leads to gapped playback more poorly coded than one that implements some of the optional parts of the spec and plays back gaplessly? I've more or less given up on DLNA mainly because of complete inconsistebcy about gapless playback, but also because most of the controllers in playback devices are absolutely terrible. |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 05/02/2016 02:20, Johnny B Good wrote:
On Wed, 03 Feb 2016 20:05:25 +0000, RJH wrote: 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? I know because, barring silly manufacturing defects or system design errors that expose the silicon to electrical stresses beyond their design limits, thermal expansion/contraction introduces mechanical cycling fatigue induced stresses on the silicon die as well as in circuit board through plated holes. Apart from when the silicon is being run right on its upper temperature limit (125 deg C) where today's modern silicon chips are prey to an effect known as electro-migration(?), this thermal cycling effect is the prime cause of post infant mortality failure in the HDD controller system. Modern HDDs over at least the past decade subject the spindle motor and its drive electronics to far less startup stress than the drives of old which could subject the PSU, motor windings and electronics to as much as 4 to 5 times the on-speed current demand (which is why the spin up time was only a matter of 3 or 4 seconds as opposed to the 10 to 12 seconds it takes with a modern drive on account the startup current is limited to a mere 1.5 to 2 times the on-speed current - kinder all round on both the drive and the PSU). The fact that the google stats showed only a weak correlation between failure rates and temperature (other than for right up to the extreme limit) on drives spinning 24/7 strongly suggests that it's thermal cycling rather than absolute temperature that contributes to high failure rates. The problem is, there doesn't seem to be any published test data on the effects of such thermal cycling (at least not in the case of commodity HDDs as used in desktop PCs). Googling "effects of thermal cycling on silicon chips" throws up plenty of research publications in this particular field which suggests that such thermal cycling effects are an important consideration in the service life of micro-electronic components. I can give it a go: http://www.springer.com/cda/content/...562-p173959749 So, for example, the author suggests a relationship between thermal 'experiences' and current. I couldn't possibly interpret those results though. Mention of the solder type (lead is more affected - so older disks? That data is probably from about 2009) heatsink temperatures (my disks never experience higher than 30C - the author's paper *starts* at 40C, rising to 70C?!). While the pictures look drastic, and do suggest cause - the statistics look lazy to me - but that's almost certainly because they assume the reader has a high level of competence (not like me!) and certain assumptions are industry sample (no stated error rates, very odd sampling references). Things 'start to happen' at/around the 60,000 cycle state (maybe 30 years in my case). So while (even) I can see something might be there, I have no idea how that translates to my circumstances. Sadly, googling "hdd spin down life rating figures" and variations of this phrase in the hopes of being taken directly to a manufacturer's spec sheet (or an article with such links) only produced discussions in various web fora on the pros and cons of spin down power saving where the only 'nuggets' were ill informed opinion best described as "Pearls of Wiz- Dumb" :-) I don't have the link any more, but I did read some really quite convincing data from server farms. IIRC, though, those disks were 24/7, and the finding pointed to configuration (3TB?) and brand as culprits. I don't suppose we're ever going to get a decent domestic test - so we tend to rely on anecdote/reviews 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. That seems a more reasonable compromise between MSFT's choice of 20 minutes and my own of 2 or 3 hours. The ideal to aim for is to set it so it doesn't spin down (too often) during your daily sessions at the computer but does spin down when you're safely tucked up in your bed. When you mentioned a 4 hour per day figure of usage, it's not clear whether this was a single 4 hour session or just an estimate over a longer 8 to 16 hour period. If you were talking about single 4 hour session, that one hour spin down time out should certainly do the trick. Just guessing - they'd be in use for 4 hours over an 8 hour period. I don't know what events cause them to wake. For example, about now (breakfast time) when I've not accessed the NAS, chances are it'd be awake. You have mentioned unofficial firmware patches in the past - and I'm not too happy with that, must say. I'm afraid you've lost me there. I've *never* recommended unofficial firmware patches... *ever*! I've certainly recommended the use of Western Digital's own officially sanctioned WDIDLE3 tool to increase the head parking time out from its insanely short 8 second default to a more useful 300 seconds value (and acknowledged the existence of *nix equivilents used by the Linux and BSD fraternity). Perhaps it was my mention of the *nix version of WDIDLE3 that you are referring to? Ah yes - that was it. I remember seeing a post mentioning that soon after I bought the current WD Red 3TB disks. I did look and found a reference to the file on the WD site - but it was quite old, and listed some quite old disks as compatible. So by 'unofficial' I meant not sanctioned by the manufacturer for recent disks. But I didn't research it much more than that. Update - I see it's listed at current (albeit 12/2013): http://supportdownloads.wdc.com/downloads.aspx?DL So I may well give that a go, thanks. 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! Well, of course, only you know what is best for your particular scenario. I was simply pointing out that such power saving strategies are usually not in tune with a strategy based on reliability considerations. I suppose, if the drives aren't running particularly hot and only go through a modest number of spin up cycles per day, there probably isn't very much in it (perhaps the difference between getting 4 years rather than 5 years of service life which becomes a bit academic if you're planning on replacing them every 2 or 3 years anyway). 16C ATM (and for the past 30 minutes - so I suppose that's fairly typical for this time of year), maybe 4 cycles a day. Been running just over a year. As you've mentioned, reliability is very much a matter of statistical probability. As long as you're prepared to deal with any sudden disk failure, you're in the same boat as the rest of us. Unless your data storage needs are quite modest, even the cheapest backup strategy (another set of HDDs) is still a significant extra investment over and above the bare NAS box on its own (and no, RAID is not (and never has been) a substitute for a proper backup strategy). Well, I'd like to to the best thing on the basis of the most accurate information. 'Best' is a heady mix of hope, apathy, science and other stuff. I'll look at the parking thing, thanks. -- Cheers, Rob |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 02:20:20 GMT, Johnny B Good
wrote: On Wed, 03 Feb 2016 20:05:25 +0000, RJH wrote: On 03/02/2016 04:47, Johnny B Good wrote: On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 09:48:15 +0000, RJH wrote: 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). I don't think it's asking too much of any user to wait for a HD in a PC or NAS to spin up when it's not been accessed for a long time. One just gets used to it. 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. It is certainly true that saving power has to be considered along with product life. The world is full of examples of electrical and electronic products that are designed to run 24/7 - fridges and routers, for example - and particularly with the latter switching them off overnight may lead to premature failure, which, when the economic, environmental, and energetic 'costs' of manufacture and disposal of the products are considered, may be less economic and less ecological, than just leaving them on 24/7 as they were designed to run. However, I suspect that is not true of HDs, which were designed to spin up and spin down to save energy. 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. [snip] I know because, barring silly manufacturing defects or system design errors that expose the silicon to electrical stresses beyond their design limits, thermal expansion/contraction introduces mechanical cycling fatigue induced stresses on the silicon die as well as in circuit board through plated holes. [snip more of same] Frankly, IME this is ********. I cannot recall a single HD failure in the electronic PCB, every single one I've ever owned has failed due to bad sectors developing on the platters. How many drives have you had fail in the way that you claim? I'd be surprised even at a single one. Sadly, googling "hdd spin down life rating figures" and variations of this phrase in the hopes of being taken directly to a manufacturer's spec sheet (or an article with such links) only produced discussions in various web fora on the pros and cons of spin down power saving where the only 'nuggets' were ill informed opinion best described as "Pearls of Wiz- Dumb" Quite, so why are you helping to create/perpetuating yet another urban myth? The facts on this particular topic are that there are no facts, so you have no business peddling one viewpoint over another, particularly when you're going against most users' experience, including, I would guess, even your own. Now, I have looked at that - and changed the spin-down triggers to 1 hour. That seems a more reasonable compromise between MSFT's choice of 20 minutes and my own of 2 or 3 hours. My PC drives spin down after 5 minutes when running off mains power, the laptops after 3 minutes when running off the battery. From memory I think the NASs are the same as the PCs running off mains. I find the resulting usability and reliability both perfectly acceptable. -- ================================================== ====== Please always reply to ng as the email in this post's header does not exist. Or use a contact address at: http://www.macfh.co.uk/JavaJive/JavaJive.html http://www.macfh.co.uk/Macfarlane/Macfarlane.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 04/02/2016 09:36, Bob Latham wrote:
In article , RJH wrote: On 25/01/2016 13:16, Bob Latham wrote: 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. That's interesting. We have a different view of what Minimserver does. My RaspberryPi player and my Linn both use Minimserver as their source and neither have ever had any difficulty with gapless playback. I've had a very quick look at the manual for your NP30 and it does advise the use of a UPnP server which is what Minimserver is and that will not cause issues with gapless playback. However, my map of the world is that minimserver is not control software, surely that would still be the responsibility of the machine manufacturer or other amateur writers. Minmserver, Synology's audio server (Plex, Kodi Server etc) IIUC simply communicate the content of the NAS to compatible devices. And these devices need software to read that communication. Your media server software obviously reads this communication properly, and ensures gapless playback of gapless material. For the NP30, Cambridge's software works fine in this regard - whether controlling direct from the player, or using Cambridge's app. Other software (such as the Synology app) doesn't work. An alternative (such as that used by Jim Lesurf) is to access the files directly, and use the NAS as you would an internal drive on a computer. I've just given this a quick try, using VLC on Mac OS. And it almost (!) works - a split second gap between tracks. Better than the Synology - a good 2s between gapless tracks. it's not a playback route I use, but I'll look into it . . . What I don't understand is why Synology are so seemingly rubbish at implementing what feels to be a trivial feature - gapless playback. I have a feeling it's implemented in subtly different ways on different hardware, so generic software (like the Synology app) can't flag gapless playback, whereas the bespoke Cambridge software can. 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? This is very odd. If your player cannot play gapless from minimserver then to my mind your player has faulty software not minimserver. No, I think the problem is with the controlling software. The Synology controlling software doesn't work. The Cambridge software (onboard the NP30 or via their iPhone app) does. In addition, what my I ask is a gapless recording? Never heard of one of those before. Gapless is a playback issue for the player nothing to do with either the UPnP server or the flac files provided they've been ripped correctly. Gapless recording is where, by design, there is no gap between tracks. For example, live music. The player can only respond to the information it's fed by the controlling software, so I don't think Cambridge can be held to account for non-performing 3rd party software. Have you had a word with Cambridge about this? The Synology forums have some mention of the problem. -- Cheers, Rob |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , RJH
wrote: On 04/02/2016 09:36, Bob Latham wrote: In article , RJH wrote: An alternative (such as that used by Jim Lesurf) is to access the files directly, and use the NAS as you would an internal drive on a computer. I've just given this a quick try, using VLC on Mac OS. And it almost (!) works - a split second gap between tracks. Better than the Synology - a good 2s between gapless tracks. it's not a playback route I use, but I'll look into it . . . Might be worth experimenting with VLC's buffer size/number settings. I guess this can be done as it is so flexible, but I can't recall getting into this. I sometimes notice a delay in getting the 'first file'. I've wondered if the NAS is wanting to load the files I've listed by dnd into RAM and so is trying to get ducks in a row before going much further. Or if its the first file(s) of the session that make it do some sorting out. Not sure for the reasons I give below... Gapless recording is where, by design, there is no gap between tracks. For example, live music. In practice I tended to assume this might happen anyway before I got into playing audio files.. So when generating files from Audio CD I usually make 'contiguous' tracks into one long flac file. Became a habit I found convenient anyway. However in practice, when I haven't, it doesn't normally seem to give me a noticable 'gap'. So its not really been a problem here. How lucky I've been, I dunno. Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 25/01/2016 11:45, Brian Gaff wrote:
I've had no issues with the media from commercial sources, ie the original Philips demo disc for my cd100 still plays perfectly, and it has to date from 1983. Hi Brian. Is that the Philips demo disc that has Level 42's '42' on it amongst other tracks? |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 10:16:21 +0000, Java Jive wrote:
On Fri, 05 Feb 2016 02:20:20 GMT, Johnny B Good wrote: On Wed, 03 Feb 2016 20:05:25 +0000, RJH wrote: On 03/02/2016 04:47, Johnny B Good wrote: On Sun, 24 Jan 2016 09:48:15 +0000, RJH wrote: 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). I don't think it's asking too much of any user to wait for a HD in a PC or NAS to spin up when it's not been accessed for a long time. One just gets used to it. Or, as I presume they must say in MSFT's marketing division, "One just gets habituated to the situation." :-) 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. It is certainly true that saving power has to be considered along with product life. The world is full of examples of electrical and electronic products that are designed to run 24/7 - fridges and routers, for example - and particularly with the latter switching them off overnight may lead to premature failure, which, when the economic, environmental, and energetic 'costs' of manufacture and disposal of the products are considered, may be less economic and less ecological, than just leaving them on 24/7 as they were designed to run. However, I suspect that is not true of HDs, which were designed to spin up and spin down to save energy. Actually, they weren't designed for that use. The power saving spin down is a feature added to laptop drives that then became a standard add-on option in the larger desktop drives shortly afterwards. In the case of laptop HDDs, such energy saving strategies do seem to work without the same detrimental effects witnessed in their larger desktop cousins (I'm thinking of the ten year old WD *IDE* laptop drives also afflicted with the same 8 second head unload time out discovered in the desktop green models circa 5 years ago with head unload cycle figures of 3 and 5 million, a value that's a magnitude larger than the quoted 300,000 lifetime rating for those green models - durability in the face of head unloading 'wear and tear' doesn't seem to scale very well in the larger desktop models). In fact, in the case of laptop usage, this 'insanely' short 8 seconds head unload time out makes quite a lot of sense in that it vastly increases the chance that the heads will be safely parked if the lid is accidentally slammed down too hard or the laptop dropped too hard onto a desk or it gets kicked off the desk onto a hard floor. Also, spin down power saving in this scenario is more likely to offer a net benefit on lifetime, not only for the drive itself but also on the rest of the laptop's components. The same is hardly true in the case of desktop drives and it's a pity WD didn't rethink the 8 seconds default time out on head unloading, especially as it only had a rather modest 300,000 cycles rating on the Greens (600,000 for the REDs). Although the extra access delay is only a matter of half a second or so, the 3 to 4 hundred milliwatt power saving is a rather questionable benefit (unless you're looking for 'Kudos' from the dumb assed reviewers for being just that little bit more "Greener" than the 'Competition'). 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. [snip] I know because, barring silly manufacturing defects or system design errors that expose the silicon to electrical stresses beyond their design limits, thermal expansion/contraction introduces mechanical cycling fatigue induced stresses on the silicon die as well as in circuit board through plated holes. [snip more of same] Frankly, IME this is ********. I cannot recall a single HD failure in the electronic PCB, every single one I've ever owned has failed due to bad sectors developing on the platters. How many drives have you had fail in the way that you claim? I'd be surprised even at a single one. Sadly, googling "hdd spin down life rating figures" and variations of this phrase in the hopes of being taken directly to a manufacturer's spec sheet (or an article with such links) only produced discussions in various web fora on the pros and cons of spin down power saving where the only 'nuggets' were ill informed opinion best described as "Pearls of Wiz- Dumb" Quite, so why are you helping to create/perpetuating yet another urban myth? The facts on this particular topic are that there are no facts, It's not that there are *no* facts, just that it's hard to track down any published figures in this regard. There's absolutely no doubt that temperature cycling is detrimental to the life ratings of all such electro mechanical systems, it's simply a question of just how important it is to a drive's useful life which, until recently could easily exceed the 4 to 5 years it takes to "Outlive its usefulness" until the manufacturers fine honed their "F1 GP race car design" approach to minimise the expense of such 'over-engineering' which lead to the "Outlive its usefulness" effect in the first place. so you have no business peddling one viewpoint over another, particularly when you're going against most users' experience, including, I would guess, even your own. I can't speak for others' experience but I can certainly remove the guesswork from your presumption about my own which reinforces the idea that the drives in a NAS box operating full time are generally best left spinning 24/7 unless you have a very well defined usage pattern that allows the time out period to be tuned to minimise the number of spin down cycles per day. As for the business of "peddling one viewpoint over another" as you put it, on that basis neither do you. In fact neither of us can lay claim as to which is the best strategy to use with any great authority but we're certainly both entitled to offer our opinions (preferably, reasoned opinions). Now, I have looked at that - and changed the spin-down triggers to 1 hour. That seems a more reasonable compromise between MSFT's choice of 20 minutes and my own of 2 or 3 hours. My PC drives spin down after 5 minutes when running off mains power, the laptops after 3 minutes when running off the battery. From memory I think the NASes are the same as the PCs running off mains. I find the resulting usability and reliability both perfectly acceptable. I'm afraid a 5 minute time out would drive me crazy with its 10 to 12 seconds access delay almost every time I need to read from or write data to disk. As I previously alluded, disabling spin down power saving wasn't the only consideration in finding a balance between reliability and 'economy of energy consumption'. The other was in regard of my mental health which helped decide the question as to whether or not it was worth risking reliability for a modest saving in energy costs. I had become rather habituated to 'instant gratification' with all of my home built external usb connected drives so it came as quite a shock to experience such delays perpetrated by a "Seagate Special" with the 10 or 15 minute spin down hard programmed into the drive controller's firmware used in a Medion re-badged 500GB FreeAgent drive. Browsing the various web fora where this 'annoyance' was discussed at length failed to elicit a solution so, in the end, when the opportunity arose, I was able to repurpose the drive as a replacement in a Vista box where not only would it never spin down ever again, even better, it would enjoy much better cooling and therefore stay safely below the 60 deg C temperature limit it had managed to hit despite my precaution of using a room cooling fan during the more protracted backup and restore sessions. A five minute time out on a typical single drive windows PC is unlikely to show any effect other than perhaps with older versions of windows such as win2k and possibly winXP. From (the ironically named) Vista onwards, system disk activity more or less guarantees that such a long time out on spin down never gets a chance to kick in. :-) Of course, when extra drives are used for data storage, these are more likely to be left alone long enough for the spin down to kick in. Whilst a couple of GB's of write cache can mask the effect on write accesses, read accesses still remain at the mercy of such spin up delays so can still be a source of frustration when accessing large media files for playback or further processing. Obviously, when it comes to such a trade off between 'instant gratification' and energy savings, the choice is highly personal and, therefore, beyond reasoned argument. -- Johnny B Good |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Bob Latham
wrote: In article , Jim Lesurf wrote: In article , RJH Gapless recording is where, by design, there is no gap between tracks. For example, live music. In practice I tended to assume this might happen anyway before I got into playing audio files.. So when generating files from Audio CD I usually make 'contiguous' tracks into one long flac file. Became a habit I found convenient anyway. However in practice, when I haven't, it doesn't normally seem to give me a noticable 'gap'. So its not really been a problem here. How lucky I've been, I dunno. But surely the player and the controller and the UPnP server should all be totally unaware if there is an intended silence gap or not. Well, the problem may be in the "should" returning "false". :-) But it could be other problems. Above I was just saying I tend not to get the problem. AIUI. A. music playing in track 3 B. Music fade out and end of track silence (track still playing) C. XXXXXXX = this is what gapless is about. D. music playing from track 4. Machines that cannot do "gapless" introduce a silence (C above) between the tracks. Intended silence (by record companies) is supplied in 'B'. Question here is what it meant by "Machines". It could be a communication problem between particular machines which fail to ensure the parcels are passed in good time. So the player may know there is not meant to be a gap, but doesn't get the start of the next file in time to avoid it. Possibly because it didn't ask the source machine in time to send it. If the music doesn't call for a silence between movements then area 'B' = 0 length. Area 'C' should ALWAYS be = 0 in length. If it isn't, the system isn't playing gapless and it doesn't matter if area 'B' is zero or not. That is why I have no understanding of a gapless track. The intended silence is part of the track, there is no gap. Sorry we may be talking at cross purposes here. I have CDs and other recordings where there are 'tracks' or index points indicating a time just before another movement begins. But the background noises - e.g. audience noises - are continuous. Having tracks lets you choose to start at a movement other than the first. But you don't want a short 'total silence' at the handover. Some classical works have sections or movements with no break at all. Yet may be 'tracked' on a CD. FWIW I downloaded the high rez flac files of Britten's War Requiem (superb!) and Peter Grimes, and they have 'file splits' like this because you can buy individual items from the entire work. I suppose I should mention that the start of 'D' could have a very brief intended moment of silence but again this is the track playing, there should be no gap 'C' in a playback system. I guess the problem might be pop songs that start right at the beginning of a track and end right at the end. Then the abrupt immediate start of one song may disturb your reaction to the previous one. But I dunno, I'm just guessing, as its not a problem I tend to run into. Maybe you need a silent gap after listening to Def Leppard if the next song your random-play mobile chooses is Val Doonican crooning gently. Or vice versa! 8-] I should declare that my music collection lacks the works of both. ;-) Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 05/02/2016 18:34, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , Bob Latham wrote: That is why I have no understanding of a gapless track. The intended silence is part of the track, there is no gap. Sorry we may be talking at cross purposes here. I have CDs and other recordings where there are 'tracks' or index points indicating a time just before another movement begins. But the background noises - e.g. audience noises - are continuous. Having tracks lets you choose to start at a movement other than the first. But you don't want a short 'total silence' at the handover. Some classical works have sections or movements with no break at all. Yet may be 'tracked' on a CD. FWIW I downloaded the high rez flac files of Britten's War Requiem (superb!) and Peter Grimes, and they have 'file splits' like this because you can buy individual items from the entire work. Not just classical. Plays, audiobooks, prog rock, live and concept albums too. My solution when converting CDs to MP3 was to either convert half the CD (i.e. one LP side) into a single MP3 or listen to it, note which tracks blend into the next, and convert the groups into single MP3s. I don't suppose MP3s preserve phase so there's bound to be a click between files even if there's no gap. So I should bite the bullet and convert all my CDs again to FLAC. -- Eiron. |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Bob Latham
wrote: However, if you have several manufacturers machines that work fine from a given NAS and UPnP server and another company who's machine does not work with either the NAS or the UPnP server then I think it far more likely the problem lies with the player and/or the control software running on a tablet/phone. A problem is that one or more large organisations may "define darkness to be the new standard meaning of light". Its the kind of thing that MS, Apple, etc, etc, do to try and get everyone to use *their* software (or hardware) "because it works correctly" - when in fact it breaks with an otherwise-agreed standard. [1] Then something like a player may not work because it *does* follow agreed standards, but the user doesn't know this. The history of HTML and web-browsers is littered with examples where people start thinking their browser isn't working properly for such reasons. Certainly, under a some do some don't situation, the "don't" manufacturer could join the "do" group even if that means implementing a spec 'addition'. I might argue that it is remiss of them if they don't. The above may mean they have to deal with an ambiguous situation, so they can't always win. Or may mean paying to join a club. I have no idea if any of the above *is* relevant in this particular case. But it is a reason for being careful about assigning 'blame' when different items or software fail to work together nicely, when others seem fine. [snip] That is why I have no understanding of a gapless track. The intended silence is part of the track, there is no gap. Sorry we may be talking at cross purposes here. I don't understand why you think that. I wasn't sure if we were, so thought it best to allow for that. From your response I think it was OK. Jim [1] Its an extension of the way MS do something like fail for ages to impliment agreed standards like those for USB Audio Class 2 devices so such devices "just work", forcing users to install a 'driver' - whilst Mac / Linux / RO users can use the devices because they connect using the same common open standard. Note that MS participated in the committee meetings that laid down the standards *years* ago. But then didn't include them in their standard OSs when others did, and many devices adopted them. You can speculate on if this is lazyness, incompetence, etc. But it enhances the chance that some device makers simply then won't bother with adopting the standard... and thus produce devices that *only* work with the current version of Windows. ....Which might suit MS nicely. -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
In article , Bob Latham
wrote: In article , Eiron wrote: So I should bite the bullet and convert all my CDs again to FLAC. I fully concur with that idea. In some ways I guess I was fortunate in coming a bit late to the party of using computer files for audio. Meant I didn't have to worry so much as I might in the past about the storage requirements. Once they can be ignored mp3 becomes an also-ran as soon as you want audio quality. Jim -- Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me. Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 06/02/2016 14:09, Bob Latham wrote:
In article , Jim Lesurf wrote: In article , Bob Latham wrote: However, if you have several manufacturers machines that work fine from a given NAS and UPnP server and another company who's machine does not work with either the NAS or the UPnP server then I think it far more likely the problem lies with the player and/or the control software running on a tablet/phone. A problem is that one or more large organisations may "define darkness to be the new standard meaning of light". Its the kind of thing that MS, Apple, etc, etc, do to try and get everyone to use *their* software (or hardware) "because it works correctly" - when in fact it breaks with an otherwise-agreed standard. [1] Then something like a player may not work because it *does* follow agreed standards, but the user doesn't know this. The history of HTML and web-browsers is littered with examples where people start thinking their browser isn't working properly for such reasons. Absolutely, I agree with all you say but that doesn't help someone who's kit won't play ball. Now minimserver is written by an individual and not a company and as far as I know he has no particular association with the likes of Linn and Naim who are two companies for whom I know gapless works. Actually, I bet Simon Nash (minimserver) could tell us chapter and verse about this. This seems from what I've read to be an issue between the control software running on the phone/ipad and the player. In Linn's case, they write the software for both themselves. There are at least two 3rd party control apps that I'm told also work with the Linn but I've not tried them. Just to pick up from our exchange upthread - that's my understanding too, but for Cambridge. Also Linn published the spec for their control comms sufficient for someone to write a 'linn player' that runs on a raspberrypi and having built one myself, I know it plays gapless. There have been companies who have brought players to the market and then had to modify their code to make gapless work, I think Pioneer was one and that uses UPnP/DLNA. I seem to recall HiFi News being amazed that the player couldn't do gapless and were quite critical. 12 months later it could according to HFN. I have a QED audio media player - that won't do gapless either. It's just eye-rollingly bad. Certainly, under a some do some don't situation, the "don't" manufacturer could join the "do" group even if that means implementing a spec 'addition'. I might argue that it is remiss of them if they don't. The above may mean they have to deal with an ambiguous situation, so they can't always win. Or may mean paying to join a club. I have no idea if any of the above *is* relevant in this particular case. But it is a reason for being careful about assigning 'blame' when different items or software fail to work together nicely, when others seem fine. I have no proof but I know where I think the blame lies and it's not anything to do with a NAS or a UPnP server. Agreed. I'd still like to better understand gapless. The Wiki explanation is unclear. I'm coming to the view that the (poor) control software inserts a silence, or takes the change in tracks as an opportunity to buffer. So it's *adding* a flag, rather than not picking one up? Dunno! -- Cheers, Rob |
Couple of cd queries, model numbers later
On 05/02/2016 14:18, Jim Lesurf wrote:
In article , RJH wrote: On 04/02/2016 09:36, Bob Latham wrote: In article , RJH wrote: An alternative (such as that used by Jim Lesurf) is to access the files directly, and use the NAS as you would an internal drive on a computer. I've just given this a quick try, using VLC on Mac OS. And it almost (!) works - a split second gap between tracks. Better than the Synology - a good 2s between gapless tracks. it's not a playback route I use, but I'll look into it . . . Might be worth experimenting with VLC's buffer size/number settings. I guess this can be done as it is so flexible, but I can't recall getting into this. Mmmm, had a look but still can't make it happen. It does work fine with iTunes. Still not sure why you don't use a media server. You can still select 'old school' by folder. Plus all the other stuff - vast search and sort (composer, year, artist etc). Also my latest toy - lyrics :-) I sometimes notice a delay in getting the 'first file'. I've wondered if the NAS is wanting to load the files I've listed by dnd into RAM and so is trying to get ducks in a row before going much further. Or if its the first file(s) of the session that make it do some sorting out. Not sure for the reasons I give below... Gapless recording is where, by design, there is no gap between tracks. For example, live music. In practice I tended to assume this might happen anyway before I got into playing audio files.. So when generating files from Audio CD I usually make 'contiguous' tracks into one long flac file. Became a habit I found convenient anyway. However in practice, when I haven't, it doesn't normally seem to give me a noticable 'gap'. So its not really been a problem here. How lucky I've been, I dunno. Obviously, the problem with one large file is selecting tracks. And as you say, it should 'just work'. -- Cheers, Rob |
| All times are GMT. The time now is 05:37 PM. |
Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2025, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
SEO by vBSEO 3.0.0
Copyright ©2004-2006 AudioBanter.co.uk