Someone asked me recently to describe my home theatre. I've put quite a lot of thought & work into it. But not a lot of money. My goal from the start was to achieve the maximum return with the minimum of complexity.

So, right from the start I knew that it was going to be as much digital as possible. I don't care about live TV and I'm a bittorrent expert so I knew I couldn't have to mess around with cable connections. But more to the point, being digital means you don't have to worry about analog components or duplication. For example, you can concentrate on having just a single Digital/Analog Converter (DAC)... a key component in your audio set-up.

The first thing I bought was the DAC & speakers. I had a new apartment and I wanted to be able to listen to music there. In particular, I wanted to be able to do two things: listen to music coming off my Nokia N95, which functions like an iPod, and listen to music coming off my laptop, a MacBook Pro. I did a lot of research online to figure out how I could get the best sound with a budget of $400. And I wound up finding a REALLY nice pair of speakers.

I actually restricted my search strictly to powered speakers, or, as they are commonly called, "ipod speakers"... and most of them are fairly crap. Even the ones from Apple didn't really score that well when I listened to them. I'm a musician on the side and I know what good sounds like. None of the ones I could find in stores reproduced sound the way I wanted—clean, like the original, faithful. They were bass heavy and muddy. But online I read a review of AudioEngine 5, a pair of "ipod speakers" that got fabulous reviews—from audiophiles.

You probably know that audiophiles are nutcases, but there is something to be said for their discrimination and knowledge of the art. If an audiophile says something is good, then it probably rocks if you're a normal person, even a musician like me. So, I found a deal and bought the A5s for $350. And I picked up an Apple Airport Express at the same time.

Both purchases turned out better the more I learned. The A5s have built-in amplifiers, which means that I don't need to (a) buy an amp (which I planned) or (b) match the amp to the speakers. That's a relief because sound matching amp/speakers would be a LOT of work. With the Airport Express, I started to notice something odd. When I plugged my MBP directly into the speakers, it sounded OK. But when I played through the Express, it sounded GREAT. Turns out the Express has a quite good DAC inside. Sweet! The improvement is highly audible.

OK, a little digression here about speakers. Most products, you get what you pay for. Not with speakers. Speakers are in fact somehow immune to the whole mass production economics. Most audiophiles seem to agree that most, or perhaps all, consumer grade speakers are absolute shit. To get good speakers you either spend absolutely boatloads of money, buy second-hand, or ... you can buy from very small companies, even individual crafters. Audioengine falls into the last category. Even though their website may look slick, this is a small enthusiast company that just wants to make great speakers.

What's up with that? I don't know. I think partly it's the analog ecosystem. For good analog components you just cannot avoid spending a lot of money on expensive electronics to put inside. You can't skimp or replace things with digital. You have to have huge capacitors, big transistors, lots of coiled wire, heavy metal. Good speakers are HEAVY. They are made not from plastic or even titanium but MDF—that's plywood in normal english. You can't fake this stuff, you have to have it, but it's not rocket science, just good workmanship. So, buying from a small company like Audioengine is not silly, it's a great choice. End of digression.

So... now I had a REALLY good sound system and spent countless hours discovering all kinds of wonderful things about my music collection. It really makes a difference. In fact, I admit that I've poisoned my ears on lesser systems... I just need to hear the higher quality. The music is just ... better. There's more in it, detail wise, spatially, musically, tonally. Get a good pair of speakers & DAC, and you too can discover the magic.

Next up: TV. Starting out, I thought I wanted the biggest plasma I could buy. I read all of the reviews, the dark room tests, HD movies, the works. Plasma is the best, blah blah blah. Went to a big store and suddenly I realized different. Two things for me. One: I'm only about 8 feet from my screen and I don't want to be dwarfed. So, I can knock down the screen size dramatically, in fact, I went down to 32 inches. Crazy eh? Second: I have a sunny upper-floor viewing room with a window directly opposite the display, and I intend to watch during the day. That means matte screen which means LCD. Benefits are that I save money due to the small size, don't have to worry about burn in or wasting power, and I know what LCDs are like from long experience. So I wound up with the Sharp AQUOS 32D64U. This model has 1080p, which was essential for me. I have to be future proof. It's going to be a long time before there's a higher resolution than that for films.

Finally, I need something to tie it all together, and here my Mac bias definitely played a role. Mac Mini of course. Of course it helps that they are silent, small, and look very good indeed. No ugly boxes for me. I run VLC and mplayer, but mainly Plex, and awesome port of XBMC. Video goes through a DVI to HDMI converter into the TV, and sound goes analog into the speakers (A5's have two inputs). My only complaint is again, the Mini's analog audio output is not as good as the Airport Express. Eventually I will have to buy a dedicated DAC.

This setup does everything I need, and it's got a good future. If and when I want to move up to new components, all of these pieces will make excellent secondary system components for a second room. They all go together really well, look good, and look and sound great. All told the whole system was about $2K which is a reasonable price considering that I'm basically completely satisfied at this point in time.

For the future? I might—might—try out surround sound at some point. I'm not crazy about—pointless for music, but for the movies—maybe. I definitely don't need a bigger screen. A proper external DAC, driven by USB port, is probably the next item to get, and then I would begin the search for a new amp/speaker combo. Realistically though I can't upgrade my speakers (or add a sub-woofer) until I move into a house. My apartment does not have thick walls and with the A5 bookshelf-sized speakers I can crank it up any time without waking people up.

So, there you have it... complete system, as digital as it can get, and in the $2K range. I'm happy.

This week on A bit of torrent ...

...a surreal film called Three Businessmen. You may not know that you're going to like this movie. You may not thank me for making you watch this movie. But ultimately, your mind will be expanded and you will have a bit, just a bit, more sympathy for the common business-person.

Basically, you've got two businessmen, pictured, thrown together in a sort of haphazard fashion, and they go trekking across the universe (sort of) in search of a bite to eat. On the way, they have many adventures, bond, and talk a lot of silly business speak. Etc.

(Eventually there is in fact a third.)

OK, there's no plot, virtually, and no action, no violence, no sex, no nudity, no guns, no special effects, hardly any budget. But on the other hand. It's by Alan Cox, who you just might remember from Repo Man (he's also the actor on the right). And it rewards multiple viewings. And it's a bit trippy. I liked it. Will you?

Download Three Businessmen (1998) torrent from The Pirate Bay now.

Till next time: bye bye.

Look at this magnificient parrot - wonderful plumage!

I captured it on digital film at the local bird sanctuary. It seems to have a clipped tail. I assume that it sustained some injury but what do I know. Anyway, this particular parrot gets a lot more interesting around dusk when it likes to talk. It knows how to say Hello and lots of interesting whistles.

I tried to edit the video with Quicktime Pro but the transcoding really ruined the quality. Next time I'll try editing it on the phone which might give a better quality if it avoids transcoding . Also I discovered that the 3GPP video standard produces videos with an 11:9 aspect ratio which is a bit bizarre (normal TV is 4:3).

Well, ok, maybe it's not amazing. But it exists. I wish I could do all this through flickr but I can't because they suck and don't handle 3gp video. Not that I really blame them since it's still really blurry and stuff, but hey, it moves and you can hear stuff. Anyway I just implemented a way to throw these videos into my blog and pages much more easily (using the power of XSLT) so here are two that I took this last Sunday.

LINK

Steve and I went for a little walk and we saw this kick ass monarch. here's a photo of it getting away . And here is a video I made when I saw it with my trusty Nokia 6630. It tried to get away, but then it came back.

LINK

Later on at the university we saw a hawk or something. Probably a red-tailed hawk since they're pretty common around here. It was too far away to get a good photo but I have this video of Steve climbing illegally anyway.

How to properly use the kick-ass ffmpegX (for OS X, a wrapper for all kinds of open source tools) to encode your iMovie movies.

It is very important, that you do NOT choose the "Full Quality DV" Setting when exporting from iMovie. This just makes iMovie glueing the 2GB chunks together in which it records movies. Mencoder can't handle that. Here's what to do: Choose "Expert settings". Click "Export". Choose "Movie to Quicktime Movie". Click "Options". In "Video Settings" choose "DV PAL" (or NTSC, if you are on that TV System). In the Audio settings, choose uncompressed 48khz Stereo. Uncheck "Prepare for Internet streaming". Make sure the output file has .mov as extender. Now the recording is reencoded as a single movie which Mencoder will encode completely as AVI.

First, it's nowhere near as simple as I thought. Second, it's nowhere near as complex as I thought. Well, here's how it works. MPEG-4 is a way to define a codec. So, when you go into quicktime and it says, save as MPEG4, you're not saving as MPEG4, you're saving as "Apple's MPEG-4 codec". Which, by the way, sucks compared to basically any other option . There's actually a whole bunch of MPEG-4 codecs, including Divx, Xvid, 3ivx, and a whole bunch of high end professional codecs that cost a lot of money. In theory, any MPEG-4 player can play any MPEG-4 codec. In practice, not so much. But also, in practice, VLC and MPlayer can play them all.

Following all that, here's an enlightening discussion thread comparing various formats and explaining MPEG-4 .

I just posted the wedding movie from my cousin Dave's wedding last september. Relatives might be interested.

Today I have a new movie of the World Cycling Championship up on the site. It was shot this afternoon and edited this evening in iMovie. My camera is a Sony TRV22. Here's the blurb that I wrote up for the page, and you can go straight there by clicking on the title of this entry. The music, I nicked from a 1983 german classic.

On October 11, 2003, the World Cycling Championships were held in Hamilton, Ontario. I went with my camera and shot some tape. Forthwith is the result after a bit of editing. What you see here is the Women's Elite race, actually just one of many races over the three-day championship. The leading racer in the film is Jeannie Longo-Ciprelli (France), who broke away from the pack in the 8th lap of 10 total. You can see here the racers going down the Hamilton mountain and then back up again, the final climb before the end of the race where a group from the pack are catching up to Jeannie is the last shot. For those who care to know these things (I don't really) the winner was Susanne Ljungskog (Sweden), and Jeannie came in 6th.

It wasn't exactly intentional, but it seems that my camera managed to linger on the Canadian Lyne Bessette! I have actually a couple of close ups of her, even though I didn't know it was her at the time. She's wearing a light blue jersey and shorts, and has a canadian flag and the Tim Horton's logo on her thigh. She's also 103 by the way ;-)