New iPod Extreme - Docking Connector Line output cables

iPod Extreme Audio cables for Home and Car Stereo

We try to keep busy in the summer doing the usual summer stuff, and a lot of us do it with our iPods. If you also like to do things with your iPod, we have something new, right off the drawing board you might find enhances the relationship!



The Home Audio iPod Extreme - Awesome noise free sound with extremely wide bandwidth.


Due to the big difference in audio quality available from the iPod Docking connectors "line output" compared to the headphone output, we have designed these cables from the ground up to give you the ultimate sound quality from your iPod. We offer two types - one designed primarily for home audio use to your stereos left and right stereo audio RCA connector inputs, and one designed for Car audio with a mini stereo plug for your cars "Aux" input. Both are made with the same high grade silver plated Teflon twisted pair wires.

And the Car Audio iPod Extreme:




Mini Plug Stereo Connection for Car Audio "AUX" Inputs.
Same great sound, Same nice looks, Same durable construction. Available now to hear your iPod like you never heard it before!






Features:
· Silver Plated Copper wire
· Teflon Insulated
· Dual Twisted Pairs for low noise, excellent sound quality
· Silver Soldered
· Techflex Jacket
· Super low Capacitance for wide bandwidth
· Custom made to order in the USA!

Links:
iPod Extreme mini
iPod Extreme RCA

Setting up your new/old turntable and cartridge

Setting up your new/old turntable and cartridge
I received the old Denon DP-45F turntable I mentioned in the last blog entry and a new Grado Cartidge (RED) I bought on ebay and hooked them up to my Denon 3805 Receiver. I use this system for my Computer audio and iPod audio while working or using my computer. The speakers are Reference 3A Dulcets - it's a nice sounding little system.

While spending 5 figures on a turntable, tonearm, cartridge and ancillaries seems easy for some, it is not my cup of tea. Plus, I cannot afford tea like that! There are plenty of great, old turntables that are easy to afford for those interested in testing the waters of "analog audio" - "LP records" to us normal people.
Ebay is filled with plenty of Thorens, Dual, Garrard, Pioneer, Technics Turntables and all sorts of other brands from yesteryear that probably only 40 somethings or older may remember. There are plenty of yardsale or fleamarket options, but in all cases you have to be careful to not get a "project" TT - a turntable that needs repair. Do your homework before buying a turntable. Get a top model Turntable from the mid to late 70's and up and it should have a pretty nice tonearm. Get a new Grado Black, green, blue, red or Shure M97XE cartidge online for a good price and you have the basic hardware for high quality playback. You'll also need a receiver or amp with a good "phono" preamp section for best results.
Getting Started:
Setting up a cartridge in your new/used turntable is unfortunately a bit of a PITA. You have left CD world and are in a new land of DANGER. It would not be so difficult if your needle were indestructible, but unfortunately that is not the case. It's a teensy weensy little diamond glued onto a glob of material glued to a teensy weensy little shaft, etc. We are talking FRAGILE.
Wiring:
You have to get the wiring right, and you need to be very careful with the tiny gauge wires involved - they break very easily. The little sockets involved are certainly strange to a newbie (or more accurately - non oldbie?). The wires are color coded and the cartridge should come with a wiring guide. The markings on cartridges are so small they are hard to see and are sometimes incomplete enough that relying on them is tricky, so hopefully you have the paperwork on your cartridge.
Alignment and Setup:
Alignment in the head shell is necessary so that the cartridge stays as close as possible to 90 degrees perpendicular to the record grooves while traversing the record and parallel to the platter/record. This is not fun to do, and particularly dangerous for the needle. You can buy numerous alignment devices, but there are also easy to use printable pdf versions that you can print out, and as long as you are very careful, and can find a way to accurately poke out the "center hole" for the spindle of your turntable, they can do the job very well.
Setting up the proper "tracking weight" (how much weight the needle has applied to press down into the record groove) is hugely important to how well the needle can track the grooves, as well as how much the needle may adversely effect the wear on the grooves. It's a balance between the two you need to achieve. Too light - and you get distortion as well as groove damage since the needle has limited groove surface area contact and tends to get bounced around. Too heavy and the needle is just not compliant enough to follow the grooves with all the weight applied and scrapes off the sharp edges (dynamics and high frequencies) until you get - mush. There are digital gauges which are nice, but a bit pricey. They should work very well. Then again, "manual" gauges like the Shure SFG-2 can be had for less. The negative part is they are not "brain dead" setup gauges. You will need to be careful with your needle, you may need to read and understand directions - and at this point you are probably pretty tired of "tools" like that! In any case, a manual gauge is not going to ever stop working unless you lose it.
BIG NOTE: Always RAISE the needle before making adjustments. It will take more time, but your needle will survive the process!
Anti skating - Easy - Just set it equal to the Tracking force you use. Most turntables should work very well set this way.

Here are some good links to more info to help you out.
Info:
Align Your Turntable Cartridge:
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/freestuff.htm
Tonearm Alignment:
http://www.theanalogdept.com/tonearm_alignment.htm
Cartidge Setup:
http://www.audiophilia.com/features/cartridge_setup.htm
Record Cleaning:
http://www.sleevetown.com/vinyl-cleaning.shtml

Hopefully you have local used record stores that have bins and bins of records for $1 for you to hunt through.
Have fun, and happy listening!

How to connect your Computer to your Stereo

We updated our Howto page: "How to connect your Computer to your Stereo"
[Why? I bought a turntable on ebay]

Well, we finally got around to an update of our popular "How to connect your Computer to your Stereo" page. Not a huge update, mainly added some extra info on connecting your Turntable to your computer and added links to some good free software.

It should be getting some further updates pretty soon. Why? Mainly because I just bought a turntable. Yeah, maybe I'm crazy - they are noisy, inconvenient, and can get to be an expensive hobby all in themselves, but I just miss playing records.

What brought all this on? Well, I was browsing around in the used CD store when I just couldn't help but browse through some of those $1 records they had virtually tons of. I kept finding old records I liked until the next thing I knew I was browsing through the $2-$5 sections. I stopped myself before I went crazy, since I gave up on my old Garrard Belt drive turntable years ago and had nothing to play them on.
What is it, nostalgia? I know there is a big vinyl resurgence lately, but I never once was tempted to shell out $25 for Norah Jones latest on 180g vinyl, and $2500 for a turntable. Don't get me wrong, I always enjoy listening to high end audio systems at all the high end audio shows, but give me an sacd, DVD audio or hopefully soon some Blu Ray Audio disks - nice clean digital audio on click and pop free disks! Well, I guess I miss the whole reverential process involved that I remember so well from my youth. You find that big 12"x12" square among all your other records, take it out and figure out the tracks you like, clean the disk carefully and set it down on the platter. Then you cue up the arm and move it - just right there - carefully to right over the gap in the tracks and let it slowely drop down... ahhh, I miss that.

No, I'm not one of those that thinks analog just has to sound better. I'll get back to you on that, I guess, since I don't even have a needle yet... Maybe I'm getting old and want to go back to my youth, but then it seems that a big part of the vinyl comeback is amongst the young. Young people were scouring the heck out of those huge bins of LP's. Maybe size matters? I always did miss the SIZE of Records - CD's were more like little toys. You can hardly read the writing. And Digital downloads? Yes, I have my share, but that's even more of a disconnect to having something palpable in your hands - something to sit back on the couch and look at while the record played.

So, while I don't even have the turntable I "won" on ebay - a nice Denon table (the nice Duals were just too high) that was quite nice and a bit expensive in its day, and I have not even ordered a cartridge for it yet, I am definately looking forward to getting it all together and working (supposing it arrives in one piece) .

Yes, I may get bored with the whole thing very quickly, and go back to strictly iPod, CD and my skimpy sacd and dvd audio disk collections for the ease of use, but I may not. Perhaps I'll ride out the recession picking up old $1 records that maybe I never checked out in my youth. Maybe I'll splurge on a few $3 and even $10(!) records that I know I enjoy. In any case it's not going to cost me a fortune to check it out.

How to connect your computer to your HDTV or Standard Def Television

We have done a little update to our Computer to TV/HDTV connections page. Added VGA to Component Video and DVI and HDMI computer to HDTV connection info.
We'll be updating the audio portion soon.

Netflix Roku Box/Player Review

Netflix Roku Box/Player Review

The Wonderful Idea:
Users of Netflix have had the option for a while to "watch it now" using their computer. While a lot of people complain about the service due to difficulty in setup, it is really not that hard to do. A few downloads for Microsoft Media player to get up to date and ad (of course) a DRM security update and it works - with Internet Explorer, at least.
But who wants to watch movies on a computer LCD? Sure they are great for computer displays, but they stink as HDTV's or TV's. They were not made for the job! Computer monitors are all about resolution, TV's are all about contrast ratio - two of many differences in overall design.
So how about a box, that you connect to your network, wireless or wired, connect to your TV/HDTV and/or Home Theater with any of the usual audio and video connections.?

Well here it is! The box basically allows you to watch any movie or TV show that is set up by Netflix for their "Watch it Now" Service. Connect the Audio and video as you would your cable box or DVD player, connect an Ethernet cable or Set it up for your Wireless network, enter a code into Netflixes website and away you go! I must say, the Interface itself is very "Apple like" in it's simplicity and ease of use.

A/V Connections:
* HDMI for Audio/Video
* Component Video
* Composite Video
* Optical Digital Audio
* Stereo Audio

Network Connections:
Wireless 802.11g (no n)
Ethernet
________________________________

REVIEW:
The setup time was very fast, and the entire process was easy, unless you have to enter your wireless encryption code, which is a bit time consuming. The connectivity options are perfect for most TV,s/HDTV's and Surround Sound Systems. A Coax output would help, but you can't put everything on a box of this size at this price.

Picture Quality:
The picture quality was watchable using Ethernet or Wireless 802.11g within the same room as the wireless router. During the Netflix/Roku network quality test, the Ethernet only got three stars, while the wireless connection got 4 stars. Weird. My Internet connection hits around 3Mbps maximum on download, so I don't have the ultimate connection. In any case, the picture quality was pretty good for the data speed. It was, of course, not as good as the better DVD's and nothing like HD material, but was at least as good as many Cable TV channels, and it was really wide screen when the program material supported it.
Audio:
Optical and HDMI seem to support 5.1 surround sound fine, and sound ok. Without more time, there's nothing to add to that.

Overall:
It's a great box. It is a wonderful addition to anyone's Netflix account.

More time with the unit:
Quality seems to go up and down. Motion artifacts can be a bit annoying since data rates are rather low and original quality sometimes is lacking. Mind you everything is pretty watchable, as long as you have good Internet bandwidth. Not as much content as I'd like - but for a free* add-on to a Netflix account who's complaining?
Rediscovering old overlooked program material is actually pretty fun. Really a lot of good stuff to enjoy. Movies seem to work fine and widescreen movies are presented in widescreen, but there are few configuration settings such as stretch 4:3 to 16:9 which would be nice for plasma owners.


***This review was edited from original, which had a reference to a problem which didn't exist.

HD Recording and Playback the Gefen Way!

HD Recording and Playback the Gefen Way!
Gefens new High Definition PVR (Personal Video Recorder) the GTV-HD-PVR is a great way to record your favorite HD content for later playback. It has a great selection of Inputs - Composite Video, S-Video, Component Video and two HDMI Inputs. Connect your non-HDCP encrypted HDMI sources and HD Component Video source and record them at resolutions from 480i up to 1080i. It also has an SD Disk slot for offloading your movies to computer. A great way to archive your HD Camcorder movies or Time Shift your favorite TV Shows and movies. While not inexpensive, it is a very versitile little box that with a built-in 80GB Hard Drive.

For Professional use - this makes a great device for Digital Signage Applications!
The Link:
Gefen GTV-HD-PVR, High Definition PVR

Digital and Analog Audio Conversion, Common Problems

Digital and Analog Audio Converters:
Why, when and where do you need them?
We get people looking for solutions to Audio problems with need for Analog to Digital, Digital to Analog and Coax to/from Toslink Optical Audio all the time. Here are some common problems.

Digital to Analog (DAC):

• PS3 Digital Output to your Standard Stereo or TV input.
• Connecting Audio Device with Digital Output to Standard Stereo Connection.
• You have a HDTV with an ATSC tuner or Cablecard Tuner, the HDTV has Digital Audio out, but no Analog Audio out, and you don't have a Digital Input on your Stereo or Home Theater.
• You have run out of Digital Inputs on your Receiver and need to connect something that only has a Digital Audio Output.
• Your Receiver has a Zone 2 (or Zone 3) that you use for another room, but the Zone 2 will not pass a Digital signal to the second Zone, only Stereo analog audio.

Analog to Digital (ADC):

• You have run out of Analog Inputs on your Receiver, but still have a spare Digital input that you want to connect a stereo device to.
• You have a single coax cable in your wall and want to transmit stereo audio to another location.
• You have a Digital Recorder with no Stereo inputs, and need to connect stereo audio.
• You need to run Analog audio a long distance without loss.

Toslink Optical to Digital Coax/Digital Coax to Toslink Optical

• Your Receiver does not have enough Coax Digital Inputs for your Devices.
• Your Receiver does not have enough Toslink Optical Inputs for your Devices.

Products:
Digital and Analog Audio Converters

DEEP COLOR MADNESS

Repeat after me - There are no useful video sources that support Deep Color.
There are no useful video sources that support Deep Color.
There are no useful video sources that support Deep Color.
There are no useful video sources that support Deep Color.
There are no useful video sources that support Deep Color.

Got it? Anyone who implies that deep color is useful or will improve your Color uniformity issues or vertical banding effects is quite simply - a dummyhead.

Home is where the Plasma and Projector is

It is nice to get home from some hotel with a crappy TV and get back to all of your recorded shows and rentals and DVD's, etc and go and watch them on your HD Plasma, LCD or projector. Ahhh, home again.
How many people out there feel the need to eyeball calibrate your hotel TV? I know I do. They always look terrible with over saturated colors, too much sharpening and poor selection of video mode that is way off (vivid).
Those 19 inch TV's or whopping bigger ones like the 32 inch ones they have in some hotels are no better setup than the one at your local pizza parlor.
It just goes to show that most people have no idea that TV's are not at their best with default settings. The ISF has been trying to educate the public for years, but with limited results.
Why?
It's all about perceptions of manufacturer intent and delivery.
TV's are set up out of the box to be ultra bright and ultra razor sharp, and in no way accurate. Many of them cannot be made extremely accurate even with ISF service menu calibration. In many cases service menu calibration is not even useful.
Why? Well, that question is one to annoy the manufacturers with. First off, they should make it possible to do grayscale calibration and other crucial settings without having to go into the service menu. That way, they don't have to worry about problems with returns because of failed calibrations. It would also result in their HDTV's looking as good as possible for the largest number of consumers. Oh yeah, that would be terrible!
The trouble is that a lack of consumer education has left the whole calibration issue in some kind of alternate universe where everything is not perfect out of the box. If manufacturers would just admit to this truth, consumers and dealers and calibrators would all be able to work from the same page - truth.

OK, enough ranting. Tbush should have a new article on recording Microphones with computers real soon, for your enjoyment.

Seattle Weather sucks like a bad ATSC USB Tuner

I'm in Seattle this week for a conference and boy does Seattle weather suck. I don't know how Seattle people deal. These are some stout minded people here, when the weather is even marginally ok, they treat it like it's a beautiful sunny freaking day. Hey, it's a great city. Lots to do and see, great people, and all of that, but really, this is June weather? Having a conference in someplace like Alcatraz might be more uplifting. It's no wonder all those great grunge bands and Jimi Hendrix came from here. Weather like this must make you want to explode when you get a chance. I hope that if we ever learn to control the weather to some extent we try it out here first. Imagine this place with, like, sunshine? Whoah! Frickin San Diego would be jealous.
What else sucks? Trying to use a non hardware encoding ATSC HDTV card to try to watch HDTV on your laptop if it's a bit old or lacking in the video card department. I got a "big name" brand USB ATSC tuner at the local BB with my "rebate" (and a few more bucks) for getting my HD DVD player there. What a waste. I thought I'd be able to watch some shows in HD on my laptop here in the middle of town if the weather sucked. Well, to make a long story short, I could tune a bunch of local channels with decent signal strength but without hardware encoding I could not watch anything. Sure, my laptops a bit old, but not that old, it's still fine for watching DVD's, and I thought I might get it to work ok at lowered resolutions. Bah! No such luck. Couldn't watch HD or standard Def even with good signal strength. I should have got a hardware encoding tuner that offloads cpu intensive processing to the adapter - not the cpu, and I should have already known that.
We do sell them, but as often happens, I wasted money to try to save a few bucks. I should have sunk that BB gift card into some new Blu Ray disks like I did with the rebate for the other frigging HD DVD player I bought.
Shoulda got: AutumnWave OnAir USB HDTV GT

Ethernet Wired to Wireless Adapter

Here's a network connectivity question we get a lot.
"How do I convert my regular Ethernet connected device into a wireless Ethernet device?"
Many people have Ethernet equipped Game Consoles, Blu Ray Players, or components that are not computers and have no way to add on a PCI slot card, PC Card or express card in order to add a wireless network adapter. All those newfangled USB connections on Game consoles, Media Extenders and the like cannot accept a USB to Ethernet adapter since they have no way to load a driver on them. You have to go with something proprietary if one is even available.

Well, here's one solution. An Ethernet to Wireless bridge, that is easy to set up and use. It's also small and easy to find a place for. It's called the AeroPad Mini.

Here's the manufacturers blurb:
"AeroPad Mini is extraordinary in that it does not require drivers to function and is compatible with Mac OS 9.x, 10.x, Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, Linux, as well as XBox, PS2, or Tivo. AeroPad offers genuine cross-platform compatibility.
The AeroPad Mini lets you breathe new life in your older Mac models such as iBooks, G3's, iMacs, and any computer that do not have a 802.11g wireless solution available to them (e.g. no AirPort Card slot, no AirPort Extreme slot, no PCMCIA card slot, or no PCI slot. Now these computers can be placed anywhere without the hassle of running long cables.
AeroPad Mini spares the tedium of setting up cables or opening up the computer to insert a networking card.
The AeroPad Mini has also been redesigned to be small and portable, and perfect for users on the go. AeroPad Mini is USB powered so you will never have to worry about being near an outlet, this is truly wireless computing at its best. Small size doesn't mean AeroPad Mini comes in a compromise. Zipping at 802.11g 54Mbps speeds, it is small yet cutting-edge."

and a link to the Aeropad mini

So what's your connectivity problem? Ask us and we'll give you an answer on Connectivity Today from RamElectronics.Net

A couple of Articles HTPC and Guitar to PC

Here's a great little blog post about trying to Re make an HTPC. A very enjoyable read for those who have tried.
Again the link: Trees in the Forest: The Darjeeling Limited

Hey, we at RAM have a new article as well:
How to Connect a Guitar to your computer to record and play along with music, using the M-Audio Jamlab -> Go to the article

ZOMBIE PLASMA DEATH SQUAD!

ZOMBIE PLASMA DEATH SQUAD!
Since Plasma is Dead:
Audioholics - Plasma TV is Dead
That means we have some real live zombies out there! Hopefully scientists have some of those ghostbusters meters available to probe these strange netherworld objects with. Hard to believe that our first provable contact with the postmortem crowd would happen to be with video displays! Here's hoping they are not evil or capable of violent, bloodthirsty outbursts, unless they are just entertaining us with this type of video material.
The Zombies cometh!
cnet.com
engadget.com

Quick note about a great article about online Video download services

HDTV Magazine has a must read article for all of us who complain about our Cable/Satellite Services entitled "A Comparison of Movie Download Services".
Really, don't miss this article, it's a quick review of the current and future Video Content download services. Very well done!

Appologies a Rant and a Sale

Apologies
Hello again to all of our old and new customers who were kind enough to subscribe to our email newsletter. We would like to make apologies, especially to our older subscribers as to the state of our current "upgraded" site. Our old site,while enjoyed by many people was very "old school". It was painstakingly "hand made" and had as much helpful content as we could manage to add. But it's 2008! So we had to move to a modern way of doing things. It's been hard to do. And we are way far from finished.
One painful decision was between copying our old content onto the new site or creating lots of entirely new, fresh content. We kept and updated some of our more in-depth content but decided on completely rewriting most of the rest of the site. While it may seem crazy to want to rewrite content for hundreds of pages, we are actually enjoying it. It's what we like to do - explain the basics of various forms of interconnectivity and help people understand and successfully use them.

Here are a few examples of our new content:
Video Converters
Networking
USB Cables


Of course we still offer updated versions of some of our best old sites content on our support page and all of our blog, Connectivity Today is still available.


A Rant
The upgrade to HD quality DVD player scam
DVD players that claim to convert your DVD to HD quality (1080i,1080p,720p) for your HD display are a scam. The marketing here is complete nonsense.
Your TV is going to convert the signal it is given to its own natural, resolution and refresh rate. If it is a 720p LCD it will convert whatever it is given to that. If it is a 1080p display, it will convert everything it is given to that. Feeding your HDTV 1080p from a DVD player may or may not be better than feeding it 480i, depending on the video processing of the HDTV and DVD player. Over and over, people don't get this. It is not just the player! People buying Pioneer Plasmas over the those off-brand LCD's are not just rich and obsessed with black level. Video processing is actually worth money. There are a lot of smart people paying a lot of money for stand-alone video processors. Why? Because they highly value the picture quality they are rewarded with. Putting a bit more into your TV purchase, or DVD/Blu Ray purchase can make a big difference in the resulting picture quality you watch, day in and day out for years to come. If you are obsessed with getting that 1080p signal from some oh so inexpensive upscaling DVD player to your HDTV, you really need to rethink how your system works. In a lot of cases your final picture quality will be better with an old, 480i or 480p DVD player of high quality (and they are selling for cheap). Of course you could just get an Oppo or on sale HD-DVD player to do very nice upscaling. It's never going to look like a true HD source with a good looking movie, though.

A Sale
We have a 15% off sale on Liberty THX Certified Optical Digital Audio Toslink cables
This week only?!