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Things are looking up!

August 13th, 2004 · Posted by Skuds in Music/Technology · No Comments · Music, Technology

For a while now my Toshiba DVD player has been acting up. It plays films OK, but the sound output is not digital so I don’t get the benefit of Dolby 5.1 or DTS sound. I had previously put another DVD player on temporarily to find out whether it was the amp or the DVD player which was knackered, and that worked OK which proved the amp and cables were OK.

On the way home today I decided to treat myself and popped into Richer Sounds at London Bridge and bought a new player. Its a Pioneer DV575A and on paper it really is the mutt’s nuts. Its multi-region, plays RCE discs, DVD-A, SACD, MP3, WMA, DivX, in fact just about anything you can think of. It also has progressive scan which will be handy if we ever get a plasma screen or anything seriously flashy like that. Both the audio and video DACs have higher than average specs as well – 192KHz/24-bit for audio and 108Khz/12-bit for video if I remember correctly.

Anyway, as soon as I got home I plugged it in and it worked straight out of the box – no need to play with any settings at all. The only thing I need to do is re-programme the multi-function remote for my amp so it controls a Pioneer instead of Toshiba DVD player. I played the Yes Acoustic to make sure that would play in Dolby Digital and DTS and because I had not previously heard it in proper surround. Then I played a region one RCE disc to confirm that would work, and to top it off I played the Manu Chao/Radio Bemba Live disc and that worked OK too. That one never worked on the Tosh without going through menus and changing the audio output from bitstream to pcm or something like that.

I shall miss the Tosh (now in the daughter’s room) as I had it for a long time and its a quality machine – the one used by many magazines as a reference machine for reviewing films – and it cost quite a bit when I bought it, but a few things have been invented since then and the Pioneer can handle all of them.

To cheer me up even more, I got the print and file sharing working OK on our wireless network. I had a chat with someone at work who has a similar setup and he said he had the same problem until he changed some firewall settings. As soon as he said that I realised that was the obvious thing I had been missing. I disabled the firewall on my PC and suddenly Jayne’s could use my printer. After confirming that it all worked fine I re-enabled the firewall but put the IP address range for the local subnet into the ‘trusted zone’ and set the security for that zone to a lower level and it all still worked OK.

Maybe I should quit while I am ahead and not try any more little jobs for today?

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