he's not joking about it.

and i use a USB infrared remote control. can control from the kitchen hehe

someone is pissed haha
you guys should have followed all the posts in all the threads to get a glimpse of the situation. logit got that coming.

but i do have to agree, a kampung man could (and would possibly) have more land than a city boy and still live in a hut wooden house and drive around in 15yo broken saga. land is cheap. you could get an acre of land with the price of some subwoofer.

different people with different priorities in life

sorry i was attending a 2 week training. next time call or sms me. if i don't pick up sms me. much faster reply. at least within the day

This post has been edited by paskal: Dec 14 2010, 07:11 PM

that's a shop's demo room, not a home HT room

it's best to put the sub where it sounds best.

didn't you already bought the XPA5 previously?

so multichannel power amp is overrated and not exactly an upgrade?

open it up and be surprised.
i've opened up the previous monitor 7 and have seen it. the wires are connected to the tweeters by a connector. simple to remove.

there's a simple locking pin on the connector. bend the connector a bit while pulling it out. easily done.
there's indeed lots of insulation sponge. normal i guess.

had a good look at the wires connecting the drivers?

why not build a htpc and plug all the hdd to it?
i'm running all 28TB on a single htpc with only 2GB of RAM. costs me less than RM1k to build it. the main components i mean. the hdd is another matter.

not as impressive as it sounds. it's quite simple actually. all the hdd are just plugged here and there.
the case costs RM400 if i recall correctly. a silverstone htpc case.

8 on board sata port, 4 running sata1, 4 running sata2.
a 4 port sata1 pci card (not pci-e) giving me full sata1 speed (50-60 MB/s speed in each drive)
a 2 port sata1 pci card (not pci-e) giving another full sata1 speed same as above.

i don't run external usb for my drives, it's too slow. all the drives are cramped inside a single htpc case, stucked inside a tv cabinet. no loose wire outside the htpc case, no external power supply.
pcie sata card used to be too expensive last year. them pci sata card are bought for under RM100 (the 4 port for RM90, the 2 port for RM30).

you don't need a full tower sitting beside the tv cabinet. silverstone htpc cases could fit inside a tv cabinet and looks just like an avr. some even came with lcd display and remote control.

i've posted a pic (a few actually) in the htpc thread a while back.

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Added on September 10, 2011, 12:12 pmafter testing quite a few sata card, i would say best to avoid jmicron, via and other non-drive controller producer.
silicon image chips is the best. their products used to be a premium, but now lots of china makers are using their chip and slapping a very low price. i've tested 2 (IINM) jmicron card and 3 via card and they suck when you have more than 1 card handling multiple transfers between drives. unlucky and you'll get <8MB/s transfer speed. that's worse than through USB.

This post has been edited by paskal: Sep 10 2011, 12:12 PM

that is freakking cheap! consistently RM50-RM70 per month is like living with bare necessity. i take it nobody is at home during work hours?

the budget proposed by jchong is really good. that should provide you with lots of choices.

i would like to add, take lots and lots visit to friend's setup and audit their setup and know your preference. the setup at shops are usually not calibrated properly and sub par.
and if you could, get an avr that have preout section. usually would cost more than an avr without, but this allows you to add in a poweramp later.

he did say specifically for an avr with 5.1 or 7.1 setup with a budget of RM10-RM12k

getting an avr with preout section is worthwhile since you could change the sound signature entirely by adding a poweramp.
like when people associate marantz as being too laid back? sure, add an amp with a forward signature and you'll get a great synergy. or yamaha as being too bright, which could be changed by hooking a warm amp to it.

usually it's a couple hundred more comparing an avr with and without preout capability. an avr that costs RM3k-3.5k should usually have them as standard.

3db on the amplifier gain, it doesn't change anything on the maximum current drive/power output.

other than allowing less turn on the volume knob? probably none.
tho signal transmission using balanced xlr allows for higher noise rejection during transmission as any external noise will affect both the hot and cold terminal and this will cancel each other out during summation. the summation process is the reason for the 3db gain.

but the summation process is essentially converting the balanced to unbalanced so you lose the benefit of any balanced amplification after the summation process as everything is operating in the normal, cheaper unbalanced mode.
using balanced xlr wouldn't translate to much improvement if you already have a short interconnect and good shielding.

'true' fully balanced amplifier are hard to come by, and are very very expensive. the amp needs to have double of everything, with symmetric precision in everything, and must be designed to be stable with an impedence of less than 1 ohm. this adds to the cost of such design exponentially. and if you're running true fully balanced there's no 3db gain as there's no signal summation anywhere on the chain.

your current power amp supports bi-amping. and in by bi-amping i mean active bi-amping. why not try that first. bet you'd get more benefit by running active than by running balanced.

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Added on November 17, 2011, 7:18 amfor advocates of Class D amp, this would be a great read. and with measured response but of course.
http://www.hificritic.com/downloads/Class-D.pdfhttp://www.hificritic.com/downloads/Class-D.pdf

didn't know that class D had that bad habit of injecting high frequency noise into the electrical line, ground connection and speaker.

This post has been edited by paskal: Nov 17 2011, 07:18 AM

if it's true fully balanced, they will brag about it. as it's very complicated to design and make stable.

the thing is, it's not hard to convert from balanced to unbalanced and vice versa. you just need a single chip to do the job. so most manufacturer just use this to provide balanced xlr connection and say that their amp has balanced output. but in reality, they do all the processing in unbalanced (even tho the DAC outputs balanced signal, as most high end DAC do) to save cost and convert the signal to balanced just before the output jack.

which is perfectly fine if you're not fussy.