Making Movies

I recently came across a review of the MOTU 1248 AVB external audio interface on yabb.jriver.com and figured it's the ultimate in flexibility for my needs - it would drive my home theatre sound system AND whole house audio system AND anything else I threw at it.

The only problem was the price - at over €1,600, it's somewhat pricey. (This blog has brought in the sum total of €50 over 2 years to give an indication of when I could afford it!).

However, it does have a baby brother, the Ultralite AVB which at under €900 would be a little more palatable. It would give 8x outs for the home theatre and can be expanded. Still out of range though, so I turned to eBay and found a Motu 848 MkII for a lot less that will work as in interim solution and will work as the ADAT expansion unit if I ever get the UltraLite.

I first tried the unit with a KVM Windows 8 VM in unRaid but found a lot of pops and clicks, particularly with higher resolution audio files. Additionally, when I introduced the longer FireWire cable I needed, it just wouldn't work at all. So with a tinge of sadness, I've retired one of my VMs and migrated it back to a physical HTPC that will run the home theatre.

So with that decision made, I set about re-configuring the HT A/V set-up. The biggest task was to physically move everything behind the screen. The photo above shows my current 110" 16:9 screen in position, but I can swing it up to reveal...

Bi-Amping with JRiver Media Centre

Having recently acquired a pair of long-coveted B&W 803N speakers, I've been running them from my almost-vintage Pioneer VSX-2011D receiver. This is very much old-skool analog with nary a HDMI connection in sight.  It's configured as purely a power-amp using the multi-channel inputs fed from an M-Aduio Delta 1010LT sound card. This card is connected to a MediaServer8 Win8 VM running JRiver Media Centre.

I plan on purchasing a proper power-amp to drive the 803s but for now, budget doesn't allow so I wanted to see if I could bi-amp the speakers using the re ever. It's a 7-channel system and does support bi-amping, just not in multi-channel mode.

Since I'm using JRiver as a receiver, I wanted to see if is possible to configure it to bi-amp the speakers. Turns out it is. Here's how;