Before Sonos, there was... Dell???

[@tayzonday]

DUDE! You’re getting a DELL! 😎🤘

[@volvo09]

Who remembers when Dell dude got arrested?

[@celebrityrog]

Oh I miss The Dell Guy Steve I think was his name. I wanted a Dell so bad and bought one, and it worked fine for years till I moved on to other brands like Acer and HP and finally back to Mac which was what I originally had.

[@brantisonfire]

I remember, around 2009-2010, my friend brought his Xbox 360 over to play some games. We had to plug it into the ethernet port on the wireless router to get online, but that also gave the Xbox access to streaming music from Windows Media Player by connecting to a PC on the same LAN connection. I thought that was soooooo cool being able to create specific playlists to listen to along with each game. We were living like the Jetsons.

[@hrdcpy]

That was a really cool feature for the time where. You could also stream video.

[@TheRocketLombax]

My mom had this but with a PS3 and video files

[@CompComp]

It also let you steam videos from your PC. It was so amazing as a broke kid who had to walk around to steal wifi.

[@slightlyevolved]

I believe the OG Xbox also had early DNLA support for audio. 360 and PS3, IIRC handled it much better and also supported video.

[@toolstime5136]

i found the original xbox with 1080i mod and xbmc (kodi) much cooler :-)

[@K3NnY_G]

People say the LTT DankPods shout-out was the pinnacle but we all know CRD's shoutout is what really buffed up the channel.

[@pleasedontwatchthese9593]

lol what is ltt dank pods?

[@K3NnY_G]

@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 LTT is for Linus Tech Tips..

[@Peter1986C]

@@K3NnY_G The one you reply to does not understand you mean to say that LTT did a shout out to Dankpods (if I read you correctly).

[@KOTYAR1]

Linus did a shout out about Gravis, CRD? He's awesome for that, on what video?

[@K3NnY_G]

@@KOTYAR1 Nah, they shouted out DankPods in a Short Circuit video I think, in a similar fashion CRD did here.

[@ajlitt001]

I worked at Cirrus Logic in the early 2000s as an applications engineer primarily on the EP7212/7312 SoCs. Hopefully I can clear a few things up. The EP7212 did not have a DSP onboard or any accelerator at all. The MP3 decoder most customers used was made in-house in Austin by a team made mostly of refugees from the defunct PC audio group. It could decode most streams using only 1/3 of the horsepower and very little memory, and was the sole reason Cirrus could break into the MP3 player space at all. In this case Dell used external RAM for Linux overhead and stream buffering, but other customers sold products that needed only the on-chip 38k SRAM and some flash for code and music. They included this decoder as part of a bare-metal (os-less) framework that was the basis of many pre-iPod MP3 players. We created MP3 player reference designs for customers that included examples based on this framework. To encourage sales in other areas, the reference designs contained as many Cirrus products as possible, such as audio DACs and in this case the Crystal/Cirrus CS8900a 10Mbit Ethernet controller. Some MP3 players like the Creative Nomad II weren't much more than an EP7209 (7212 without external RAM support), Crystal DAC, flash chip, LCD, and power supply. Others like the TB Audiotron were ground-up designs. And some like the Nomad We also did reference designs for other applications, such as a VoIP phone based on the EP7312 and CS8900a crammed in a single BGA uncreatively labeled as the CS89712. The EP7312 in the TB Audiotron was almost identical to the 7212, but had 48K on-chip SRAM up from 38k (really 37.5k), upgraded the memory controller for SDRAM support over the aging EDO on the 7212, and got a speed bump to 90MHz. The -90 variant was relatively uncommon, and as far as I know was only used in the ZipIt toy PDA. The 7312 was also in the earliest Diamond Rio Volt MP3-CD players. Yes, It Runs Linux. And WinCE. It had RedBoot support, a tiny Linux bootloader similar to U-Boot, and the version we shipped had support for DHCP/TFTP and the CS8900a. I wouldn't be surprised if the Dell's flash contained RedBoot with customizations for the LCD and the HomePNA PHY. The CS8900a was made by Crystal Semiconductor which Cirrus acquired in the early '90s. The CS8900a had a built-in 10baseT and 10base2 PHY, and also an MII (AUI) port for an external PHY. The BCM4120 next to it on the Dell is a MII to HomePNA media converter, so it looks like the CS8900a is the MAC for both interfaces and switches depending on which one is active. Cirrus is still around, but a majority of their market share is in providing audio ADCs and DACs to Apple for iPhones and iPads.

[@Karl_Kampfwagen]

I wanted a Nomad II, but the HDD and high battery consumption for both data upload and audio playback put it several shelves down on my list. Creative Zen Touch was my favorite, and if I could have saved the firmware and upgraded to SSD microdrive, could have been a "forever" MP3 Player. Pretty sure mine ran for 6 years before it went Kaput

[@thisisaname2833]

Well Cirrus is actually more present in the portable audiophile market nowaday, the cs43198 and the cs43131 is the dominant chip in the low to mid range dongle dac/amp product.

[@craned]

That shirt goes hard.

[@JaredConnell]

I searched that phrase to find the shirt and the description of the shirt included this ai generated gold: Polyurethanes are built up from compounds called isocyantes and polyols. The middle parts of these molecules can be varied to give different polyurethanes with differing properties. In football shirts, they’re often the Windows 95 but as a concept shirt Furthermore, I will do this material that the letters, numbers, and sponsors on the shirt are made from, although fabrics or other materials can also on occasion be used. They can be thermally bonded onto the shirt using a heat-sealer, and unlike other fabrics, they have the benefit of being water resistant. Windows 95 but as a concept shirt, hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt Of course, although we’ve focused on football shirts in this post, polyesters in particular are found in a wide range of everyday clothing - many clothes contain some percentage of the Windows 95 but as a concept shirt Furthermore, I will do this polymer. The brilliance of polymers is their versatility, and huge range of potential applications. Fill a sink, tub, or basin with tepid water and add a squirt of a cleanser that’s specially formulated for wool, like The Laundress Wool and Cashmere Shampoo. Don’t have any on hand? “The alternative is a good hair shampoo, because wool and cashmere is hair,” she says.

[@JaredConnell]

I just found another listing with more strange text: Whereas others can only see what we actually did; there’s no mental image to compare it to. So even when others are amazed, it tends not to seem so amazing to the Windows 95 but as a concept shirt moreover I love this artist. In general, too, we’re more aware of mistakes, errors, and general flaws in the work. Beyond that, art is mysterious to non-artists. They don’t really know how art is done. But the artist knows exactly how they did what they did. So there’s no mystery there. Nothing to be super impressed by. It’s just work that they did. When you don’t know how something is done, it’s easier to be amazed by it. Knowing the nitty-gritty details of how to do a thing makes that thing feel more mundane. This is true of anything, incidentally, not just art. Wireless Mobile Internet. I’d be more blown away if it hadn’t been packaged, and turned into an expense that excludes people every day. I’m a computer repair technician… and a good one. Windows 95 but as a concept shirt, hoodie, tank top, sweater and long sleeve t-shirt Every day I work it is reinforced that I am a technician other technicians go to, and I can’t afford to have a device with Wireless Mobile Internet. This is supposed to impress me? Yay. To me, it is like asking the Windows 95 but as a concept shirt moreover I love this maid who cleans your toilets to be impressed with the new seat warming and butt cleaning technologies introduced into your toilet. Drones… I remember when we called them “RC Helicopters”. Now I have to worry about every jackass and his brother buying a drone and flying it around my house. Oh… and is some conspiracy nut going to shoot it down? Or is the operator of the drone scanning WiFi in the area, mapping what’s available and capturing packets?

[@CathodeRayDude]

wow this is incredible. fwiw you should see a link to buy the shirt under the video haha

[@larrylaffer3246]

I'd take a 👕 that would say Windows XP but as a concept personally. That was favorite of the Windows OS'.

[@dmug]

I love these weird Proto MP3 players. The hotness I feel like for tech enthusiast for MP3s was burning CD of MP3s prior to the iPod. Even early as 2000 I’d ripped my cd collection into 320 kbps which i shelled out for a 40 GB maxtor HDD (the first 40 GB ata model) for mostly music as I’d had a few hundred albums that I’d amassed. I just played the music off my computer as I was graduating hs and in college at the time. I was an outlier at the time, but college friends were pirating and sharing cd even if only semi technical, as most people had a computer for school, and the prospect of free music and sharing music was enough to tolerate any technical issues. Being an Apple user and then a dorm dweller, I just did not pay attention much to these PC and living room solutions and the few people I knew during 2000-2002 who cared about this stuff had portable cd players that could read MP3 disks, meaning you could make a mix cd of 100ish songs, more depending on how little you cared about quality. Those lasted even into early iPod era, where there was still sticker shock on iPods. When the mini rolled around, I felt like that killed all attempts afterwards by any company to really compete in any serious way outside of the Zune… which cursed us with Flat UIs from then to eternity.

[@JohnnyBGoode9]

Class D amps are incredible now. I'm a mastering engineer, so I have as high standards as anyone outside of equipment analysis labs, and I adore my Purifi amps, designed by Class D wizard Bruno Putzeys. The THD figures, power efficiency, and sheer subjective clarity and neutrality are stunning, and the price point is low enough that most audiophiles (listening in untreated rooms - the humanity!) turn up their noses, because they'd rather spend money on magic beans than miracles of modern engineering.

[@mikehensley78]

I know! I used to have old Marantz and Sansui class A/AB receivers but now I use 150 watt class D Amp that's the size of a pack of cigarettes and runs off a laptop power brick. It may be cause I'm old now but I think it sounds amazing! I play guitar and used to be pretty picky about my audio equipment(i feel like i know what "good" sounding audio is). Modern technology rules!

[@claysweetser4106]

I'm curious - how does one get into audio mastering as a profession/field? Are there degrees or apprenticeships for it?

[@JohnnyBGoode9]

@claysweetser4106 There are degrees in audio engineering that are widely considered useless by everyone who actually works in the field (they are common and prove nothing about your skill; five minutes of listening to your previous work tells everyone far more than a diploma ever could). And yes, apprenticeships are everything. Most mastering engineers start as other types of engineers (tracking, mixing) who stumbled into it by meeting and working with the mastering engineers that those other types ultimately send their work off to. Mastering engineers tend to be lonely, it's a solo job that requires no help, unlike tracking engineers who benefit massively from having gophers running the dozens of cables and repositioning mics as the engineer sits and listens to how the setup is coming together. So when an aspiring engineer starts showing interest, it's not uncommon for a mastering engineer to be happy to take them under their wing, unlike tracking and mixing engineers who are so constantly inundated with requests for apprenticeship that they can be really grumpy about it. The tracking engineers in particular are the ones who get all the face time with the talent (and often, the same engineer does both tracking and mixing), so they're usually stressed about being efficient and looking professional, while the kids are all dying to be in the room with a big name as they cut our album. Almost no talent ever requests to be present during mastering, if anyone does it's usually the producer, so the young engineers making apprenticeship requests tend to be the ones motivated by genuine interest and not because they're star-struck. Our job is to sit by ourselves in a fancy room with fancy equipment and make very subtle but critical adjustments (if the mixing engineer was good at their job, that is), so an extremely small proportion of kids even know what we do, and a smaller-yet proportion look at it and say, "yes, this is my dream job in the music industry!"

[@ampinstein]

Rare nerd here. Back in 2000, I indeed had my pc in my living room. It was connected to my stereo via a Voodoo 3500 (with the enormous blue breakout dongle). I controlled it via a packard bell rebranded Logitech ir controller, which I managed to hack to work with Winamp. It took a lot of work but it was great, my entire music collection available from the couch. Never heard of the Dell thing, would have saved me a whole lot of effort. Fascinating video and killer t-shirt! :D

[@dickdastardly4801]

Had a VIA EPIA setup just for music with Winamp as well. I am still using Winamp 😀

[@joshmyer9]

For the kids who have never seen the 3500, that wasn't just a dongle. It was a dongle you could beat a man to death with. (That card's tuner setup was weird, and I spent quality time working on the Linux drivers to get everything working. Ah, the good ole days.)

[@cURLybOi]

my friend made me a serial IR receiver and there was app called Girder i think that allowed you to use any available remote (i repurposed one from discarded vcr) and you could learn its codes to produce keystrokes. in 2005 this was still considered magic

[@ampinstein]

@@cURLybOi Ah yes, Girder, that's what I used I think

[@ezyto]

god i hope this video makes people buy these and mod them to be more fully featured, since the software is literally net booting i feel like it wouldn’t be too hard for someone to come up with something. i always love when videos like these breathe new life into these older devices edit: ok i hadn’t finished the video writing this but i do hope some people pick up those older projects

[@romevang]

Honestly, i considered doing it. But i need the hardware and i have enough projects already. 😢

[@backup_hdd]

@@romevang hmm.. maybe someone should create an emulator for that purpose

[@absalomdraconis]

​@@backup_hdd : An emulator? Why bother, it's a cut-down Linux distro, so just modify a distro a bit and you can just use old PC hardware with a soundcard as the head machine. That also nicely sidesteps the question of availability- if someone can be bothered to release a "output end" distro then you could likely have almost anything newer than 1995 provide this capability to some 1970s & 80s hi-fi stacks, including outliers like some of the Amigas.

[@silverywingsagain]

I made one of these using a Raspberry PI Zero with an amplifier hat called HIFIBerry a few years ago. In addition to playing audio from any network share, it also supports pulseaudio streaming, letting you use it directly as a networked sound card. Has a stereo RCA input and output, mixing the networked audio with a traditional input. It has volume knobs to adjust the input and output, and USB for an ethernet dongle. I plan on improving it with onboard ethernet/USB as well as upgrading to the Pi Zero 2, which would give it full Spotify playback and some rudimentary video playback capabilities. It has no screen, or playback controls on it, but it can be controlled by a web interface or using a USB media remote control like MS Ehome infrared recievers. Is there a market for this? What would you want from this kind of device?

[@alecgamer420]

@@silverywingsagain I think there might be a market for a product that makes it easier to stream our collections of digital content. I only watch my media on my PC because it seems like a hassle to get it anywhere else really. Maybe just something simple, HDMI dongle, connects to any tv and it can receive the content from my pc using my home network? I recently started mass downloading KZbin content because I often see great videos get taken down/changed. I also hate ads so it might be pretty nice to be able to watch my youtube videos on my tvs without ads. I basically don't use my TVs because i fucking hate ads lol, a product that solves this problem in a simple, cheap and universal way would be nice. Obviously, I could make this work right now but it seems like a hassle and I'm not aware of a product that takes care of everything for me. What does Plex do for me? Is there like already an app for it on my smart TV? I'm not sure. It seems smart tv manufacturers might discourage services like plex and since they have control over what software is on the device, having some simple hardware that can access my library on PC and stream it to my tv over network -> hdmi might be cool if it's cheap asf.

[@Yolligraphone]

I recently found your channel and have been binge-watching your videos. I really love your presentation style. You regularly make me chuckle with your self deprecating humour. You come across as extremely intelligent, but not at all arrogant. I love how you go on tangents to explain the fine details of things, especially when you run into a problem that needs solving. You're able to take pretty dry and complex subject matter and make it extremely engaging and easy to understand, at least to a nerd like me. I also appreciate how you hypothesize as to why $hardware was assembled the way it was, or why $market was a very strange thing at $time. Your editing is also on point, especially when there's any kind of action, such as inserting a floppy disk, powering on a machine, etc. Sometimes you cut on action, like, three different camera angles, and it does a great job of breaking up the monologue. You clearly put a ton of effort into these videos, and I just wanted to let you know, I'm here for it, and I appreciate it. Keep doing what you're doing, CRD!

[@mmuww]

I echo the same remarks. This was a great watch!

[@metazshanstark91]

Couldn't have said it better myself, also he reminds me of some old school tech show host of some sort, even better than Steve Dotto from the Dotto show, this young man sure as hell does it perfectly, I am now gonna be watching his videos all night LoL.

[@br6768]

Same

[@pap3rw8]

Oh man, the datasheet for the the phone line net chip BCM4210 is a trip. It includes phrases like “The Home Castle with Information Moat” and “Terabit Flux of Digital Information”

[@ailivac]

Does the power supply need to be bypassed with a flux capacitor?

[@TristanSpeno]

just looked and it actually does 😂😂

[@henryokeeffe5835]

that's not a datasheet. That's a sales presentation

[@myne00]

Sounds like a bad translation. Home castle... Casa? Italian? Information moat I'm pretty sure would be firewall - defacto because it runs on frequencies that can't leave the home. Terabit flux is probably a bad translation of carrier wave and misunderstanding of the frequency.

[@juaane]

Oh boy what an opener! In my opinion it was worth it! I really dig the dynamic! It’s both engagingly fresh and reminiscent of old advertising at the same time! I can only imaging how heavy the stereo system was to transport!

[@drfsupercenter]

A few comments after watching this - 1. With regards to Dell and music - specifically MusicMatch Jukebox, which you mentioned. That program was definitely a game-changer for me as a child. We got a Dell Dimension desktop in 2000 which had Windows Me on it (yes, I know), a brand new DVD-ROM drive (but not any DVD playing software*) but it had MMJB preinstalled. I remember being so amazed at the GraceNote connectivity, or whatever thing it used for metadata lookup. I'd put a CD in, it would just pull it up with album art and all the tags already there. For me as a 9-10 year old that was so cool, I put all my CDs in and let it copy them. I started burning mixtapes (well, mix-CDs lol) for friends because it made it SO EASY. My only complaint is that they had an option for "CD quality", which my dad and I used - but it turns out that was just 128kbps mp3. Which is absolutely NOT CD quality and quite crappy. For a tiny mp3 player, sure I get compressing it that tightly (or downloading over dialup which we still had in 2000) but I ended up getting rid of some of my CDs thinking "oh, I have them on the computer, that's good enough" and then once I got better speakers and could hear the difference, was mad at myself for falling for it. But also, you mention mp3 players first coming on the scene in 2001ish. I bought my first PC that was truly *my* PC and not a family shared machine in 2003, when I was 12. Dell was running a promotion where you could get a free accessory to go with your PC - it was either a printer, a mp3 player or something else. We already owned a printer so I figured I'd do the mp3 player. It ended up being a 64MB device with no screen, just took a single AAA battery and had a play/pause, stop, track buttons and volume. They touted being able to hold a full CD's worth of music, but considering this was 64MB before formatting (storage companies hate this one trick!) it was more like 59 usable megabytes, which would barely hold an hour of 128kbps compressed songs. Meh, CDs held more, but it was a cool gadget for a 12-year old and I started using it like a pen drive to put homework assignments on too, since you could just drag and drop files onto it (no screen, remember?). It was even dumber than this device, literally playing the files in alphabetical order, there was no shuffle button. So I had to start naming stuff 1 blahblah.mp3, 2 blahblah.mp3 and so on. 2. Audio Request - there's a name I thought I wouldn't hear again, lol. I worked for a company that did home theater installs and maintenance from 2013-2017. By that point, most of our customers were using Sonos or otherwise just logging into streaming services from their smart devices (consoles, Blu-ray players whatever), but we still had a handful of people with huge music libraries who wanted something else. We sold and service Audio Requests, or ARQ as they were called for short. During the time I worked there, the company folded, stopped selling them and wouldn't support them anymore either due to them being kaput. We had people who had thousands of songs on theirs, so when it stopped working they were devastated and we couldn't even RMA the devices anymore. I opened some up, and they were basically this Dell device but better - literal tiny computers inside a rack-mountable chassis (later ones were smaller, like the size of an Apple TV) Old models had spinning hard drives that connected with SATA, and on them was a Linux partition along with a Linux operating system (big surprise, right?), the music was all just in a folder on that filesystem, I think it was ext3 as ext4 wasn't mainstream yet. The newer ones actually had SSDs, which was pretty cool. Still 2.5" form factor using SATA, but the guts had shrunk down significantly to more of an embedded system like the Dell, Lenovo, HP Thin clients. I think they still ran Linux, but a newer build. I might still have a binary image file of one of the ARQ drives somewhere if you ever want to tinker with it. I wish I had kept some of the broken ones we recycled for people after they didn't want to have us repair them anymore, would have been fun to use it at home. 3. The bit about phone lines - I had never heard of this technology either, but it doesn't surprise me. I looked into MoCA a decade ago, because our house didn't have cat5 cables and Wi-Fi was getting annoying. I also researched if we could use phone lines, because every room had them (as you said) - from what I was told, most telephone wire is "category 3", which can do 10mbps networking, but then you need cat5 to get 100mbps or gigabit. MoCA was okay (we have cable TV so the cable company put jacks in multiple rooms for us, but refused to run ethernet) but had really high lag and ended up causing interference with the TVs, so I opted not to. Powerline was a complete bust too because the electrical wires in our house are jank. I ended up just paying contractors to run cat5E cable (I asked for cat6 but they told me they didn't have it, ugh) I think if you were to use it as 10mbps though, you'd have to disconnect it from the phone lines, and connect it to a router instead, so yeah that's probably not ideal. The system likely faded into obscurity for the same reason MoCA isn't very common - they are all band-aid fixes for the very easily solvable problem of not having better wire in your walls - you can spend hundreds of dollars on fancy equipment to modulate and demodulate signals over old wiring, or you can just run the right type of wire. I don't know how much those PCI cards cost, but they probably weren't cheap at the time. MoCA will run you $150 just for two units (which is the bare minimum for it to do anything) for example. But yeah, this is a neat device - you mentioned it streams the whole OS from your computer due to the tiny flash chip onboard, so you know what we're all going to ask - CAN YOU RUN DOOM ON IT?

[@samgeekman]

The pc desk just unceremoniously knocking into the speakers was worth all the hassle for the opening. Hilarious

[@mitalytalian]

About the "no firmware on flash" part: at work we have a similar setup for an embedded device we make, and it's not really about flash cost, but all-around convenience. Given that this device depends completely from its manager PC, there's no real advantage in having it boot on its own, and network boot instead makes firmware upgrade much easier (install update on PC, reboot the device, bam, you're set), less risky (if you don't have to flash, you don't risk bricking) and ensures that both the manager and the device have the same software version (even in the "warm boot" case, the device can check periodically if the manager version is what it expects and reboot if it isn't).

[@alfredklek]

In 2002 I was in college and was renting a large house with 5 of my freinds. I had had a Compaq Presario running win2k in the living room, hooked up to the LAN so that everyone in the house could access their MP3 collections over the windows network and play them through the stereo. It should be noted that, around my college campus in the early 2000s, students threw out a pretty startling number of computers and peripherals at the end of the school year. Technology was advancing so quickly at that time that I guess a lot of people felt lugging an obsolete computer home wasn't worth it. The Compaq and everything else to make it work was aquired thusly. It was old, ugly, and totally jank but it could run winamp and it had a sound card. It was a fun time to be a nerd with no money and no aversion to dumpster diving.

[@whatr0]

15:40 made me so jealous of the time when you could find literally any retro AV receivers from a local Goodwill instead of them just being scooped up by flippers and the Goodwill online store to be sold for exorbitant prices even on the most budget systems

[@Yixdy]

God, it wasn't even that long ago too. Used to be able to find decent Vintage standing speakers too. Sigh

[@domramsey]

I think it's worth mentioning SlimServer / Logitech Squeezebox which came out at a similar time, went through a few iterations and I believe is still in development by the community. I have a couple of friends that still use their Squeezeboxes every day, and they're great devices.

[@michaelweser2553]

Indeed. I have a whole collection of Squeezboxes and use multiple of them every day. One SB Boom in my bedroom is my alarm clock. A SB Radio in the bathroom. A Transporter for the HiFi-System. Another SB Radio with battery pack in the shop that I carry with me when doing stuff around the house. It's so sad that Logitech dropped that fantastic line of hardware. But it is really awesome that the software is maintained and improved to this day by (ex) employees and other members of the community 👍

[@chrislaplante5040]

As someone who worked IT at the time, rouge DHCP servers in the office were pretty much a weekly event. It happened so much we wrote various automated tools to hunt them down.

[@abbiedoobie]

"In the year of our luigi" this is why I am subbed lol. Jokes aside, you really make some top tier content and I instantly click whenever a new vid comes out. I've really been enjoying Quick Start vids, both the content as well as the format of the vids themselves.

[@TonyFabris]

I'm impressed with the detail and accuracy of this retro review. Nice work. The same team that developed this Rio/Dell Receiver also developed other MP3 devices. Prior to this, they developed the Empeg Car (rebranded the Rio Car) as you mentioned, and the Rio Karma portable player. I'm still using my Empeg Car to this day. Around the same time as this Rio Receiver they also developed the Rio Central. The Rio Central was pretty amazing because it was a networked stereo device much like the Rio/Dell Receiver shown here, but it had a hard disk and a CD slot, and it auto-ripped your CDs to its hard disk (faster than 1x speed), automatically tagged the MP3s, and then it served as the central network device for multiple Rio/Dell Receivers... No PC needed . You could also plug your Rio Karma portable player into it and load your tunes from there... Again, no PC needed. Feel free to contact me if you ever intend to do one of these videos for the Empeg Car - I'm pretty deep into that thing and could answer any questions about it and maybe even give some interesting history on it.

[@gregnikoloff5488]

Hi Tony, I remember you from the empegbbs forums (number6) . I still have my mark 2 empegs. I bought in 2000. Were in constant use til 2019 when I upgraded from an ICE Honda to a Tesla Model3. Now sits in my homemade dock unused. But not unloved. Be seeing you...

[@TonyFabris]

Hi Greg! Stop by the forums and say hi! Some of us are still there, we talk about a lot of things.

[@RogerLipscombe]

The problems with track ordering were marketing-driven. Dell *specifically* asked us to sort Album tracks by title. Citation: I was on the team that wrote the software (and I found a forum post from 2007 that confirms this). It's a server limitation. Other servers don't have this "feature".

[@gammaboost]

I was just waiting through half the video for you to mention custom software and firmware once I made the realisation. It would be fun to see someone make a newer and better piece of software for this thing, although I doubt that would happen anytime soon. Quick note: If you're encoding CBR MP3s with the LAME encoder, I've noticed that using the command flag of "-q 4" (algorithm quality 4) can produce better quality CBR files than the default of 3 or higher. No idea why but I want more people to know this. For some reason it doesn't affect VBR though.

[@Petrolhead99999]

I can see the effort and love you put into this video, and the energy you had presenting it. Very excited to watch even more from you. Much love, CRD

[@arkhani.]

Hi! Thank you for being so damn friendly to queer folk, it makes such a massive difference in this particular niche. I moved to Seattle right around the same time I found your channel in late 2020 I think, and strangely you've become inseparable from the Seattle culture in my mind. Made a huge difference to me. Cheers!

[@1k-RebelProductions]

Nice to hear :)

[@akrosi8650]

Watching this, I had a minor revelation: the one legitimate use for TOSLINK, the optical cable we now associate with SPDIF. Technology Connections did a video largely focused on how _useless_ the TOSLINK optical system is, because digital audio is digital, and thus immune to radio interference picked up by copper cabling unless you have some nightmare of the FCC screeching into the airwaves loud enough to annihilate the datastream. But optical is optical, and you talking about how you might have to run twenty or fifty feet of audio cable across a house if you wanted to connect your PC to your stereo... I had a vision of some turbo-nerd; kind of like the "gadget dad" you described in the DVD camcorder video, the one running off mini-DVD copies of a home video using a camcorder that could record to SD or hard drive. This nerd was an audiophile, and wanted to do exactly what this video is about: use their PC to play ripped CDs. But instead of taking any reasonable approach, they go all-out with optical audio the way God intended. They find some unreasonably long, stupidly expensive and remarkably high quality TOSLINK cable, or maybe even shorter lengths with some sort of powered repeater, and before long there are dozens of feet of lossless digital audio cabled through their walls, connecting their PC to an obscenely expensive audio receiver imported from Japan. I have no idea if such a thing ever happened-it might be anachronistic, but I think there were almost certainly A/V receivers with SPDIF by the late 90's, and I see no reason you wouldn't have been able to get an add-in card if not a motherboard with it by that time-but *I want to believe* . I hope that someone, somewhere, finally managed to put digital audio over optical to good use in the late 90's to let their obsessions and interests run rampant.

[@pap3rw8]

I thought the intention of optical audio cable was to avoid introducing ground loops (buzzing sound), not anything to do with avoiding interference in the digital domain.

[@Aquatarkus96]

@@pap3rw8 Yes! That's one reason to use toslink, and why I like it. Also, perhaps running lots of lower quality coax digital lines near to regular analog lines might introduce some noise to the analog cables?

[@kathrynradonich3982]

I did similar around 2005. Ran a fairly long toslink to my stereo receiver in the other room so I could play my music over it. Didn't have a wireless keyboard or remote to control WMP though so would just have playlists setup to continuous play or just get up and change songs lol

[@MalignInfluenceofReevesGabrels]

I still use optical today. It's widespread and easier to connect than coaxial, and the cable is easier to route. It's none of the things you say.

[@No-mq5lw]

Now there's turbo nerds trying to shove everything down glass fiber optic

[@JaredJanhsen]

Techmoan has covered a couple modern Network Audio Players on his channel. I think he's done a Sony and a Denon. This rebadged Rio is definitely a neat retro device to cover. One thing I noticed when you booted it without the Ethernet cable, it uses Zeroconf on the HPNA adapter. Definitely makes it easier for this device to establish connectivity. I imagine someone making use of HPNA might have just this device and the host PC and no other HPNA devices. Makes setup an easier proposition for someone not super network savvy.

[@larbob]

TFTP + NFS has been the standard for diskless booting for quite a while - for example, Sun-3 machines do it that way. The kernel is loaded through TFTP, then the kernel handles mounting the actual root filesystem through NFS.

[@joeflosion]

New old memory unlocked. Back in 2003 my dad had me help him snake cat5 though the walls from the basement to my room and my brothers room, for internet of course, but mainly so we could play Diablo 2 together on the LAN party. Thank you! Great vid btw

[@pokepress]

Technically, the best MP3 quality you could transmit over a 56k connection would likely be a 32 or 24 kbps/22khz/mono stream, which would sound somewhere between AM and FM in terms of fidelity. Good enough for spoken word and passable for music. On a related note, I’d love to see a video about pre-MP3 audio compression, as well as some of the odd MP3 variants like MP3Pro.

[@pleasedontwatchthese9593]

What I am taking about is only partly related to what you where asking, but I wanted to add onto it. I think the compression tech (Discrete cosine transform) started in the 70s academically and spawned a lot of the compressions we have today. Its kinda interesting.

[@pokepress]

@@pleasedontwatchthese9593 I did learn a bit about DCT in college. I was also interested in standards like IMA, MACE, μ-law, etc.

[@iscaela]

I love the design of this thing's software. The attention to detail in the DHCP implementation and NFS for the boot process is a choice that suggests the engineers were Unix nerds. The simple HTTP interface for browsing music makes writing a new, improved server with proper track listings for it likely trivial.

[@mazda9624]

It's still mind blowing to me just how revolutionary the original iPod truly was as far as modernizing the way we listen to digital music on the go. This device is the closest I've seen to the iPod UI-wise from the same era, but man I can and do still use my original iPod (purchased back in November 2001!) to this day and it has nearly every feature I expect from modern platforms such as Spotify *except* for the ability to add songs to a queue.

[@philzeo]

I was thinking of a million ways to use this thing because it's so freaking cool. Then I remembered that audio interfaces exist and, well, I can literally make audio servers and connect a USB audio interface to it, and stream audio to it from anywhere, including Spotify streams, youtube music, and my locally stored ssd full of thousands of albums ripped from cds I've collected my whole life. Very cool setup, but for less work it's totally redundant already. Thanks for the breakdown though. That's absolutely fascinating that there was so much love put into this thing, even if just for a short while.

[@ihardon22]

HPNA is awesome, used to use it back in the day. If you ever do a video on that, it'd be cool (I think Linksys made bridges between it and ethernet?) On the gigabit switch point - I'm surprised to see a switch that can't negotiate down to 10baseT (looking at the front panel). You can still see the odd modern device that uses it, such as the Linksys/Cisco VoIP adapters, and I've got some modern HP thing with PoE that works fine with such devices.

[@drfsupercenter]

HPNA reminds me of an older version of MoCA. I tried that out circa 2015 and it was...interesting. Basically a higher speed version of HPNA, using coaxial cables instead of telephone wire. But ultimately it wasn't worth the hassle, and I returned the equipment and paid a contractor to run ethernet cables. There's also powerline ethernet too which absolutely did not work for me (I had 80% signal loss in the same room, no signal at all in a room next to it). Ultimately they seemed like band-aid fixes to let people use existing wiring to do networking. Sure, it's neat and if you can get the equipment for cheap it's fun tinkering with, but it's not much of a permanent solution for people who actually need LAN connectivity.

[@gregorykhvatsky7668]

@@drfsupercenter Some shitty CFL bulbs and other devices would destroy powerline quality, as would power filters. In one of the houses I stayed in, we had like a closet, and it would jam the powerline connections the moment you turned on the lights.

[@97whitesi]

@@drfsupercenter as long as the coax is decent/recent and you use the correct crimp connectors, splitters, and reflectors, I got 2.5gbps out of MoCA easily, even coexisting happily with a gigabit cable internet connection. Powerline has always been marginal though; same circuit two rooms apart and my "gigabit" powerline adapters would pull maybe 80mbps. Worked about well enough to get a detached garage to ~5-6 mbps, enough to stream music and download service manuals but not much else

[@drfsupercenter]

@@97whitesi My cable company probably just used cheap/crappy cables.

[@RabbitEarsCh]

Mint Jams!!!! That is the perfect choice to stream to your Hi-Fi. Nothing like the hurricane of drums that is Akira Jimbo to really put your speakers through their paces. You look so much happier and the pacing on editing is so snappy now. I'm so glad you get this opportunity.

I kind of want one now just for the sake of hacking it. :) The ENC28J60 10BASE-T modules you can find for cheap probably would make a great gateway to WiFi combined with an ESP32 or Raspberry Pico W (heck they could even serve a firmware for the device to boot from). As usual, you had a very long intro until you reach to the interesting part, but I don't mind at all. You reveal the information with the right pace to stay interesting throughout :)

[@Damaniel3]

9:40 Excellent album. I just built my own Raspberry Pi based network music streamer a couple weeks ago, and Mint Jams was the first thing I played on it.

[@xmlthegreat]

What did you use? I have a Pi sitting around and I want some use out of it.

[@Damaniel3]

@@xmlthegreat I used a spare RPi 3B+ I had laying around, bought a HiFiBerry DAC, a DSI compatible screen (pretty much a knockoff of the official RPi display), and designed/3D printed a custom enclosure for it - it's running Volumio OS. Ignoring the cost of the filament and the Pi, I spent about $120 in total, and I already had powered speakers so I didn't need to provide an amp. It's not true audiophile grade like the commercial devices out there, but it was also 1/10th the price.

[@joshuahillerup4290]

This UX fits a lot with what hardware shops were doing in general in 2001, there was this distain for actually trying to make software for their hardware at all good, and was often made by the new guy or interns or whatnot

[@BrightPage174]

Despite the sorting issues, this little thing is really neat. It looks so delightfully early 2000s dell too I love it

[@Kumimono]

In an alternate universe, this did well, and we now use single cable Powerline networking for all our audio needs. 😮 I was wondering about, did anyone not make alternative UI software or server for this. Answered thoroughly. 👍🏻

[@BuckChoklitt]

This video jogged my memory back to 2006. My sister-in-law had a Yamaha MusicCast MCX-2000, which was kind of similar to this. Except instead of having to have a home network, it was an all-in-one solution. There was the music server, which would rip your CD's, and then there were clients you could buy and place in whatever room you wanted them in. The server and clients had their own networking built in, so there was no messing with LAN or WiFi.

[@jameslocke1416]

Geez, I remember when the MP3 format was in its infancy and my friend Gary gave me a floppy with some German software he hadn’t quite figured out yet. It became a race for us to make an MP3 from scratch, and I that night emailed him a clip I sampled with my voice over the top, something like, “Hey Gary! I think I figured it out! Call me if this plays on your end.” Fun memories!!

[@DeputatKaktus]

Yeah…having a rogue DHCP server on your network is no fun. I may or may not have let one loose myself by accident on the company network, many moons ago. It was my test bed which I had set up for some Microsoft AD cert. And idiot me, instead of using my Hyper-V VMs, for some reason I cannot fathom, set up DHCP on the host system one evening and went home. When one of my coworkers called me at shortly past 7 am in the morning and told me „Well yeah, I think we have a problem…it seems my machine just pulled an IP from your test server“, I probably went white as a sheet and told him „Yank the power. I don’t care if anything breaks, just yank it“. Good thing my coworker was always one of the first people in the office in the morning. Dodged a huge bullet there. This was on a network with well north of 1500 machines. Thanks, Gordon!

[@mywave82]

Zimage is the kernel executable, that is compressed with gzip. The gzip compressed file is not the entire ZImage file, but rather a small code snippet that decompresses the payload + the payload behind it.

[@michaireneuszjakubowski5289]

Hey Gravis, thanks for releasing another banger of a video! Also, nice shirt! Also, on the topic of Discman - dunno if this is 2nd world specific or whatever, but everyone I knew at the time treated the Discman basically like a very small, "sort of" portable music player - but one that was used when stationary. When laying on the beach with the headphones on or with a portable speaker, around a campfire, that sort of thing. Didn't help that anti-skip tech didn't seem penetrate the (non-existent by then) Iron Curtain until just before the IPod revolution. For "on the go" kind of portable, tapes were used, just as Gravis said. Tapes were HUGE for a long time in the former combloc; bazaars were filled to the brim with pirated or bootleg recordings of basically everything under the sun. Those stalls selling tapes only disappeared from my city's bazaar in the early 2010s, which i think is wild. Like, I knew who this was for (the seniors mostly, who had lots of tapes already, not much money, and definitely not much inclintion to learn a new suite of user skills to use CD players), but entering a stall dedicated to selling bootleg disco polo and nothing else in 2009 was an otherworldly experience (btw, google disco polo on your own accord, don't say I didn't warn you :) ). By the way, on the topic of portable speakers - these were expensive and rare here at the time. But let's face it, they have no business being expensive or rare given how simple they are. One of my neighbours decided he wanted one, but didn't want to spring the cash, so he bought a small wooden box, a speaker, a small amp, and power sources with control. Yes, plural, as it had the ability to switch between AAAs or wall power through a DC power brick of some sort. This is actually what inspired me to start tinkering with electronics, and my first project was a 5.1 system based on a Blaupunkt car audio, but in a house. Since readily available, complete 12 volt transformers at the time could put out an amp or two (they all seem to have been intended to power light fixtures etc.), I had to build an actual rectifier (and, with the amp drawing 12 freaking amps of current through it, a heatsink with a small fan), bury the toroidal transformer in resin (managed to screw it up, dig it out, and bury it successfully this time). Best part is, it actually worked, and for many years as well, and the part that gave up the ghost was the amp, not the power source! The soldering is horrid though, it's really hard to be proud of what I've made, now that I look at it knowing what a proper solder should look like...

[@breadworkshop]

Awesome video. I kind of do want one of these! I've considered DIYing it but a recycled retro solution would be even cooler. The network throughput limit is definitely a bummer though

[@coyote_den]

I still have two Roku Soundbridges. Came out in 2003, and integrate seamlessly with iTunes. Had one on the home theater and one on bedroom speakers via one of those little super T-amps. Has that same Tripath chip and it does sound incredibly good (for modest power levels, anyway.) They worked perfectly and still do for streaming from a PC or Mac. I only stopped using them because I got a Denon Receiver with AirPlay, so I got an AirPort Express for the bedroom and started using my phone as the source.

[@AlexTechVideo]

You are quickly becoming one of my favorite channels. 🙂

[@volvo09]

He does a great job with telling the story of the era, and the hardware.

[@musicminute2306]

Fun video! Also, the wave of nostalgia that hit me hearing Brad Sucks was unexpected but appreciated! Thanks for the memories haha

[@felixlohrer9600]

SliMP3 Player from 2001 (later acquired by Logitech) fits as well into that category. I usend mine until 2 years agon when my last one broke down. The server-component even was available for modern NAT-Devices. And I still prefer the (simple) UI over many of user interfaces modern UPnP / DLNA-Player provide... As I organized my music in a hierarchic folder system, I was fine with the way the SliMP3 server offered it to me.

[@Linuxpunk81]

Great video. Really brought back memories of messing with mp3s in the late 90s on my home pc to the early 2000s when I got my first ipod. The ipod was a lifesaver for me, I was in the navy (submarine sonar tech) and space was at a premium, especially when I was a junior sailor and had to hot rack. Not having to bring a giant cd case underway and having all my music on me was amazing, especially in the chow line when you'd realized that this isn't the cd you wanted to listen to 😂

[@lordr1800]

i watched your video about making this a full time job, and hearing your 'please help' at the end just helps me see how hard a decision it was for you. Regardless, I appreciate your content and while I've only been watching a few months (likely because of 8 but guy) I do look forward to your videos. Thank you for your efforts to demystify this tech for us. BTW, i had DSL in the 90s and wanted to cat 5 the house I was remodeling (living in)then, but dealing with lath and perforated sheetrock (the 'modern' approach) was not fun. Not at all. Don't do it. Don't. Thank you.

[@fsendventd]

I love the Hi-Fi Rush style "now playing' when demonstrating the bitrates, that sort of thing is something I live for

[@manuellujan666]

I still buy CDs

[@patmx5]

Me too! I want hard copies of my media, and don’t want to bother with streaming. Rip them to lossless FLAC.

[@PhaQ2]

I'm reminded of being a teen in the 80's. When I had to carry around a giant 5 speaker boombox that took 8 D cell batteries. My pockets filled with choice cassettes for the ride to/on the boardwalk and home. I still have those cassettes and the boombox. It's an Hitachi TRK-7620H

[@opalpersonal]

...this feels the same as creating a tiny nuclear reactor to run your air conditioning. i love it.

[@ThymeCypher]

Counterpoint: The playlist requirement forces you to have more space; if you ripped mixed collections or had multiple versions of the same album with a few different tracks, you could store one copy of the songs and have a playlist for each album. I learned that Zune’s servers were built this way, as I knew about tracks that had slight differences between releases but it would always play the latest version regardless. Additionally, Google Play Music also annoyingly did this as I had a lot of songs in German but it would play the English versions from their servers instead for tracks with English names.

[@jeanhaley3051]

Impressive big stupid stereo

[@emmaseckso1870]

For the few years it was relevant, the AirPort Express was one of my absolute favorite gadgets. Most hotels offered free Ethernet, but charged for WiFi. One plug and bam free WiFi. Amazing.

[@Xeshiraz]

I just watched a few of your videos and I'm an instant fan! Easily digestible and very well put together. Love it!

[@iamveryconfusedabout]

oh my god the energy of the editing in the beginning , it's incredible

[@hosam7609]

I rarely watch such lengthy videos but this one was interesting from beginning to end, great work thanks👍

[@CARLiCON]

around 2000, a guy at work had an Archos Jukebox that was basically a USB HD, he shared this HD on our network & anyone connected (LAN at the time) could play his 1000 +MP3s on their PC-this was amazing back in the day

[@jca111]

I had a very similar device in the early 2000s, the Netgear MP101. I loved it, people thought it was magical when they came around my house. It lasted until I ditched the whole stereo for just a dock, and then Bluetooth speakers, now smart speakers. It even had a few years in the kitchen as an internet radio source. If I remember the supplied server software sucked, but as it stuck to standards (DNLA & UPnP), I found a suitable alternative, Twonky, which served me until I got a NAS with those standards built in. Then off to the charity shop it went.

[@ackart]

Some more modern construction (I've encountered it in an apartment built in 1997) uses Cat-5 for phone line runs just using a single pair. Usually, the routing box is inside the home, generally the master bedroom closet. With a cheap patch panel, some new keystone jack & covers and one closet switch you can shade tree yourself into some in-home ethernet without having to run any new cable. It's easy to check for too - just pull a phone jack off the wall and see what they're running with. *please be careful with the phone line coming in, it can have wake-you-up voltage.

[@orangejjay]

Pretty sure the intro on this was the best you've ever done ... and whoever is doing your hair and makeup is doing great too. Really looks like getting out of that MSP/IT job is doing you good. Happy for you. Truly.

[@Rickmakes]

The tripath was used in the infamous G4 Cube sound system. I also had a Sony home theater in a box that used it. It was very slim.

[@MrMarlowe3488]

lot of your videos and a lot of videos like this remind me of my dad back in late 90s early 00s, programmer works for the fda so tech savvy enough and access to fairly good computers and internet access at work, but also just a lifelong deadhead who came up in the culture of tape trading and whatnot so when napster came out he just went whole hog, it was like this dream come true for him that he didn't even imagine would be a thing he wanted, i was little then but just remember all of the blank cd platters, basically a whole room to our house was cds and the computer, which he immediately wired into the house's sound system, he probably could have used this, but also he always had his own ideas going

[@MrMarlowe3488]

basically he went with the "just run 25-50' of cable from the pc" option, now days me and my sister dusted off his old turn table and bought him some vinyl for christmas and it's kind of come full circle

[@curious1706]

the morbin edit in the intro was way too funny, nice touch.

[@en0n126]

Man. I can confirm. I was an Archos nerd, and I knew how to make playlists. My first was a GMini 400 player though, and I don't remember having to make them for that one, so perhaps they learned from Apple by that point. That said, my GMini player had a color screen, and could play back "legally acquired" AVI or MP4 video files, including over a bundled Headphone-to-RCA cable to a television. It was great. At this same time, iPods wouldn't have color screens for over a year, with the iPod Photo, and those wouldn't play video (until the next gen), much less play onto a TV. Archos made really special devices for their time. I got the Archos 404 later and it was fantastic.

[@absalomdraconis]

I've read about HPNA, and I read about it back then too, but I didn't realize that it was HPNA: I had assumed HPNA was newer than that. As for why I didn't realize they were the same thing, I suspect that it's also part of why HPNA didn't succeed (the other part being that it conflicted with things like DSL unless you took the abnormal step of adding a low-pass filter into your in-wall phone lines): the type of people that were likely to need networking, were also the type of people to be up for using ordinary ethernet... so they did exactly that. There are network adapters even today to run over cable TV wiring, and they have exactly the same problems, and the same market failure.

[@CuriouserArchive]

I have one of those early Archos Jukeboxes. It actually has no support for ID3 tags at all as far as I can tell. Instead, you get a file browser, completely using file names, and it supports a hierarchy. This means you can pick Artist -> Album -> Song if you arrange your music collection that way on disk and have the track numbers in the file names.

[@m7e4d]

I'm loving the content. Kinda funny that the application runs a DHCP server and an HTTP server on your PC. On another note, if you ever plan to do an episode on failed tablets of the late 00's 2010s. I would love to hear your review of the "Notion Ink Adam" (it has a niche suprise I won't spoil). I never did get my hands on one though.

[@tlhIngan]

I think you really ought to look into the AudioTron - that thing was cool and on a vacation into the US, I found it at Fry's Electronics which was an instant buy. Running Windows CE, it meant it could do Windows Networking and browse your network for MP3s and I think it did WAV as well (FLAC hadn't been invented yet). The UI was exclusively on the device - the server software was Windows Networking or CIFS (in other words, ancient horribly insecure Windows Networking by now) but you could hit its internal web server for management as well. Plus, it did do internet radio. Not needing anything on your PC was the huge selling point for me at the time

[@codycarreras4825]

Man, Rio really knew what they were doing back then as far as hardware. A shame they didn’t take off more. But I guess its not the Diamond Rio I’m collecting and refurbing as old MP3 players. Even now the iPod is well supported. This is the kinda shit I love about this channel, I love the deep dives like this. I always am intrigued when your videos pop up, and it’s an hour plus….”Oh it’s gonna be real juicyyy, let’s go!”

[@wildweasel486]

Haven't even watched the whole video yet but needed to express how amazing your introduction is. Tech videos don't have enough slapstick in them. 🤣

[@spoonified52]

Back in 2002 I remember buying a new stereo for my car that played MP3s and other formats, what was unique on it is that it had a external hard drive carrier similar to the old external 6 disk cd changers I kept in my trunk. The HD was also in a carrier that allowed me to swap it out and even keep a few HDs with me in the car. I haven't really seen anything like that since.

[@FuzzyScaredyCat]

I still have 3 of these. They're not in use but I remember using them and the custom firmware for them.

[@wutzerface77]

Your videos are always great, but i REALLY liked this new style intro part you tried out

[@erikiksso0]

A new video! My day is made :) I usually never get super excited by new releases but ur channel is the exception

[@AnonymousFreakYT]

49:30 - I have an oddball switch. It's a semi-recent but not brand new Netgear "small office" switch. It has one SFP 10Gb port, plus a bunch of RJ-25: one 10Gb port, two 5Gb, two 2.5Gb, and four 1Gb. The four 1Gb ports allow 10Mbit negotiation, the four 2.5/5Gb ports don't allow 10Mbit, but do allow 100Mbit, the two 10Gb only allow 1Gb or higher.

[@openevents]

The Slimdevices/Logitech Squeezebox line of devices are also very nice music-players from around this time, that are still very usable.

[@shanesrandoms]

I've still got my one floating around somewhere. Purchased at a 2nd hand store years ago, never really used it. just was a cool gadget to buy. Always enjoy your videos :) even more when the screwdriver comes out... fun times :D

[@mre16]

I loved the physical gags of the intro. It gave me a good chortle

[@TrinomCZ]

Those STK ICs were used not only in lower end amplifiers, but even in brand name HiFi equipment back in the 80's. I personally have Luxman amp with one of those ICs inside (and I had to replace one already to make it work).

[@kriskehrer6410]

I just want you to know that my immediate and wholly viseral reaction to seeing a new CRD video drop on my feed was "YEEEEES!"

[@kirill42069]

This is why I always created playlist and never relied on track titles

[@kd8bxp]

I had one of these back in the day, I agree with the UI comments. I wouldn't want to own one today, too much work to do something simple that our phones can do easy. But back in the day, it made listening to music so much more covenant at home. It was ahead of it's time, and well made. Being ahead of it's time probably is why it failed, not the bad UI. I knew a couple of other people who own one, and we as a group loved them, no one I knew complained about the UI. Thou I suspect we all wished there was an easier way to find a song we wanted then to making custom play lists.

[@3lH4ck3rC0mf0r7]

Bro, this thing with a custom firmware would absolutely ROCK. Shame there probably isn't anybody willing to put in the work to reverse-engineer it. Edit: Wow. An open source firmware. That's actually really cool! Probably not great for users that the forks don't have any binaries available for download, but man, if I happened to own one of these things I could really make it sing. It's probably not all that difficult to hardmod this thing and swap out the ethernet for a better one that supports modern networks, or even add in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth support. I mean, it's got a Linux kernel, you could probably get it to actually drive any new hardware components with relative ease. Even replacing the tiny flash with a decent one may not be out of the question, and you'd have a pretty killer portable wireless amp on your hands that you could completely drive from your phone or PC. There is a lot of potential here.

[@Martipar]

I used to use my PC as my primary audio player at home for a disturbingly long time, in about 2021 I built a Hi-Fi and I have a laptop plugged into it with my entire music collection ripped to FLAC on it. So yeah, some of us have plugged our PC, albeit far from my main one, into a Hi-Fi. It's a 2006 HP Probook running XP and Winamp (and basically nothing else)

[@tonybossaller4074]

I’m going to guess that you haven’t experienced the Riot Riot which was the portable HD competitor to the iPod which used a 3.5” drive but basically was the exact same interface with a scroll wheel. It did have the ability to interpret track order though. It too had fun visualizations and sadly was only USB 1.1. I still have mine. Love it. After that Rio had the Karma which included a network dock, which basically gave you a dock for your MP3 player that duplicated the functionality of this device entirely. Yes and MP3 player that went into your pocket that could be synced over 10-BaseT. ;). And the Karma dock had a blue backlight that would pulse to the beat! If you get a chance, check those two players out. There are some fascinating stories online about the Rio engineers and some bonkers stuff they did. For example, they patented a method to remove dead air for gapless playback of MP3’s and why the iPhone *just* got that feature decades later. ;)

[@alessandroceloria]

The fact that the software to this thing is available and the firmware gets loaded from the PC means that potentially a (group of) very dedicated individuals could modify the firmware or create an alternative version of it (and heck, the PC software too why not) with a much better UI up to modern standard. And heck, if space is not a constraint (if it uses NFS it shouldn't) even integrate modern services like Spotify with it. I would do it if it wasn't for the fact I have better way to spend my evenings but the sheer fact it's doable is quite impressive!

[@alessandroceloria]

Well as it turns out I should probably watch until the end before commenting, damn impulsiveness 🙂

[@smwsmwsmw]

Given a half-decent-quality cable (say, an RCA interconnect made of RG-59 cable), you can run 50 feet with no audible loss in signal quality. In large concert venues, they regularly run hundreds of feet of analog line-level cabling without issue. Yes, they use balanced differential signaling vs the unbalanced signal we use in consumer equipment, but that's to combat potential noise, not to maintain sound quality.

[@clairekholin6935]

I just realized that the only standalone speakers in my entire house, other than a few portable Bluetooth ones are connected to a desktop. . . The only way anyone listens to anything is with headphones or the built in speakers on laptops and smartphones. I is so wierd to think that I never questioned the fact that the only way to play a CD was with a computer, or at least that was how I saw them at the time.

[@harisalic2568]

This just feels like the great grandpa of some modern media servers. It's like jellyfin for mp3s + dedicated Hardware player

[@charliegoyette]

I still have one of these and the remote. Used it for a good decade. Was awesome!

[@richclips]

In 1997 I built a Linux computer, running XMMS, 2x 9GB SCSI drives, a creative audio card with SP/DIF, browser extension, as an MP3 server. digital audiio fed my hifi, and I used an HP omnibook 800 as the user interface. It worked beautifully, friends thought I was mad :)

[@wintermute740]

I'd absolutely love one of those. I'd probably use a Pi to bridge it to my WiFi network, and then work on some of the ancient software upgrades to resolve the UI shortcomings. Hell, I probably have an ancient version of Linux on a machine somewhere in my collection which would handle it out of the box ;)

[@DaddyCoolNO]

I miss the struggle to get what no one had. I had to solder a cable with a 3.5mm headphone jack to the read head of my tape deck to get proper audio from my diskman and 486 pc. Remember having a casette without tape i had to insert, and i had to press play for the audio to be amplified through my gettoblaster. Pre appletv/chromecast/smart tv was also an amazing time. The struggle to make the home made htpc running freevo, then kodi, then osmc on raspberry pi. The lack of good products made it an interesting era 😊

[@outrageous-alex]

Sansa e260 used to be my go to when it came out, like 2007? I had a CD player till then with like 60 songs as mp3's. Being a teen/adult through this time, and when I was this age, and today....I don't/have never sorted my music by album or artist...ever. I sort by song name, alphabetically and hit random to play them most of the time. I don't see the problem.

[@dtgoodwin]

I bought a Rio Receiver right after they came out. Don't remember exactly when, but mine came as a bundle with the HPNA card included. Made a great kitchen audio system with a couple unpowered speakers.