Investing in your audio system? (Part 1)

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Music is almost essential in our daily necessities; some might have decided to spend thousands of dollars to optimise their listening experience while others are satisfied with their included earphones. Having said that, investing in equipments such as speakers, cables and even acoustic treatments is just part of the equation. The truth is people often overlook the importance of having good quality audio files to listen to.

Regardless of your speaker's fidelity, if the file format is of low quality, it is often a lousy representation of the song/mix you are listening to. Sadly speaking, all the money you have invested will be bottlenecked by the quality of your playback audio. Commonly speaking, there are 3 major audio file format categories we can look at (not inclusive of audiophile grade format), namely lossless uncompressed, lossless compressed and lossy compressed.

Lossless uncompressed would be the highest quality of the three, commonly know as "CD quality" files. Examples of lossless uncompressed formats are .wav and .aiff. Such formats are very common and are supported widely by media players such as VLC and iTunes. Lossless uncompressed files retain the highest quality in terms of audio representation (due to higher sampling frequency and bit rate). Hence, it will require more storage space as compared to its other counterparts (average 50MB for a song, 3 – 4 mins).

Lossy compressed files have the lowest fidelity in terms of audio compression and they are commonly referred to as .mp3 and .aac. As compared to lossless uncompressed, lossy compressed files use psychoacoustics algorithms to take away sounds that will least affect the overall representation of the track, thus, reducing the overall space needed to store the files. 

In many cases, lossless compressed files are ranked in-between the two examples mentioned above as it does not lose any data in terms of spectrum representation but the overall size of the file is compressed. That being said, a good encoder / decoder will have the competence of recreating its uncompressed version. Typically, lossless compressed files are .flac or apple lossless format (ALAC).

Understanding the differences between these formats are important as you are going to be playing back these files through your beloved sound system.  In spite of having a high calibre audio system, if the audio files are of low quality, your speaker will never sound good. To make things worse, your speakers will emphasise the flaws of the audio track.  To hear the audible differences between the files formats, analyse and get used to, take practice. Generally speaking, it is much easier to hear the differences between a .wav and .mp3 on a high fidelity system. 

Personally, I have chosen to adopt apple lossless format as they are widely available for me to use and widely supported in my playback devices. It also does not take up too much space as compared to .wav files. Storage space is limited for me so I have to control the amount of songs I have on my devices (except on my iPod Classic).

To put it simply, if you are going to invest, or have already invested in an audio system such as monitor speakers or personal earphones, you might want to set aside a budget to purchase high quality tracks for your listening pleasure before splurging on other hardware.

YWFU

 

Improving Your WiFi?

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I was scrolling through Facebook the other day and realised that there was a trend in WiFi improvement-related articles on my timeline. Instantly, I was interested in what my friends are sharing and what suggestions the articles have to counter the problems of bad WiFi reception. To be honest, I was rather disappointed as the recommended solutions were either "old and reused ideas" or just took too much effort.

Before continuing, if you are hoping that I might have some tricks that will improve your WiFi reception significantly for free, I will probably disappoint you in this particular post. Common tech tips such as using a soda can to extend the range of the router or find the most suitable place for your router to transmit its radio waves are undoubtedly correct. These methods will boost the coverage of the router. However, in my own experience, such approach does not provide a significant improvement in wireless performance. Therefore, are the efforts that you have invested in improving WiFi coverage worth it for a small performance boost?

Picture Credits: Soda Can Solution (1), Router Positioning and Soda Can Solution (2) 

In Singapore, radio bandwidths are congested and densely populated homes are known characteristics to deter good WiFi performance. Improving WiFi performance will then require much more drastic solutions to counter such problems. One of the most efficient methods in terms of cost and application will be powerline adapter. These devices usually come in pairs and will require your household power wall plugs (for each adapter) in order for the system to work. Powerline adapters use existing electrical lines in your home to transmit / receive data. Hence, there is no need for additional long Ethernet cables to be laid from your router to the destination. Essentially, a powerline network is a wired network and such networks are definitely more reliable and consistent in its throughput speed as compared to its wireless counterpart.

Personally, I used powerline network to solve the unreliable WiFi issues in my home as the WiFi signal is not strong enough to provide any efficient data speed for my Internet consumption. In my bedroom, I have attached a powerline adapter with access point features so that my usage of the Internet can be wireless. With an investment of roughly $50 SGD (3 years ago), I am still enjoying a consistent and reliable WiFi performance (about 40 Mbps, on 2.4GHz) in my bedroom 24/7.

There are certainly some drawbacks of such a system--one being the efficiency of data transmission. As you can see from the paragraph above, 40Mbps is around 20% of my overall throughput speed, meaning 80% of efficiency loss. Though there is a loss in performance, 40Mbps is still realistically adequate for most applications and I will pick reliability over inconsistent services anytime. Additionally, modern powerline adapters have power pass-through features, thus retaining the functionality of your house plug. 

Maybe, after all, I do have a free suggestion that will improve your WiFi experience significantly, and that is to schedule your router IP leased time. Your router will automatically manage the IP addresses of the devices connected to its network when the leased time is up. This process of reorganising the IP addresses will take some time to complete. To avoid downtime in your internet usage, schedule your router to only renew the leases at a set time where you're most probably sleeping or not using the internet.

In my case, I have set my leased time to be 24 hours, which is more than enough time to access the web.

In my case, I have set my leased time to be 24 hours, which is more than enough time to access the web.

YWFU

Managing Your Storage Data

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It's been two plus years since I have migrated all my crucial data into a personal Network Attached Storage (NAS). For those who want a short and sweet answer, get it, and for those who can afford, get one with a redundancy feature, as that would be even better. 

I used to dump my data into multiple portable hard drives and retire them into my cupboard, genuinely hoping that I will never use them. I was naive enough to think that this will work in any case of a hard drive failure. Much to my dismay, I was really unlucky that one of my backup hard drives failed when I needed to retrieve some data. Worse still, the hard drive was only used once during the archiving process and yes, I did check all my files before I kept the hard drive. 

After much research, I realised my mistake in assuming that the service life of a hard drive will remain full when not in use. I mean, logically speaking, if an item is only used once, it should not even spoil when it is not being used right? Reality check: real world items do not work that way. 

The physical design of a hard disk drive (HDD) has its limitations since the whole enclosure functions from a spinning platter (the part that stores your data) and a reader to read and write from it. This mechanical design is much more fragile as compared to a solid state drive (SSD) as there are moving parts that are more sensitive to displacement either caused by accidents or general wear and tear. Normally, it is advisable to replace your HDD after 4-5 years of usage as a preventive measure for a hard disk failure. 

Thus, one might conclude that ensuring the backup drives are well within the recommended time frame of serviceability will do the trick. However, that is only part of the equation because it does not provide any redundancy feature. NAS systems provide a solution that distinctively answers the problem mentioned above. Not only will that provide adequate storage space for your archived files (depending on the system configuration) most of the time, but also most NAS will bundle redundancy features together with the system, such as redundant array of independent disks (RAID) or physical USB backup. 

The purpose of this post is to share my experiences in applying and integrating a NAS into my digital life. When I first started out looking for a better solution, I was not ready to invest a good sum of money into NAS. Thus, I chose the WD My Cloud NAS as my backup solution as I can afford it comfortably, and the price per GB (about 0.08 cents) was rather close to a standard HDD ratio.  Setting up the device was rather straightforward if you have some background in computer networking. 

Organising the backed up files was easy as you skipped through all the agonising moments of labelling your hard disk physically and neatly (a little OCD problem of mine). The only essential steps were to store the relevant files to the relevant folders where you can comprehend it easily. Since this is Network Attached Storage, accessibility of files on multiple platforms (Cloud Computing) through The Internet is also possible. This factor has greatly cultivated my habit of using portable devices of average storage size, for example, my 16GB Nexus 5. I would usually store all my critical data on my phone and still retain accessibility to my other files in NAS when needed (e.g. photos, documents). Although one might have to be a little disciplined to manage the consumption of your offline storage space, it does not bother me anymore as of late since I do not have to worry about running out of inbuilt storage space. 

How I label my disk drives

With the added attributes of NAS system, the initial cost of a simple NAS system will always be higher than a generic HDD solution. However, the increment in price will be justified in the long run as replacement of a failed hard drive is much easier and reindexing a new drive will also shorten system downtime. Although my WD My Cloud does not allow drives to be hot swappable, I used a physical hard disk of larger storage capacity (not necessary) to backup the My Cloud unit in case it fails. 

Another factor that might bottleneck the performance of your NAS will be the data throughput of your network. The download / upload speed of your network will usually determine how fast your NAS performs, henceforth, additional thoughts in planning your networking system are also crucial in optimising your NAS performance. 

Throughout this whole experience, I am really glad to have taken on the NAS solution and make my data more centralised to access. There are also many other solutions such as Google Drive, which provides 15GB of free storage space for your cloud computing needs, and Rack Space, which provides different packing tiers for those who wish to have a private cloud without the hassle of managing the hardware. 

Cloud computing has definitely gained more traction than what I have observed since I started exploring NAS. Advantages of cloud computing are definitely attracting more people into the scene. Nonetheless, such systems should be managed properly to prevent compromise in data integrity. 

YWFU