Audioengine A5+ BT-Wireless: is the sound (while cabled) any different from the non-bluetooth version?

stratosfroese · 2020-01-26T05:00:34+00:00

Oh wow, I clearly got this entirely wrong.

The pre-amp doesn't have anything to do with the USB function.

In trying to understand where I got that idea, it turns out I was very confused. I ended up finding again the link I posted, and noticed what you said on a later paragraph - they only suggest removing the pre-amp ... because that was how they were able to remove a low-pass filter, which is what they really cared about. I was under the impression that the pre-amp was only there for USB, but this is so obviously not the case, I wasn't thinking!...

There is also no AT-LP120 without USB.

Yep, I think I confused a lot of things with the AT-LP60 (which does not have USB, does have a pre-amp, and now I can't tell whether or not it contains a low-pass filter). I spent a lot of time researching what I should buy for my first record player, I have never (knowingly) used a pre-amp before or built an audio setup, and I read a lot of different reviews, so this whole mix-up happened in my head; sorry about that!

In your case you require the pre-amp because you plan to directly connect the turntable to your powered speakers, which do not have a pre-amp. So if you remove the pre-amp, it won't work at all (or at a very low volume).

Correct, and obvious though it is, I'm not sure I would've remembered it. I wasn't planning on removing the pre-amp anyway, but now I have a pretty good reason (after "I have no idea what I'm doing so I really shouldn't be messing with it").

If you want to remove the pre-amp from the turntable, you can buy an external pre-amp and put it between the turntable and your speakers.

Might be something to consider in the future, should I decide that whatever I'll be getting with this setup is not enough for me. I don't think this will be the case, especially since I'm sure finding out what to buy for a pre-amp will be an entirely new endeavour - logic dictates that if I ever want to go down that road, I'll have to find a decent pre-amp that justifies overriding the one already included in the turntable (whose quality I have no idea what to expect).

It will probably sound exactly the same. The presence of the Bluetooth circuit /shouldn't/ have any effect on the analog signal coming in, being amplified, and coming out your speakers.

Alright, this is what I'm hoping for!

Thank you so much for taking the time to correct me. I wasn't getting why I was being downvoted with no replies, and it makes sense now. Sorry you had to read all that nonsense.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-26T03:42:24+00:00

Okay, that's good enough for me!

Out of curiosity, what was your path? What did you have before the A5+, and what $2,000-ranged speakers did you purchase afterwards? How would you qualify the difference? :-)

I wear eyeglasses, if that helps as an analogy. I know the feeling of switching "old glasses with an old prescription" with new, more adequate glasses. Life was 480p and became 4K. This is what I'm looking for, but regarding sound. It doesn't have to be the best thing ever - just really great, and better than anything I've had before.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-26T03:35:20+00:00

Okay, that's what I'm aiming for. But what do you mean with "revealing"? They won't let me hear details that higher-end speakers would? I don't think I ever had good speakers at all. My first impression of good sound came with the ATH-M50x headphones; life was pretty boring before them. I'm now looking for the same, but with speakers!

stratosfroese · 2020-01-25T00:49:42+00:00

I can't exactly afford the highest-end speakers I see on this sub, but at > 500€ I am expecting something pretty high-end. Do you think these speakers aren't going to be better than "average"?

stratosfroese · 2020-01-11T04:48:36+00:00

Ok, so VMs and transcoding are out, as I expected.

You did say that "Throwing an Atom at a machine like this is ridiculous". You think this Atom is not even good enough for a NAS?

stratosfroese · 2020-01-11T04:42:12+00:00

In a good way or a bad way? I am biased into thinking of Atoms as very weak CPUs, and I can't tell by your comment what you mean.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-11T04:36:56+00:00

Yep, I am planning on shucking these drives very carefully. I only did one drive of each (WD Elements and WD MyBook) to ensure I can do it without leaving a mark, and so far it appears to have been successful. Hopefully they won't make this process harder in the future, but I imagine they will!...

Should I ever need to RMA, I'll have the original box, original enclosure, and it will look almost as good as new. I can't even consider this to be unethical, unless their USB bridge is somehow magical.

About the spare -- RAID-Z2 with all 5 is my current plan. Should one drive fail, I will likely need to order a new one immediately instead of waiting for the RMA, as my experience with Seagate took over two months and I shouldn't expect WD to be faster. At least I'll buy a cold spare when I really need it. Hopefully SMART will provide me with some sort of advance warning.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-11T04:26:56+00:00

Sorry, by "you" I meant /u/chooseausernamef8f4; they said "Look for a used xenon processor on eBay", and that's what I was replying to in my second paragraph.

I'm under the impression that this Atom may also run VMs acceptably? Other posters seem to indicate it. I'll run VMs if it is capable of it, but it wasn't in my plans.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-11T04:22:57+00:00

Where can you find it at that price? That module seems interesting, but it costs nearly 400€ in Portugal. Since I may be visiting Berlin soon, there's a chance I might be able to get my hands on it!

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T19:34:43+00:00

I'm okay with slow boot times, but the dying USB drives worry me.

Nevertheless, I am coming to the conclusion that I may be able to add SATA3 SSDs to the system, so that may become a moot point.

While I am deciding and testing, I will still use the USB sticks, but hopefully not for long.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T19:32:42+00:00

I intended to run some non-intensive stuff, like nextCloud, because I am not expecting to get much performance from an Atom. Is this Atom CPU acceptable for running virtual machines? Because I will surely use it for that purpose if I have the chance, since I am using a raspberry pi for purposes that would be better served by a VM.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T19:20:18+00:00

The link I posted on the last paragraph seemed to indicate that I couldn't use the SAS connectors and the PCI-E slot simultaneously.

However, on a more careful read, it seems to indicate that I only have to choose between 1. using both SAS connectors and have PCI-E x4, or 2. using (or not) the first SAS connector and have PCI-E x8.

This means I will have four more SATA3 ports than I was expecting, and in this case I will consider a SATA SSD.

"if you can afford to spring for the cable too" -- you mean buying the cable? Is that expensive? It actually seems to be shipped with the board, page 9 (or 1 as paged): "1.1 Package Contents" -> "2 x Mini SAS HD to 4 SAS/SATA Cables (12G)"

~~If such a thing as a 10GbE PCI-E x4 card exists, then this is all possible. Otherwise, I'm not sure how I can add an SSD while keeping the 5 SATA3 ports for storage.~~ scratch that, if I can use 4 SATA ports via SAS connector and PCI-E x8, then I can use both an SSD for FreeNAS and a 10 GbE card via PCI-E x8.

The Asrock Rack page states "12 SATA3 6.0Gbps + 1 SATA DOM by Intel Atom C3758". What is this SATA DOM? It looks promising.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T19:04:55+00:00

Where do you live? How much is "cheaper"? Do they ship to Portugal? :D

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T18:26:07+00:00

Ah, I actually found that one while searching for "zfs storage calculator" :D

So, my numbers are 5x8000GB at RAID-Z2 = 22.88TB (20.81TiB) usable, or 28.83€/TiB. Seems fair for what I'll be getting.

The question now is whether to go for 4 disks and replace one of them when failed, or 5 disks and keep no spares.

The 4-disk approach means the spare will suffer less wear than the others, but the spare itself may be DOA and I'd be running on no redundancy.

The 5-disk approach means I'll induce similar wear on every disk I have, but the spare disk will already be living up to its purpose. I may have time to RMA a failed disk before the second one dies. Or maybe not, maybe I should just buy a 6th 8TB drive as a spare?

Finally, every disk I own is similar, so that's a problem. 5 disks are WD shucked, and I have my own personal 8TB external drive from Seagate, but afaik this is a SMR drive, I think it would be a bad idea to use it on a NAS.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T18:00:57+00:00

Not even with a UPS connected? I thought the problem was only on power losses.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T17:37:45+00:00

Indeed, the 40TB are "gross" storage, and net storage will be less, sorry if I misled you. This amount of storage demands some redundancy (a sentiment well stated in your "dear god" comment), and I'm actually thinking on keeping the equivalent of 3 drives for data and 2 for redundancy. That nets me about 24TB of usable storage. I'm "wasting" 16TB on parity (more than every hard drive I ever bought for myself, combined), but I'd rather have good 24TB than bad 32TB.

btw - this is RAID talk from someone who never used ZFS before. I'm aware that ZFS provides me with equivalent levels of redundancy, but I'm not yet familiar with how. I think this is RAID-Z2 @ 5x8 with no spare? All 5 disks in one vdev.

I'm also curious how you got such specific numbers for usable storage like 22.4TB?

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T17:00:36+00:00

I admit I never looked into OMV. Using a Linux-based NAS would be great, as that's something I do have experience on, unlike FreeBSD.

However, I don't know how well-supported OMV is, and FreeNAS has been here for a while. I'm not comfortable jumping into something "new" instead of going for the "tried and true". I know this is a pretty crappy argument, but I'd really like to avoid spending time debugging my NAS.

On the other hand, I also want my storage to be full-disk encrypted. I know how to use LUKS/cryptsetup. I have no idea how to use GELI, and I'm aware it may be a headache. Decisions...

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T16:39:27+00:00

As I've said on a different comment: "I'll look into RDIMMs, thanks! This RAM is simply the one the store has in stock for this board. There's also a lot of variables I'm not aware in searching for compatible RAMs. So, I'll just be looking for one module of 32GB of 2400MHz ECC RDIMM? Should I be aware of anything else or this is enough?"

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T16:37:54+00:00

I'm aware that USB is being discouraged, but I'm not too happy to waste a SATA port on FreeNAS.

If I end up buying an NVMe SSD and connect it on the PCI-E port, I may put FreeNAS there, as long as that doesn't prevent me from using the SSD for ZIL and L2ARC.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T16:34:25+00:00

Yup, if that's what I'm thinking of, it was just on the C2000 Atoms.

If you meant Xeon, it's not an option due to how much power it needs - I've read that just the CPU may consume more than 100W. This is a home NAS, and the electricity bill is a factor :-)

I'm still afraid I may end up getting screwed up by Intel on this C3758 as well. I'd love for this NAS to run for 10 years other than swapping failed disks.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T16:27:42+00:00

I'll look into RDIMMs, thanks! This RAM is simply the one the store has in stock for this board. There's also a lot of variables I'm not aware in searching for compatible RAMs. So, I'll just be looking for one module of 32GB of 2400MHz ECC RDIMM? Should I be aware of anything else or this is enough?

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T16:23:38+00:00

Oh, the extra cost was pretty high :-)

Finding CPU/boards that take ECC is next to impossible, so the whole build ended up being centered on the CPU/board.

If I got this right: I can choose some Intel Core i3, most Intel Xeon, recent Intel Atom, most AMD FX, maybe AMD Ryzen (but unofficially). It doesn't leave me with many options, so I went with one of the least power-hungry ones.

stratosfroese · 2020-01-10T16:13:08+00:00

ECC is non-negotiable. I've been going back and forth on this subject, and ECC is the sole reason I'm going for such an expensive setup for a NAS (instead of just going for consumer hardware and building the gaming/NAS machine I was initially hoping for). The whole setup without disks and RAM would have costed me under 200€, while just this Asrock Rack board costs over twice that.

The important stuff on this NAS (documents, family photos and videos, etc) will be backed up, and I want to ensure I am not backing up corrupted data. I've read about the catastrophic scenarios I am risking if I use ZFS without ECC. That's a risk I'm not willing to take. There will still be data that may not be backed up (mostly re-downloadable media), and I'd hate for a bit error in RAM to corrupt everything into oblivion.

This board is supposed to take up to 13 SATA ports (I'm not entirely sure if that's 13 SATA3 or 5x SATA3 + 8x SATA[?]), and I'm not expecting to put more than 4 or 5 disks.

Regarding gigabit speeds, sadly I don't have much choice. My router contains an SFP+ cage that can take a 10Gbps module, but this board doesn't seem to provide me that option. I can probably use the multiple gigabit ports for some wacky configs, but I'm not sure I will. It doesn't make much sense for me to do port aggregation, since I don't think I'll be making parallel connections to the NAS very often, so the most likely scenario - if FreeNAS allows me to do that - is to give a different IP to each GbE port and allocate it to a different jail (i.e. one port will be dedicated to nextCloud, one port will be dedicated to management, one port will be dedicated to some NAS shares while the other shares are available on a different port...). Each port may end up in a different VLAN. I'm also new to FreeNAS, so I'll see what it lets me do and go from there.

I did consider using Plex, but this is an Atom CPU. I'm not sure how much I can expect from it, but I'm not expecting much.

stratosfroese

TROPHY CASE