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For a very long time, I've wanted a good set of headphones. And I do have quite a few pairs of them, mostly of the earbud style which pretty much did their job, but I wasn't someone who saw themselves sitting for hours listening to music through headphones. It's strange though that I wouldn't have gotten around to delving into that part of audio till now.
I grew up in the 70's and those were the days of the Koss Pros. It seemed like any serious audiophile had a pair of them. And I'd been pretty serious about the hobby from the time I was in middle school and buying my own equipment. But there always seemed that there was something more important than spending the not inconsiderable amount it cost to own good headphones.
By the 80s and 90s, I was really immersed into audio and people were spending big money on premier headphones such as the Stax electrostatic models. Just not me.
In the early 2000s when I was working at a home audio store, I even bought a pair of Grado's SR60s. It was their low end model, but they were nice. However, I never used them much, so they were sold off. I was really into home theater at that time which certainly wasn't a headphone thing! There was one pair that we sold in the store that almost got me.
The Sennheiser HD 600. They sounded awesome and felt that way too! However, at $450 (1998 dollars), they were just too expensive for me. Over the years, on and off, I've looked at them used on eBay, but there was never a good time.
Then last month I ran across a video on Youtube talking about a pair of headphones that Massdrop was selling. Apparently, the company had contracted with Sennheiser to produce the HD 650 (successor to the HD 600) specially for them and we're selling them for $200! I was floored!
I checked with the wife first, but I ordered them right away! Essentially they are the HD 650s with a very few changes; shorter cord, 1/8" jack with 1/4" adapter, different finish, much less fancy box,....oh yeah, a different name..... HD 6xx vs. HD 650.... They are every bit as good as I remembered and mine aren't even broken in yet. So much so, that I'm considering buying a headphone amp and/or a high definition player to use with it. They have a 300 ohm impedance and aren't supposed to work well with regular players like phones, iPods, etc. I'm listening to mine right now on one of our iPods and it sounds pretty darned good, so I'm curious as to how much better it might be with better input!
It's been a long haul, but my rebuilt workstation is finally up. I will have to say that it's a little strange to open up the Resource Monitor and see 16 cores running! So let's start there.
The heart of any high
performance vehicle is the engine. And looking at the SR71 "Blackbird's"
huge engine, you can see why it's a legendary plane. It was said that
they pretty much only needed one answer when a SAM was launched at
it......, that was to go faster!
At the heart of my rebuilt workstation is the Xeon E5-2630L processor. It's a bit of a weird part in the computer world. It's clocked at a low 1.8ghz, so only consumes 55 watts, which isn't very much given that it's got 8 physical cores and being hyper-threaded functions as 16 cores to the operating system. Which basically means that it doesn't do anything super fast compared to say, an i7 or i9, but it can do a LOT of different things pretty fast all at once.
Right now, it's being fed by 2 8Gb modules of Corsair Dominator RAM, but with a total of 8 sockets available, I can max out at 64Gb total some day in the future.
It's all plugged into a Gigabyte X99-Gaming G1 board. The X99 chipset and the boards that they live on, is what make this thing workstation level. 8 RAM sockets, M.2 compatible, 40 lanes of access to the processor! Actually, I had started out with one of these which had dud processor pins that I never did get fixed. Then last week, I bought an Asus X99-3.1U board that had some issues with POSTing, which has to go back to Canada. So now this. There are two other parts to this build that make it my main machine for the next several years.
A couple of weeks ago I traded for an nVidia GTX 970 which takes over the graphics duties for my old GTX 770 which looks just like this, except that it's less powerful and consumes twice as much power.
The last major component is the Plextor M.2 NVMe drive that will take over the boot drive duties. Theses things are quite a bit faster than my old Intel SSD connected through SATA3. The mass storage and optical drive stays the same, as do the old complement of monitors.
I supposed I'm about as happy as I can be with another rebuild put to bed.
In a post of September of 2017, I talked about the build I had done for my son's birthday back in May. It had taken me a year to gather all the parts that went into the machine, but in the end, he was happy and it was worth the trouble. Three years later, as we finish out this year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic, it's that time again. My son is a rising senior headed toward his last year of high school and then on to college to study engineering of some sort...... Which mean this...... that machine driven by a Pentium G4400 and rockin' a GTX-750ti graphics card wasn't going to cut it.
And with another birthday fast approaching, it was a good time to upgrade his "gaming pc" to a full-blown college-ready workstation! When I analyzed his equipment, it looked like the bones were there. The Corsair Carbide 380t case is compact enough to go if he goes and certainly is fine if he wants to stay at home and start locally. I had gotten him a pair of 22" HP business-class monitors last year so that was fine as well. What needed some sprucing up was the ASRock motherboard which had only 1 of 2 RAM sockets working, and a Pentium G4400 driving the system. So I set a $300 budget to get it all done; motherboard, processor and graphics card.
$86 went to a Skylake i5-6500. Four cores running at 3.2Ghz with a little bit of headroom to bump it up. Little Sis chipped in by buying an inexpensive, but effective CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Black HSF, but that turned out to be 1/4" too tall for his case, so I had to chase down an M4 low-profile HSF to replace it. Now, I have an extra Hyper 212 sitting in the closet! I found a GTX-1060 on eBay for $120 because it was a Dallas seller and I didn't have to pay shipping! Then things got complicated.....
I had decided that we should go with the higher end Skylake chipset boards; either the Z170 or H170. Looking around, I found that the Mini-ITX boards of that generation tended to run around $100, plus or minus regardless of chipset. I was able to find a Gigabyte Z170 board for $90 shipped, but missing it's I/O shield which cost another $10 out of China. Everything came in around the same time last weekend and we got to work. That's when the upgrade train went off the rails!
It started out with the Hyper 212 being a quarter of an inch too tall and the rest was just downhill after that! Next, I couldn't find the other stick of RAM for his machine, then the board refused to POST. Then started the trouble-shooting routine. One thing at a time using everything including his old board and processor. It turned out that the board just wasn't going to boot. I even tried straightening a few pin in the socket that looked bent. No Joy! Luckily the seller was a good guy and refunded the money immediately. Then I found another board just like it in LA and the guy offered it to me for $60 shipped. It was sold "working" but with some bent pins in the socket! I took a chance anyway!
It came today and Whatayaknow!!! It came right up.... bent pins and all.
I have to say that all was not "wine and roses". I'm sure some of you have already guessed it! ....... the upgrade cause the Windows10 load to "deactivate". One new key and an hour and a half of tech support later, I can say that "I'm very angry at Micro$oft"!!!
In the end, the whole thing came in under budget and his machine is ready for a few more years. Yeah, I'm going to have to pull the board and install the M4 HSF assembly when it shows up from Canada in a week or so and I have some parts to sell back off too. Now, if I can only figure out what I did with that other stick of RAM I squirreled away 3 years ago.....
That's a C17 Globemaster on a test flight. My Globemaster is now in full-blown production mode!
About a foot from my left knee is a Silverstone CS380 case holding a fully working home server. It's running FreeNAS 11.3. Right now the only thing on it is a share called "media" that's holding 400+ movies that I've ripped into a non-DVD form, meaning that the files are small enough to get squirted through the network to a tablet to watch. Eventually, I'll create spaces for my music and photos to live there as well and all our media will be easily available and I won't have to go and find it for my wife and hand it to her on a flashdrive so she can post something on social media! I will say that it wasn't easy.
I started out thinking that I'd be doing something like this small form-factor box tucked into a corner somewhere.
Then I fell in love with the robustness of FreeNAS and really went for the idea of a ZFS storage array that had the ability to withstand 2 drives failing at once. In the middle of trying to build a 6 drive beast to do that, I went way off the rails and feeling like I'd never get the thing up and running!
I was having dreams/nightmares of rack servers with dozens of hot-swap bays.
Ultimately, I was able to settle on a comfortable middling size compromise when I found the Silverstone CS380. In reality, it's just a mid-tower that's had it front end specially adapted to hold 8 "hot-swap" drivebays. The back end of it is really just simple ATX.
The Supermicro X9SCL/SCM motherboard slid right in without a hitch and there was plenty of room for a normal tower style heatsink/fan assembly. Once I got the type of RAM that it needed solved, I was able to get 16Gb (8Gb x 2) ECC RAM out of China off of eBay. That leaves me 2 more sockets for future expansion. I have all six drives connected directly to the motherboard, but also have an IBM/LSI controller along with two empty bays for future expansion.
It took me a while to get everything loaded, up and running, but Youtube is an endless well of information these days. You just have to expend the time to find the right videos and watch them! Yup, I screwed up my first drive pool build, somehow allowing it to access the 16Gb SSD that I had put in there for possible future cache use which screwed up how it balanced out it's space allocation. In any case, I figure it out, pulled the drive, deleted the pool and rebuilt it. So now, it does indeed correctly gives me a bit over 7 Terabytes of storage out of 6, Hitachi Ultrastar 2Tb drives. Yup, that's right; I'm sacrificing around 5Tb of drive space to redundancy! But hey, that's why we build these sorts of things to start with right? Oh, and I also has something clearly reinforced to me while watching the 500Gb of movies being copied over.
The standing rule of thumb for FreeNAS is that you need 1 gig of RAM for each Terabyte of storage that you have. A little much for a file server, right? Uhhh, no, not really.... I was watching the console data as the file transfer was being made, and it was using something like 80% of the available memory out of the 16Gb that I have in the machine! If I hadn't had enough, it would have really slowed down that operation! Lesson learned...
Do I wish I had one of these cool little cube builds!?! In a word, No..... In any case, I might still build a little box mini-server for my brother-in-law anyway!
