Mac hanging AV2 ?

Posted by: Roy Donaldson on 21 December 2006

Hi there,

I've just gotten around to moving my mac mini across into the living room and connecting it up to my main LCD.

While doing that, I connected it up using 2xPhonos into an analog input on my AV2. When doing this, I noticed that the AV2 would become non-responsive and hang at times.

I've since moved the Mac over to a Optical output, straight into the AV2's DACs (less electrical crap), but wondered if anyone had seen anything similar ?

Thanks,
Roy.

(if anyone else is thinking of doing this, downloaded divx/xvid both look and sound terrible, but at least I can watch things before they come out over here :-)
Posted on: 21 December 2006 by David Dever
I've had this happen before, too, with a Mac mini I had kicking around–the power brick adapter is notoriously noisy, and it may be transmitting tis through the fround plane, when using an analog connection.

Optical, as you have found, solved the problem definitively–before it was decommissioned and made into a server!
Posted on: 21 December 2006 by Adrian F.
Hi Roy!

I'm using an iMac streaming the data over wireless LAN from my office to an AirPort Expess in the livingroom near the AV2. Since I don't wanted to use the relatively cheap D/A convertors in the Express, I took the optical output from the beginning on...

iTunes data ripped from my CD collection works well. My best "radio station" when in shuffle mode Razz But with internet radio I had weird effects. The tempo of the music was going up and down by itself. Like someone would change the speed of the source tape. Probably a network cache or congestion problem?

happy listening
Adrian
Posted on: 22 December 2006 by Roy Donaldson
David,

Interesting to know that it's a lot of the noise coming from the electrical output on the analog of the Mac that's causing a problem.

I've moved it over to the optical output now and it's running fine.

It's a shame my LCD only has 1 HDMI input (and I've only got 1 HDMI cable run Smile, as I now need to swap cables between my DVD5 and the Mac mini.

You can definately tell the difference in picture quality in xvid vs. the DVD5 Smile. When you run 720p/1080i you can still tell the difference. The resolution may be higher, but the overall picture just doesn't look nice.

Roy.
Posted on: 28 December 2006 by Adrian F.
I just found out, that my new tv settop box (dvb-c with hd) puts out that much noise over it's scart connection, that it pollutes all other devices connected to the same tv. Frown

When the 252 is on AV input, you could hear noises in the speakers coming in over the AV2 when any electrical connection was plugged from the tv. Be it analogue sound over rca, or even the coax digital connection from the dvd-player (over it's scart)... Changed it to optical to solve it. But now I have to swap optical cables, because 2 inputs is not enough.

Roy, you can find hdmi-switchers in any kind of way here: http://www.gefen.com/

happy watching
Adrian
Posted on: 28 December 2006 by Adrian F.
Even though digital coax should be better, there are a lot of devices with only an optical output. So you are constantly short on inputs. Here I found an optical tos-link switch: http://www.oehlbach.de/

They make also 2 HDMI switches. One that would choose it's input automatically, when only 1 input is active would be the icing on the cake...

Adrian
Posted on: 28 December 2006 by Adrian F.
Mostly I think faster than I write... Sorry Roy, no hijacking intended. Why I'm posting in this thread:

With the noise described above, I had the following problem.
When I was switching the visual devices (tv, dvd, cablebox) on before the sound devices, I had problems in switching the preamp to the AV input or getting the AV2 out of sleep.
When I was switching the naim's right before activating the TV side, there was no problem and they were reacting spontaneously.
Since getting rid of any electrical connection between a visual device and the audio side, this problem seems to be gone.