Category: Tech

Logitechnical

We be back, baby!* Thanks to a workaround, the Logitech Squeezebox Radio has returned to full and uninterrupted service in the bedroom. So my bedside Logitech UE4000 headphones have a hole to plug into again. 😉

I squeezed that Squeezebox until the devil dwelling within came out of hiding. The plot twist was it was lurking in Wi-Fi. I sent the details of the troubleshooting process to tastewar. I’ll spare you, unless you’re feeling particularly masochistic. What a way to spend a weekend!

* The radio’s player type is baby.

Bedside Mannerisms

So……….. what are my options for a bedroom table radio? My Pixel 4a phone has a headphone jack. I could connect that to the Logitech Squeezebox Radio’s auxiliary input.

The radio has excellent sound, and it even has a tweeter. But right now I’m feeling quite sour about Logitech, and the idea of all those buttons doing nothing bothers me. If I’m going to use my phone, I’d rather press one of my baby Oontz Curve Bluetooth speakers into service.

Squeezeboxed Out

Sorry to say, all of the nitty-picky audio stuff I mentioned yesterday isn’t the whole story. I was hoping to ignore the rest of it, but now I can’t.

First, I should point out that Logitech stopped selling its Squeezebox players over ten years ago. Since then the SiriusXM and Amazon Music apps have disappeared, and support for streaming AAC audio was ended. Yet it’s to Logitech’s credit the technology is still working at all. A couple of days ago, this message appeared on my two Logitech Squeezebox Radios, and on the Squeezebox Touch.

Somebody did something to the Squeezebox service at Logitech, but everything was working and all was well at mysqueezebox.com.

The word “upgrade” made me wonder if an updated service was available to download, even though the Logitech Media Server console said there wasn’t one. Yup, I was running v3.8.0, and there was v3.8.1. (The reference to Revue doesn’t apply to me.)

After downloading and installing the new server code, error messages began appearing about missing DLL files. Being System-level messages, they stay in the foreground until closed. But other than the annoying messages on the old netbook that’s running LMS, and the messages on the devices, everything was working. So okay, fine, leave well enough alone.

Then, this morning, the messages saying the players were not authorized to use mysqueezebox.com were gone! Yay! Somebody did something to the Squeezebox service at Logitech. The messages about the missing DLL files remain, but I’m fine with that. However, back at Logitech, somebody was doing something again. Everything would work for a while and then fail again, because the mysqueezebox service was disappearing. So they’re rebooting there, and I’ll reboot the players again and ignore them for the rest of the morning. Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to this story!

Update: 12 o’clock and all is not well. I feel like I’m back at work again, troubleshooting a problem.

The Squeezebox radios work for a while, then they go offline until being restarted. If I leave them offline and check the status of the mysqueezebox service, there’s a DNS error. After restarting, the IP address for mysqueezebox.com keeps changing. I have never seen that before. Curiously, although the Touch player also shows the rotating IP addresses, it doesn’t go offline. Neither does the Squeezeplay program, a virtual Touch player. Its DNS resolution is being handled by Windows.

I’ll probably have to resort to the slimdevices forum, which I was hoping to avoid. As with all user forums, there’s a lot of speculation by people who don’t actually know anything. Even if they’re knowledgeable, they aren’t necessarily in a position to do anything about problems at Logitech.

Update: I’m the April Fool, and the joke’s on me. After putting in a lot of work yesterday, I figured out the problem, and even thought I had it fixed with a patch. But today I woke up to bricked radios. Logitech now requires media server 8.3, and the Logitech radios have incompatible 7.7.3 firmware that cannot be updated. There is a patch that is supposed to get around the problem, but it doesn’t work. The Logitech Touch has compatible 7.8 firmware and, despite the warning shown above, it still works. As does the Squeezeplay program, with virtual firmware 7.8.

Other than that, I’m giving up and saying Goodbye to my Logitech Squeezebox Radios.

Casting About With Bluetooth

Tornadoes are killing people in the south, Russia continues to pummel Ukraine, children are being shot to death at school, and I spent the day playing around with home audio stuff.

Breaking News: A former president has been indicted on criminal charges, not yet disclosed.

One of the annoyances with Windows 10 (I don’t know about Windows 11) is there’s no way to know if a Bluetooth protocol other than standard SBC has been negotiated.

https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/what-are-bluetooth-codecs-a-guide-to-everything-from-aac-to-sbc

Android 13 is more informative. My Sony Bluetooth speaker on the porch supports Qualcomm aptX, and the Onkyo receiver downstairs has Apple AAC.

I prefer Chromecast over Bluetooth with the Onkyo. That way the phone doesn’t need to be near the receiver. It’s probably been almost a year since I began experimenting with Chromecast audio on the Onkyo, along with the Chromecast Audio device hooked up to the Harman Kardon receiver upstairs.

When I first connected the Chromecast puck the sound level was low. I knew its Full Dynamic Range setting would increase the output to the line level standard of 2V, but I couldn’t find the setting. The only explanations online were for older versions of Google Home, and the new app was keeping the option hidden.

I gave up looking for an answer and figured out that rooms had to be defined for the house. After I assigned each Chromecast device to its own room, the Full Dynamic Range setting appeared for Chromecast Audio. Enabling it kicked the volume up to CD level.

Out of Phase, Out of Time

There’s no escape from folded mono sound. This morning, Boss Radio 66 played the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time”, a song that’s used very effectively in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.

The song was taken from the indifferently produced Metamorphosis album that ABKCO put out in ’75. Stereo elements were added to the original mono track that was given the worst sound treatment ever devised, re-channeled stereo.

As heard on the mono speaker of my Logitech Squeezebox Radio in the kitchen, the sound had the distant, hollow effect that’s typical of fake stereo when out-of-phase channels cancel each other out. On YouTube, the official copy of the recording is called the “Strings Version.”

L+R=M

Stereo records were introduced in 1958. In November, 1968 the White Album was released with both stereo and mono mixes. There is only a stereo mix of Abbey Road, released just ten months later. The end of true mono mixes for popular music had begun.

Ten years later, when I was working in radio, the DJ promo singles that came to the station had a stereo side for FM…

… and a mono side for AM. (The picture sleeve had a strawberry scent!)

Hitting the mono switch (a feature sadly now lacking from receivers and amps) when playing the stereo side of this record produces the same sound as playing the mono side.* Folded mono had been heard for years, with stereo recordings played on mono FM radios, and stereo records played on mono record players.

Early stereo records had this warning.

The problem with most mono cartridges of the time was the stylus only moved sideways. The vertical modulations in the stereo grooves would not only be missed, they could be damaged by the heavy downward pressure of a stylus that wasn’t able to move up and down.

This notice appeared on later records, when mono cartridge styluses (nobody says “stylii” anymore, do they?) were made to be compatible with stereo records.

But folded mono sound can have issues, especially if there are phasing differences between the channels. I heard this effect last Monday night on Big Planet Noise. Bob Irwin played a mono 45 DJ copy of a song. In high school, when the song was new, I heard it in stereo on WBCN, listening with my Pioneer SX-440 receiver and SE-20 headphones.

There’s a lot of intentional out-of-phase sound between the channels, and I would switch the SELECTOR knob to FM MONO to hear what it did. The effect I heard 50 years ago was pretty much the same as I heard Monday night. This is the song.

Windows has a mono switch under the Ease of Access audio settings. Put on headphones, switch to mono, and you’ll hear most of what I heard, but not all. I suspect the misguided Haeco-CSG process was applied, which was a case of the cure being far worse than the problem it attempted to solve.

* The Haeco-CSG audio process was developed at A&M Records. Thankfully, by the mid-70’s it was no longer being used for mono DJ promo records.