Category: Tech

If This is Sunday, It Must be Denmark

Thorens TD-166 Mk II turntable (1983) with Ortofon Super OM 20 cartridge.

Phono cartridge brands I have known and (mostly) loved, in the order I first experienced each of them: Pickering, Shure, Ortofon, Audio Technica, Stanton, Grado, Micro-Acoustics, and Sony. That’s a very short list, compared to many vinyl other enthusiasts!

The Sony XL-MC1 is my only moving coil cartridge. The electret transducer in my Micro-Acoustics 3002 is perhaps the most advanced technology ever implemented for phono reproduction, with the exception of the ELP laser turntable.

There are numerous other makers of phono cartridges today, especially with high-end models, but from within that list only Ortofon, Audio-Technica, and Grado remain.

My all-around favorite in sound and tracking ability is Ortofon of Denmark, with the Super OM 20 being my best cartridge. Mounted and aligned in my well-maintained Thorens TD-166 MKII turntable, it is certainly the best tracking cartridge I am using. Ortofon continues its video series on what makes quality phono cartridges work the way they do.

Happiness Is…

Happiness is accomplishing a known goal. That’s a Scientology definition, a tidbit I picked up the summer in college when living on Cape Cod. The Falmouth public library had a large collection of Scientology books. No, I’m not a Scientologist.

That happened to be the Jaws movie summer. Seeing it in Falmouth was funny, because people who were extras in the movie, and their relatives, were in the audience. They weren’t shy about letting everybody know when they, or someone they knew, appeared on the screen.

But I digress. The happiness context here is this. Just as I brought this installation of WordPress back from near death, and got my Sony 300-disc CD changer working again, last weekend I worked on my Logitech Media Server network until it had been returned to full functionality. The solution was to get the Squeezebox Radios off their native WiFi implementations by using Ethernet-to-WiFi adapters.

It’s been suggested to me the radios were dropping off the network because of interference from a WiFi 6 signal somewhere within range. Even if that’s what happened, there’s no explanation why the adapters don’t have the problem. Also it was suspiciously coincidental with changes that I noticed had been made to the mysqueezebox cloud service that required an update to the LMS software running in the house.

Anyway, I’m happy now that everything is working again. There’s an Android app for controlling the network players that I started using this morning. Why hadn’t I looked for it before? Because I tried one a long time ago on the first generation of the Roku streaming player, and it was terrible. I assumed they would all be awful, but I sure was wrong about that. Squeezer is an excellent app, and it’s free.

Next up? Seeing if I can put LMS on the Raspberry Pi 3 that tastewar gave me.

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.