I got a great deal on a DN-500AV. At the same time a friend upgraded his sound studio and gave me a lovely set of 5 Dynaudio Acoustics. A Bag End subwoofer tied it all together and a simple Thunderbolt 2 to HDMI cable from the 2013 iMac make it all work with a simple audio config utility called Audio MIDI Setup.
It was (and still is) a nice sounding system. So much so that I played and streamed music on it when not editing. The problem was, when I left the home studio to, say, go to the kitchen, the music stayed in the studio. Turning it up loud began to bother my wife, understandably on occasion. She would say, and rightly so, that if I really wanted to fill the house with audio I should start by putting speakers in the numerous ceiling holes I had made 12 years ago when I had remodeled the house. In my defense, those "holes" were strategically placed and had sturdy speaker mounts and excellent speaker wires behind them. As you can imagine, it all runs to a pile of wires in the basement. I had never found a good house audio system that worked the way I wanted it to. Admittedly, some 7 years ago (after some prodding), I covered the holes with speaker screens. No sound, but at least the holy ceiling was less offensive.
Anyway, after a year or so of loud music pouring from the studio during breaks, I saw something at a Christmas clearance sale at Fry's: a Denon AVR-S910W 7.1 receiver with Atmos, ethernet, and WiFi! Inspired, I brought it home and built an aesthetically pleasing shelf in the dining room, with the understanding that I would now install actual ceiling speakers in the ceiling.
I did all this with great enthusiasm and found after-Christmas ceiling speakers on sale at Best Buy, and a pair of in-wall speakers for the dining room. Wiring the dining room speakers was a bit tricky so I simply ran the wire under the rug and covered the 3 or so feet of exposed wire at both ends with blue painter's tape. I claimed the blue tape would be temporary. I just wanted to, you know, make sure the system worked. And it did! The house became filled with this amazing cloud of music that you could walk through! But with iTunes, the DN-500 and S910W receivers were slightly out of sync. It made drum solos interesting but vocals were just confusing. So I found the Airfoil app and it put both systems in sync--from any source. We then began living and working in a cloud of sonic happiness.
As you might guess, the blue tape remained on the dining room floor. After a year I stopped seeing it. After 3 years I forgot all about it. My loving and very patient wife did not, of course. At 5 years our friends started volunteering to help me run the wires under the floor. Bowing to the inevitable, I suited up and went under this (no-basement) part of the house to pull wires, passing a petrified squirrel along the way.
To get to the latest self-gift, and make a long story longer, the screen of the old 2013 iMac was starting to wane, and early in this year's holiday season I gave myself a 16" MacBookPro. As we all know now, it will not run Mojave nor Avid. So it went back to Apple, and I transitioned to use my 2018 MBP as the daily workhorse.
While editing with Avid I never liked running other applications, particularly for music. Awhile back I started using an iPad to play music while I worked. Problem was, the iPad would only work with ONE of the receivers at a time. Airplay 2 on an iPad will of course work with multiple receivers that have Airplay 2. My receivers don't even have Airplay 1! I refuse to buy new receivers just to get Airplay 2—you have to draw the line somewhere—just to get the whole house audio cloud back running on an iPad!
So this season's gift-to-self was a pair of the cheapest AppleTV black boxes I could find. Each has Airplay 2 and an HDMI output which goes right into each receiver. The house sound cloud has returned, in sync, and works well with the iPad, as I edit with Avid on a MBP, and write long stories like this. If anyone on the L2 found this entertaining, or is happy about now finding a way to get Airplay 2 into an old 5.1 or 7.1 receiver via an AppleTV puck, then maybe it was worth sharing.
May all our systems work and play well together in the New Year,
Roberto
Pure Grain Digital • Mountain View • San Francisco • Lyon
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