The bava media center, featuring a Sony Trinitron 19” television to the far left with a Commodore 128 right below it. Beneath that is a used Panasonic DP-U89000 DVD Blu-ray/UHD multi-region player for the new fangled higher-end media. The beige entertainment center (starting with component pieces) has the gold Pioneer DVL-909 CD/LaserDisc/DVD multi-region, below that is an Onkyo DC-C390 6-disc changer for your ultimate compact disc fix. Moving right, you have a Panasonic AG-6200 NTSC and PAL multi-region VCR (a must since arriving in Italy), a Marantz PM6006 stereo receiver (which is running out of spots), and on top of the entertainment center is an audio-technica A-LP-120-USB turntable, and to the right of that the 100 pound 27” Sony Trinitron—an absolute gem.
Beneath all the component pieces are two drawers filled with vinyl records and laserdiscs. This makes for some handy storage and keeping things clean, but the vinyl and laserdiscs always find a way to get out of their holders and strewn around the office.
As Tim knows from when we were building the Console Living Room and then Reclaim Video, I love to wire together and play with component systems like this. I’m not particularly good at it, but it gives me endless hours of frustrating delight. I have my current setup in decent shape, and almost every receiver input has been accounted for. Recorder is the only free input, and once I figure it out I am thinking that is a good input for the commodore 128—we’ll see. The above image highlights the mapping of the various inputs, here they are as of today:
- Phono -> Audio technica turntable
- CD -> Onkyo 6 disc changer
- Network -> Pioneer DVD/LD/CD
- Tuner -> Panasonic VcR
- Recorder -> N/A
- Coaxial -> Panasonic Bluray/UHD/DVD
- Optical 1 -> Onkyo CD/Computer
- Optical 2 -> Pioneer DVD/LD/CD
You’ll notice from the mapping above that I have the Onkyo and Pioneer going in as both RCA and Optical inputs. I have found recently that some DVDs do not pickup the optical feed on the Pioneer, so sometimes I have to switch the audio feed back to RCA.
But that begs a bigger question, how does this all look on the backside, which audio/video feed is going where? How is it coming into the computer for ds106radio casts? That’s something I want to work through given I’ll be trying to break it down on a stream this coming Friday. So let me see if I can make heads or tails of it here.
The Audio hijack setup is a Shure MV7 microphone with a USB-C input into computer, the USB Audio Codec input is a USB-B input from the audio tecnica turntable. Those are pretty straightforward, but the Cam Link 4K is an Elgato 1080p HDMI capture card that is coming in from a switcher for two RCA devices: the Onkyo 6-disc changer and the Pioneer CD/LD/DVD player for the CD as well as video (if and when I need it). This switcher is primarily for converting RCA video inputs to HDMI, but works just as well with a CD player, so it was the best option I had at hand to convert the CD players into an audio feed for the radio. The switcher has a button that allows me to select between the two RCA inputs for each of those devices, which is pretty slick. Just need a better labeling system.
This RCA switcher could also work for the VCR input, and I can pull the Bluray and UHD player feed in from another Elgato CAM Link capture card I have lying around (although I might need to get one that does 4K) straight to HDMI, no RCA conversion needed. The video streaming setup might be worth another post, but this does give you a pretty good sense of the audio inputs for the various ds106radio/Reclaim Radio sources that can do both vinyl and compact discs without issue….YEAH!
Also worth mentioning here is that the Optical 1 input is actually picking up to components because there is an optical audio feed splitter that mixes the the Onkyo CD player and the optical audio from the Mac mini into this single channel, so I have to be sure to not have audio coming from both at the same time.