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[Hendrik]

I setup my new system last night, and tbh the volume problem isn't really present.
With 10dB passive attenuators, i can run on 100% internal volume (with R128 volume leveling, though, so it always lowers the volume a bit) without my ears falling off (it reaches around 80dB on -20dBFS pink noise, as measured with a SPL meter in C weighting)

I tried tacking them out, but apparently my speaker are better then I thought, and I start to hear noise, at least when around 1ft from the speaker (where I happened to sit when taking them out, directly in front of my center speaker).

Will have to see if this volume level is enough, or if I have to experiment a bit more.

[mwillems]

I setup my new system last night, and tbh the volume problem isn't really present.
With 10dB passive attenuators, i can run on 100% internal volume (with R128 volume leveling, though, so it always lowers the volume a bit) without my ears falling off (it reaches around 80dB on -20dBFS pink noise, as measured with a SPL meter in C weighting)

I tried tacking them out, but apparently my speaker are better then I thought, and I start to hear noise, at least when around 1ft from the speaker (where I happened to sit when taking them out, directly in front of my center speaker).

Will have to see if this volume level is enough, or if I have to experiment a bit more.

If you're hitting 80 dB at -20dBFS, you're pretty close to "reference" level (83dB at -20dBFS).  

Two thoughts:  

1) One thing that wasn't intuitive about my interface (the Steinberg) was that it has a firmware/hardware volume setting that the windows mixer can't actually control; it needs to be set either in the Steinberg mixer or physically on the box.  It looks like the Focusrite has something similar (based on the manual), so it might be worth checking that you maximized the volume there as well (apologies if you already thought of this).

2) If you want that extra 3dB to get to reference, and the noise level without the attenuators is too high, various outlets sell 6dB inline attenuators.  That would get you just above reference level (84dB at -20dBFS).  

Here are two models from PE (just for illustration, I'm sure you don't want to deal with international shipping for a five or ten dollar part)
http://www.parts-express.com/rca-line-level-audio-attenuator-6-db--266-234
http://www.parts-express.com/harrison-labs-6-db-rca-line-level-audio-attenuator-pair--266-242

Reference-level capable has been my personal design target, as the reference level output is a bit too loud for any kind of ordinary listening for me; the 83dB at -20dBFS is ok, but those 0dBFS 103dB peaks make my hair stand on end!  But I like the idea of being able to reproduce sound at the same volume as a movie theater if I ever wanted to  

[Hendrik]

Yeah I found the volume control in the mixing panel, and set it to HW control so I can use the knob if i ever wanted to, but its maxed out now.
I might dig for slightly smaller attenuators, for now it sounds great. Had to toy a bit with ASIO buffer settings to stop it from glitching occasionally, but now its great.

[mwillems]

Yeah I found the volume control in the mixing panel, and set it to HW control so I can use the knob if i ever wanted to, but its maxed out now.
I might dig for slightly smaller attenuators, for now it sounds great. Had to toy a bit with ASIO buffer settings to stop it from glitching occasionally, but now its great.

Great news; always love it when a plan comes together 

[Hendrik]

I found a bunch of 6dB attenuators, should get them next week.
I think thats a good thing, too. I currently have such switchable ones with options for 10/15/20, and the switches on those seem rather wobbly, when tuning volume with MCs Room Correction I found a big difference in two speakers, turns out their switch moved to 15 somehow, I guess that happened when moving the amp a bit earlier...

[mwillems]

I found a bunch of 6dB attenuators, should get them next week.
I think thats a good thing, too. I currently have such switchable ones with options for 10/15/20, and the switches on those seem rather wobbly, when tuning volume with MCs Room Correction I found a big difference in two speakers, turns out their switch moved to 15 somehow, I guess that happened when moving the amp a bit earlier...

Yeah the switchable ones are good for diagnostics, but have their challenges.  I bought some switchable ones and some fixed ones when I was first figuring out my situation because they were relatively cheap and I wanted to get things working. I ultimately landed on the fixed ones because they "safer," and I didn't really expect to need to change the gain structure once I got it down.

How's the system sounding otherwise?  Better than the old one, hopefully (after all the effort).

[Hendrik]

It sounds great. I don't know all the fun terms that everyone uses to describe how audio sounds, but I do feel like its a bit more alive and gained clarity.
But of course I didn't keep the old system setup to double check this impression, so who knows.

No complaints, anyway. Well, except that my TV is dumb and does not turn the screen off when the HTPC turns off the HDMI output (ie. on standby). May get a USB HDMI-CEC adapter to make it tell the TV to turn the screen off instead.

[JimH]

My TV (Samsung) has a timer in the settings.  After x minutes of inactivity, it shuts off.

[6233638]

May get a USB HDMI-CEC adapter to make it tell the TV to turn the screen off instead.

If you can figure out a way to get one of these working correctly in Media Center, that would be great. I'd love it if I could control MC via my TV remote.
 
I bought one to try, but it broke the connection between my HTPC and TV (no video) and I didn't want to buy an active extender for something which, according to other people, did not work correctly with MC anyway.
 

My TV (Samsung) has a timer in the settings.  After x minutes of inactivity, it shuts off.

My Sony is annoying in that it will only do that after 1, 2, or 4 hours of inactivity. That generally means the prompt is showing up near the end of a film if it's set to 2, or the TV is idle for an hour or more if set to 4.

[Hendrik]

My TV (Samsung) has a timer in the settings.  After x minutes of inactivity, it shuts off.

"Inactivity" for the TV means the remote wasn't touched. Not "no active input", so its not something that works for me, since I never touch the TV remote anyway, other then to turn it on once.

If you can figure out a way to get one of these working correctly in Media Center, that would be great. I'd love it if I could control MC via my TV remote.

All I really want is the TV to go in standby when PC goes to sleep, for now anyway, and that can be done with a simple tray icon application that waits for Windows to turn the screen off (such a thing already exists, too).
Maybe one day I might poke at getting remote control support in MC, but not soon.

[Hendrik]

I got the USB CEC widget today, and sadly out of the box it doesn't handle standby and screen turning off. It does however turn the TV off when the PC shuts down, and back on when the PC starts, but thats not enough of course.
It comes with a fancy SDK, maybe I'll just plug it into a tiny system tray application that monitors sleep/screen turning off/on and runs the appropriate CEC commands. Something to do for the weekend I suppose.

For anyone else trying such a device, i didn't get any HDMI image at all until i upgraded the firmware of the widget and installed its driver.

[6233638]

It comes with a fancy SDK, maybe I'll just plug it into a tiny system tray application that monitors sleep/screen turning off/on and runs the appropriate CEC commands. Something to do for the weekend I suppose.

Isn't Media Center already monitoring this sort of thing now?

For anyone else trying such a device, i didn't get any HDMI image at all until i upgraded the firmware of the widget and installed its driver.

Huh, I wonder if that was what caused the problem here. I don't recall there being available firmware updates at the time I purchased mine though, and it was never suggested to me when troubleshooting - they just told me I needed to buy an active extender, which cost more than the device itself.

[Hendrik]

Isn't Media Center already monitoring this sort of thing now?

It is, but I also want the TV shutting off if MC happens to not be running, so at the very least for that functionality a system-wide mini-daemon is rather useful - for my use case anyway.
Not sure yet.

Seems like a decent task to get going with the SDK.

[Hendrik]

The first draft of my tiny tool is finished, only took about the last hour, it simply sits in the system tray, doesn't need any configuration, and turns on/off all devices connected to the HDMI bus depending on screen on/off or standby of the HTPC. Neat-o!

The API to interact with the USB CEC device is pretty simple, so maybe I'll dabble with the remote control functionality as well, and we'll see if its worth supporting in MC.

[6233638]

Sounds good! Perhaps I will have to pick one of these up.
 
I'm curious - were you connected to your Sony display before when it wouldn't show a picture until your updated the firmware? (it's a Sony TV I am using)

[Hendrik]

Yeah, direct connection from HTPC over USB CEC to Sony TV. I cut out the AVR now that I have the USB DAC.
After not getting anywhere at first, I unplugged it from HDMI and connected the TV directly again without the device - but left the device on USB, and installed the firmware update and the driver. Connected it again, and it works just fine now.

Enabling the screen back after standby is still a bit flaky, well, something to work on. I don't use standby much anyway, as long as the TV turns off when the screen is turned off by windows, thats the major use-case for me.

[6233638]

These days my HTPC seems to be on 24/7 thanks to Media Center (which has me wanting to upgrade to something more efficient soon) so even if no other support for this thing gets added to Media Center, that tray utility which turns the display on/off when Windows turns the screen off would be very useful.
 
Standby is broken on this system anyway (an incompatibility between the motherboard and PSU that neither manufacturer acknowledges) so it would be a full shutdown/hibernation if I were to turn things off anyway.

[6233638]

My CEC adapter arrived today, and that was a big headache to get working—mostly due to cable-related problems.
For some reason it didn't like the USB cable I was using, so once I swapped that out I was able to update the firmware, and after swapping out the 10cm HDMI cable it came with for a properly built 1m cable, I was finally able to get a picture on the TV.
Then I had to play around with the order that everything was being turned on for the TV/PC to see that they were both CEC devices. Half the time it was just killing the HDMI input as soon as it was connected to the TV. (nothing worked—even without the CEC adapter—until I cut power to the TV at the wall and reset it)
 
However, once they actually connected properly, it all seems to be working correctly now, and I'm able to swap cables around without any problems.
As long as this connection is reliable, I should be able to hide away the adapter now.
 
I see that there is a "HTPC header" board now which supports a number of motherboards including NUCs—that seems like a really nice integrated solution, especially if Jim is planning on selling those NUC systems. It would be great if we could get CEC support built into Media Center.

[6233638]

I must say, even after only having it a day and using Hendrik's tray application (thanks again) it is surprising just how much better the USB-CEC adapter has made the HTPC experience.
 
My Sony TV is like Hendrik's where it does not turn off with a blank input, and only has a 1, 2, or 4 hour idle timer which is based on the last time you sent an input from the remote.

2 hours is often too short for many films, and 4 hours means there's at least an hour after you watch a film before it turns off.

Now I don't have to worry about this at all, and the TV will switch off after five minutes of the PC being idle, and never during playback.
It's also made me realize just how often the PC is left idle for more than a few minutes.
 
 
The TV seems to be a lot quicker to respond via CEC too. With CEC, it seems like it holds onto the handshaking or something, as the TV turns on with an image right away, rather than displaying a blank screen for 10-15s before the image appears if I use the remote. It just makes everything that bit more seamless.
 
 
Even if there is no further development or integration with Media Center, I think it was a worthwhile purchase.
I would of course like to see full integration to control Media Center though - but more than that, my television has a "Theater" button on the remote (many Sony TVs do) which toggles the picture mode between the current one and movie mode. This is great for switching between PC and Film use.
 
It would be amazing if Media Center could activate this at the start of fullscreen video playback, but I don't know if it's available via CEC. (or libCEC anyway)

[theoctavist]

I am looking at getting a relatively affordable power amp, which wouldn't navigate me into any corners and still gives me the flexibility to get active speakers later. Good speakers are far more expensive.
I requested a quote for international delivery from Emotiva regarding their 7 channel amp, which would be a good entry point to keep using my current speakers for now.

emotiva are awesome indeed. I just replaced my lavry and mytek dacs with emotiva stealth dc-1

[Hendrik]

I must say, even after only having it a day and using Hendrik's tray application (thanks again) it is surprising just how much better the USB-CEC adapter has made the HTPC experience.

I agree, just the simple commodity of the TV properly turning off on its own helps a whole lot.

For me, the only missing piece now is my DAC, which would be great if it could also go into standby automatically. It has a 12V trigger input, so I could control it over that, but I need to cook up a 12V trigger output for a HTPC..

[6233638]

I agree, just the simple commodity of the TV properly turning off on its own helps a whole lot.

For me, the only missing piece now is my DAC, which would be great if it could also go into standby automatically. It has a 12V trigger input, so I could control it over that, but I need to cook up a 12V trigger output for a HTPC..

I'd be interested in that too if you figure something out.

[6233638]

Well I forgot all about it, and I had never actually tried it before, but there is an "Auto" scene selection on my television which follows the content type reported to the display by the video card.

This is a standard HDMI feature, though I don't know if AMD or Intel implement it.

For Nvidia it is set in the "adjust desktop color settings" section of the driver control panel.
I wonder if they have an API which would allow Media Center to automatically report the content type as "Movies" when video files are being played fullscreen.
There is an "Auto" setting in the control panel, so there must be some way to specify what type of content your application is displaying.
 
When I change the content type manually in the control panel, the changes are seamless on the display without blanking, so it would be a very neat solution if it's possible for MC to control this.

[astromo]

The first draft of my tiny tool is finished, only took about the last hour, it simply sits in the system tray, doesn't need any configuration, and turns on/off all devices connected to the HDMI bus depending on screen on/off or standby of the HTPC. Neat-o!

The API to interact with the USB CEC device is pretty simple, so maybe I'll dabble with the remote control functionality as well, and we'll see if its worth supporting in MC.

Wow, this thread has drifted somewhat.

Anyhoo, the discussion on HDMI CEC devices piqued my interest and (without the long story) I ended up here:
http://forums.pulse-eight.com/yaf_postst493p12_I-made-the-CEC-adapter-work-with-Microsoft-Media-Center.aspx
where JRiver was mentioned by name.

Not sure what hardware you're working with but you might want to collaborate with AndrewFG. Seems like he's had a wheel pretty well built and possibly ready to roll for some time.

I'd be interested to see where all of this gets to.

[Hendrik]

Yeah we got the Pulse-eight adapters as well.
I really only set out to solve my problem of the TV not turning itself off when the HTPC goes to sleep, which was really annoying.

In the future, maybe MC will get support for such USB CEC adapters natively, so it can be controlled via TV remote.

[astromo]

Yeah we got the Pulse-eight adapters as well.
I really only set out to solve my problem of the TV not turning itself off when the HTPC goes to sleep, which was really annoying.

In the future, maybe MC will get support for such USB CEC adapters natively, so it can be controlled via TV remote.

I've seen this kit before (don't remember when) and it got me interested but I shied away from it given it's focus on other platforms. Didn't want to get in over my head. Your comment about putting the TV to standby got me thinking I should review the situation.

[Mikkel]

I'm waiting for a Behringer FCA610. Will give my opinion on it when its here. It is supposed to replace the Asus Xonar Essence ST + H6 due to some ground loop between the Essence main board and the H6-card.
The FCA610 will connect to the Behringer A500 via balanced cables, so I cross my fingers...


Best regards,
Mikkel