robcee.net

The enbloggening.

Switching back to Windows

interior image with all the glowy bits

It’s been a good run, but nearing the end of 2019, I’ve decided to make the switch back to Windows after nearly two decades of being primarily a Mac user. Don’t get me wrong, since 2002 when I got my first IBM PowerPC-based Mac Pro, I’ve always had a PC running alongside it. At the […]

Multi-room audio with the HiFiBerry DAC+ Pro and Volumio

The old amplifier's faceplate.

After my kitchen stereo project, I’d been thinking about the next stage in my multi-room, RaspberryPi-based audio setup: The Living Room! I had, in a box, unused for probably ten years, an old NAD C272 stereo amplifier. A pair of Paradigm Atom bookshelf speakers were gathering dust down in the basement that used to belong […]

HiFiBerry Amp 2, Vintage Koss Speakers and Volumio

I’ve been a Sonos user for probably five years now. Initially, they were something of a marvel of integration and software polish, providing ease of setup and room filling sound for … they are not cheap. Their closed ecosystem was another sour note for me, but I pushed past that in favor of convenience. The […]

Hardwares

One day in March, 2018, I woke up feeling pretty good about the day ahead of me. Coffee, a little light internet and then a good two to three thousand words on my book. That was the plan, anyway. About three quarters into my coffee, my screen turned to black and white vertical lines and became […]

Audirvana 3

Last year, around this time, I was about a month into my iTunes replacement experiment with Audirvana+. I still get a lot of hits on those articles, so I thought it was time for a follow-up on how that’s going. That is especially relevant now that Audirvana has reached the shiny 3.0 milestone, with a […]

USB Overdrive, new life for abandoned hardware

This post is a note of appreciation for Alessandro Levi Montalcini‘s USB Overdrive for macOS. I put off buying this software for a couple of years, making due with sub-rate work-arounds and inadequate stop-gap drivers for a slew of random USB devices that have come and gone: The Xbox 360 controller that refused to work; […]

Syncing Playlists with the Fiio X3 (or X1 or X5)

Awhile back I wrote a review of my portable digital audio player, the Fiio X3 2nd generation (Amazon US, Canada). The summary of that review was that this is a bare bones audio player, with a simple UI, that is beautifully-built with an attention to sonic quality. It sounds fantastic but has a few UI […]