The talk about digital music stores and online downloads by Steph in a previous post led to this: I have decided to tell all about my home-built digital front end audiophile music rig that has been delivering glorious uncompromised digital music through my valve amplifier coupled to a pair of excitable horn speakers.

Actually, many music nuts know how to do this already. If you are one of those nuts, please write in to give tips and show us your rig. For the rest, I’ll describe my experience building a non-network rig, which is easier to built and arguably delivers better sound.

It involves several steps, the most crucial of which is to get a big, silent external hard drive.

Step 1

I can safely recommend the Seagate FreeAgent 750GB (below) – a virtually silent fan-free drive that doesn’t get scary hot when stressed, even in a non-airconditioned room. I bought the firewire and USB 2.0 version. Firewire cos I wanna save one of those precious USB ports on my laptop.

A cavernous hard drive is the engine of your digital-music-audiophile-rig (er, Digmar?). You can also use a network drive to drive your Digmar, which gives the added benefit of being able to access music from any networked-laptop or PC in the house.

What I don’t recommend is the chic-looking Lacie designer drive I bought a while back. My 750GB unit roars – and wheezes – like a small turbine engine, literally drowning the music at close quarters.

Step 2

Next is to consider what audio formats to rip your ceedees in. There are only two options for this if you care about audio quality: lossless or uncompressed audio format. Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) or Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) are great, although purists say uncompressed formats like WAV or AIFF sound best. By best, it means not distinguishable from the original ceedee.

This is debatable, but even my not-so-good hearing seems to be able to discern the difference between both and preferred WAV. But WAV yields gigantic files. A CD of 12 songs can take about 500MB. A FLAC or ALAC compressed CD is less than half that.

And WAV can’t take cool album art such as the one below, as well as other meta data, at least in iTunes, which is a bummer.

The reason I mentioned choosing an audio compression format before discussing music playing applications and computers is because knowing which formats you want is necessary to determine how much storage you need.

Step 3

Hooking up your drive to a laptop or PC.

The good news is: Any laopok, old or second hand computer should suffice, so you can go cheap and still get high-end sound from your rig. But that’ll be for next instalment. Heh, I’m tired already writing up to here. How to build a Digmar will continue …

Further to Alfred’s post on number portability in Singapore …

ST Forum has published IDA’s response to my original letter. The reason they provided for not mandating true number portability (I will define true number portability here as when you can indeed port a number to any plan – pre or post paid) is …

“This is in recognition that consumers would choose mobile services based on their needs (for example, pre-paid users usually prefer the flexibility of not being on a contract), and most would likely stay as a pre- or post-paid mobile customers when they switch providers.”

Which consumers wouldn’t “choose mobile services based on their needs”? I’m sure consumers can easily find out the features and benefits of pre and post paid plans, and will choose accordingly.

BUT the point is the consumer’s needs might change and hence their choice of a mobile service might change. E.g., student starts work, uses the mobile more and wants to go from pre paid to post paid. Or like me, I’m out of the country but do come back now and then and hence want to move my Singapore mobile number from post paid to pre paid.

By disallowing true number portability, this simply goes against the initial reason for implementing what IDA calls “full number portability” – which is to empower consumers with choice and presumably promote and liberalise the local telco market.

After spending all that money and man hours of going through a public tender to get a centralised database administrator to manage number portability, how much more trouble or cost will it incur to allow number portability across pre and post paid plans?

My understanding of the number portability system is that there is a centralised database administrator which simply maps out the mobile number to the telco. You call a number, it gets routed to through this database which then passes the call on to the respective telco’s network.

What really is the issue behind Singapore’s incomplete yet “full” number portability system?

What with the surge in the number of bands trying to cut their teeth in the music realm, the battle of selling CDs to music junkies seem to be intensified on the Web, rather than on retail shelves.

Taking the heed of Radiohead (aka the greatest rock band of all time), Nine Inch Nails also went on to release their latest album on their website as a completely free download available in a large variety of formats. And the files weren’t small, compressed files either. Users with great patience can choose to download the entire album in the 1.2gb WAV “better than CD-quality” version.

Letting fans freely download the album appears to be an interesting marketing technique, considering the band had given away the first single freely, and the second single was released on their Facebook iLike page. And with record labels repeatedly claiming that such online downloads will rob them from CD sales, it would be interesting to note if this theory holds water, after physical copies of the Nine Inch Nails album hits the stores this month.

The anticipated price wars have begun! Reports everywhere are suggesting that Nvidia are finally lowering ther crazy S$999 prices for their GTX 280s. If you go to Newegg.com, you’ see that you can now get a MSI GTX 280 for US$459.99, which works out to be about S$620.10.

Now that’s a mch improved deal, if you consider that the cheapest GTX 280 you can get now in Singapore costs about S$899 at Potterhouse. Sure, the new $600 price is still higher than two ATI HD4850s (S$500+), but hey, there’s no worry about Crossfire scaling since the GTX 280 is a one-card solution.

Now, there’s only the wait for the price drops to come to SG, which will be swift, I assume. If you have been looking for the next best thing in a while, the GTX 280 suddenly looks great again… unless of course you want later versions with smaller die and things like DX10.1.

Now, this BFG-Dangerden GTX 280 monster would be a great replacement for my water-cooled 8800GTX now. (It costs more than stock GTX 280 of coz, but you can always buy the Danger Den waterblock separately).

According to local distributors, it will be in end of this month (July), when these power-packed graphics cards will make their way to shops here.

What we have now are these single-chip 512MB versions, which are selling for S$435 (e.g. MSI version) in Sim Lim Square shops.

What’s the big deal with these cards, you ask? If you are a hardcore PC geek, you’d already know that they herald ATI’s long-awaited comeback to bring some competition to the market.

PC gamers have seen Nvidia update/refresh their existing chips to the max, but never seen real next-gen improvements until recently – but that’s with the overpriced 280 GTX and 260GTX in recent weeks.

Now, the ATI’s HD4870s and HD4850s are giving them a run for the money. Two HD4850s (at 2 x S$279=S$558) in Crossfire can shoot along with a S$900+ 280GTX. Two HD4870s – preferably on the same card in x2 format – will do really well if they scale properly in Crossfire.

So if you are in the mood to upgrade your PC graphics for games like Age of Conan and Crysis, there’s never been a better time to plonk it for two cheap monsters from ATI.

(spy pix of the 4870×2 here)

Hutchinson/3 here in Hong Kong recently announced their iPhone prices and their mandatory subscription plans here.

To cut to the chase, it seems like if you’re thinking of getting an iPhone at an uncontracted price for use in Singapore – fat chance, at least for now. 3′s FAQ says:

	Will standalone iPhone 3G handset be available for sale?
	No. The iPhone 3G needs to go with a series of data-centric tariff plan in order to perform its best. 3 Hong Kong has tailor-made a series of data tariff plans, coupled with unique contents and applications, allowing 3G users to fully indulge in the mobile Internet world.

So that simply means that you’ve gotta be prepared to squander HK$2,938 + (24 months of HK$188) = HK$7,450 (about SG$1,307) for an 8GB one. Thankfully there’s no 7% GST on top of that.

Oh, and this is provided you are one of 500 “lucky” pre-registered folks who have signed up to buy it.

All that trouble and you’re still better off buying the US$600 uncontracted one from AT&T.

I think I’ll wait.

It’s official – the Guinness World Records has bestowed Firefox 3 as the most downloaded software in 24 hours! From June 17 to 18, the browser was downloaded over 8 million times. Weeks before Firefox 3 was ready, Mozilla rallied Firefox users to download the browser on June 17 Download Day and gathered 1.7 million pledges. Now, the total number of downloads worldwide stands at 28 million, and Singapore contributed about 130k downloads. Not too bad a number, considering that the numbers from our bigger neighbours aren’t very much bigger. With Firefox becoming more popular, I’m still baffled by the fact that some media websites still don’t work properly in the browser. Cross-browser testing as part of the 101 of web development somehow just hasn’t sunk in.

Yeah, you can do a striptease in Age Of Conan. I tried to see if the barbarians would stop to have a chat but i think they were too busy levelling up. Anyways by the time I hit level 6, that extra piece of chest armour was badly needed for my own survival

The street battles for mobile users are intensifying here, and these days, with cellphone operators fighing tooth and nail for customers, you can not only get a phone for free, but even free calls and mobile Internet – for up to 6 mths!

That’s exactly what I got for finally switching last night. I’ve been agonising on whether to leave M1 – I love it a lot, sorry, and I’ll miss the customer service after 12 years with it – but at the end of the day, it’s hard-earned cash that made my mind up.

How so? The HTC Touch Diamond phone which I bought just now cost me less than $200. Amazing? Well, let’s do the sums.

Original price for HTC Touch Diamond = $1098
Operator discount: -$500 =$598
StarHub PowerValue 300 plan discount -$100 =$498
Hubbing discount -$100 =$398
Trade-in my old O2 Atom -$200 =$198
Minus off my StarHub loyalty points -$50 =$148.

Amazing discounts, right? Truth be told, M1 and SingTel also have similar deals – they are both selling the Touch Diamond at around $598 with a basic plan.

But what swayed me in the end was also this amazing deal – 6 mths free subscription for new signups. That means another $48 (a mth) x 6 = $288 in savings.

Okay, I gotta pay about $37 for a new SIM card. But if you add the sums $148+$37-$288= -$103

Yup, I just got my phone free, plus I “pocketed” $103 (in fact I save another $60 coz of the free mobile Internet for $10 each month) because I don’t have to pay any subscriptions – almost – for the next half year!

The fact that SingTel has a similar free-six-months deal for its FIXED LINE users shows it is fighting a tough fight with StarHub. Will M1 now stand up and offer something similar? Let’s wait and see, but I don’t think it will stay till and envy the crowds at the StarHub shops (I had 60 people in front of me in the queue).

But in the end, I’m glad I’m rewarded for my patience these past 6 mths for not upgrading and tying myself in.. now, I am truly happy with the fruits of some real competition here – the toughest in years for sure.