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HI All, I have just acquired an Auralic Aires LE and I thought it would be a good idea to start up a dedicated thread so other users can share their experiences, tips and tricks. I will take possession early next week and before I do I have been thinking of transferring my music collection onto a new HDD, should I buy a HDD with it's own power supply or should I buy one that uses the Auralic's power? I'm guessing buying one with its own power would reduce any interference. I will be connecting the Aires LE to my Chord Hugo DAC. I'm planning on using the Digital Coaxial over the USB, should I be considering the USB path? If so, why? Thanks for looking.

Hi All, I've had a good hard look around the forums and around the net about how to upgarde my HDD in my SD Foxtel IQ box. Most of the threads are very old and many point to software called SkyCopy+ So I wanted to just put it out there again as a fresh question to see if anyone has had an opportunity to upgrade their SD Foxtel IQ HDD's recently and knew how to backup the old recordings and also install the new HD. I removed my HDD from my Foxtel box and connected it to my PC, when I ran SkyCopy+ it didn't recognise the HDD, so I think the SkyCopy+ app is no longer able to copy Foxtel IQ hdd's for upgrading. Does anyone else know how I can go about upgrading my HDD? My current Foxtel IQ box is about 3 months old and has a 160gb HDD, which in my opinion is not big enough!! Thanks!!

I went into Myer Maroochydore today to see some of the current Panasonic HD TV sets in use. They had a L55ET50A which I persuaded a salesman to let me try out for a while. Unfortunately all these stores tend to daisy chain their sets to broadcast SD commercial TV through some antiquated and tortuous video plumbing with poor quality amplifiers and cables (probably hangovers from the analogue era), so any assessment of picture quality can only be comparative between the various brands and models so lumbered with such poor quality source imagery. To get around this I brought along a portable USB HDD with a range of different video files and still images to try out. My USB powered HDD required 2 USB ports to boot up (using supplemental power as I expected) but was then recognised by the TV. Both my FAT32 and NTFS partitions worked ok. As I use a Mac computer, I tried out a few MOV H264 files that I had made myself. A P&S 640x480 file was pretty well unwatchable scaled up to full screen (as expected but worth a try), although there is the option to view at original size - so best seen on a PC screen anyway. A bunch of 720p H264 MP4s played OK, but as these had been down sampled from 1080p to upload to YouTube, they did not look that great either. I had a 1080p MOV straight out of Final Cut Pro X, but the TV would not recognise this. A shame, as that was the equal of broadcast HD. I then tried out a variety of older AVI format DIVX and XVID type movie encodes from DVD. As long as the bit rate was up there (i.e. video file of at least 1.5Gb or bigger) they were acceptable to watch at armchair distance, although some macro blocking and artefacts were seen. Finally I tried out a few 720p MKV files at 4Gb or bigger encoded from blu ray. These all looked great on the screen and upscaled quite well. I imagine a good quality blue ray player with original disc would produce stunning results on this set but I was unable to try this out. I did not try out the 3D capability either. The menu file navigation system on the set was able to move about a bunch of folders within folders and then the files within those ok. I then tried out viewing photos on the TV. I was immediately disappointed to find that when viewing JPG images, the file structure is totally ignored. The display just dumped thumbs of every JPG image found on the HDD with no way to discriminate and only see a small collection in one folder. This is a severe limitation as I had hoped to be able to have my entire photo library available to selectively view, maybe there are options to deal with this, does anyone know? (The inelegant solution is to load up a thumb drive with those pics desired to be seen). When viewing the JPG files however, the results were exceptionally good. The source images were all well over the 1920x1080 size (many were 21MP from my Canon DSLR) and these downscaled for the screen and displayed extremely well. I am a photographer and being able to view my photos on such a large screen is actually quite important to me. So thumbs up for this, if only the folders containing the images were respected by the TV viewer firmware. I have been looking more into these sets and now will probably wait until June for the release here of another model, which has even better specs, although a slightly smaller screen size. The Panasonic TH-L47WT50A looks to be my choice. Anyone have comments on the above?

Item: Western Digital WD My Book Duo 4TBLocation: Melbourne (CBD or inner East) Price: $140 Item Condition: Excellent. No box, just Power supply, USB cable and device with 2 WD Red 2TB drive. Reason for selling: Not being used as I current have 2 Synology NAS to backup data Payment Method: Pickup - Cash, Paypal, Prefer not to post Extra Info: The device is a great USB3 backup, that can be connected to PC, MAC or as a Backup to a NAS like Synology. It can be formatted as FAT, EXFAT, EXT4, NTFS, HFS (Mac). The drives are removable and it can be used as RAID 0, RAID 1 or JBOD. The age of the device is approx 1.5 years, but the HDD have only clocked up a small number of hours, as the device was set to sleep after 30 minutes and has mostly been disconnected and off https://www.mwave.com.au/product/wd-my-book-duo-4tb-dualdrive-raid-desktop-external-hard-drive-wdblwe0040jch-ab56248?gclid=Cj0KEQjwxPbHBRCdxJLF3qen3dYBEiQAMRyxS0S4Jn8jeFJ4vF3S6G2qxDIPRLrzCnIw0O5FuPrbgs0aApa28P8HAQ#detailTabs=tabOverview Pictures:

This hard drive has been used sparingly and is in excellent condition. Tested, no bad sectors - see screenshots of test reports. Formatted for you in NTFS. Extremely easy to use - you don't have to install anything, just plug it in and it's ready to use. Smart and energy efficient - turns itself on and off with your computer. Environmentally-friendly - designed to save power by going into standby mode after 10 minutes of inactivity. It is also very silent compared with other external drives. PC and Mac compatible. $40 - pick up from St Kilda 3182.

Item: Panasonic PWT520 Blu Ray Player , Twin TV Tuner and HDD recorder Location:Keysborough, Melbourne Price: $150 (neg) Item Condition: 7/10 - Has small dent on top panel does not effect operation Reason for selling: Not being used Payment Method: Pickup - Cash, Paypal, COD Only Extra Info: Had this for a few years in my listening room but not really being used anymore Pictures:

Item: 5 x 3TB HDDs Location: Kogarah Price: $75 each or $350 for all 5 Item Condition: good Reason for selling: raising funds for a new amp Payment Method: Pickup - Cash, Paypal, COD Only Extra Info: Hi have for sale 5 x 3TB HDDs. They were used in a NAS and I have replaced them with 5TB drive so no longer needed. 2 drives are WD Green and the other three are seagate. Health check shows good on all 5 drives - happy to pm health check reports. Pick up preferred either from Kogarah after hours and weekends or near central station during business hours.

Item: Samsung T1 Portable SSD Drive - 1TBLocation: AdelaidePrice: $350 (I think RRP is $700)Item Condition: Like New - used a few daysReason for selling: Change of directionPayment Method: Pickup - Cash, Paypal, COD OnlyExtra Info: Bought this last week, was going to attach it to an audio streamer but then decided to change direction, so no use for it anymore. Formatted and used once to test it is okay. Pretty much like brand new. Comes with box and cable. http://www.thessdreview.com/our-reviews/samsung-portable-ssd-t1-review-1tb-price-speed-capacity-security/2/ Looks like it is a Samsung mini 850 Pro SSD inside. Pictures: