AV Setup

The current (as of Fall 2011) AV system was set up Michael Morries Pierce and probably based off a predecessor by Sho. This description of the system is based on the archeological investigations of Pavel Panchekha.

Audio Chain

The main source of audio is the lounge computer, simpi.mit.edu, or one of your laptops. You can use play audio from one of these by plugging the loose audio jack into your laptop. (It might not be loose; it might be plugged into the lounge computer. It's the small thin cable that goes to the green port on the computer.)

This cable is plugged into the gray four-button multiplexer box, into input 1. It's the box made by Recoton, and it should be at the top of a stack of boxes under the TV; it does not require power (it seems to be a straight mechanical switch). The other inputs to this box are the DirecTV box, which is input 2, and the television, which is input 3.

The output of the gray box is plugged into the black three-button multiplexer box, into input 3. This is the Impact Acoustics box, and it needs to be plugged in (it's plugged into the thin power strip to the right of the TV). The other inputs are input 1, which is the hanging from the ceiling in the back left corner of the lounge (is this supposed to be audio output for the projector?), and input 2, which is the television. (Is the television plugged into both boxes? I don't know. Maybe... I'll put more effort into figuring this out later.)

The output from the black box is the audio control box; it is the CD input. The audio control box is the Technics box with a large round volume knob that sits at about arm-level. This is the box at where you can change the volume. (3 is about good; maybe 5 for soft music, maybe slightly higher for parties. It goes up to 20, but that volume might leave you deaf.) This box needs to be powered. The other inputs to the box do nothing.

The audio control box has two outputs, A and B. B is currently hooked up to nothing (it should eventually be hooked up to the hallway speakers). A goes to the amplifier, which is the panel with lots of wires coming out of it next to the oscilloscope. Both of these outputs are broken into left and right and then into positive and negative wires; here, the white strip / gray wire is positive.

The amplifier connects the audio control box to the speakers and the subwoofer. The subwoofer wire comes out the back, the speaker wires from the right part of the front panel, with white/gray wires negative. This box also needs power. The speakers this connects to are only the left and right speaker over the projector screen. Those speakers have power provided by this amplifier, so they don't need power. Here you can adjust the gain setting to change how much subwoofer you can handle.

Software Setup

The desktop on the simpi.mit.edu machine is running 11.04; the main difference from a base install in terms of audio is that it is running a system-wide pulseaudio server. Thus if you want to add users (why?) add them to the audio group.

So far, we don't have any media setup beyond VLC; we should work on that. But for now, if you set up VLC to stream music to rtp://simpi.mit.edu (if you're interested, that's port 5004). This can also be done from the GUI --- you go to Media > Streaming (Ctrl+S), pick the files you want to stream, and pick Stream; then hit Next, set New Destination to RTP / TS, click Add Destination, and finally type in the URL simpi.mit.edu. Yeah, it's ugly, we'll try to fix that.