Minbari

I think the basics should always be learned in a safe and repeatable scenario. I would never suggest somebody's first soldering project to be on something so small. No reason to learn how to handle a soldering iron on this. Learn on some decent gauge wires and make a little headphone amp or something. Learning the technique properly and then learn how to handle much more difficult and much smaller projects. Dumping a new beginner into a nearly impossible project is a great way to get discouraged and not actually learn any of the transferable skills... I can't think of much worse advice than suggesting that learning in a good, well laid out scenario with clear instructions is bad. Obviously soldering earpods is difficult and maybe more "real world" but it absolutely should not be the starting point for somebody here. Learning is an individual process that doesn't have a one size fits all solution, and that's why education is usually handled gradually, to ensure the fundamental skills are there before moving to a worst-case scenario.

Yes this is possible. You can use a TRS/TRRS diagram to find the pin connections. The biggest problem will be the incredibly thin gauge of internal wire. Having tried adding a new 3.5mm connector to the end of a higher end pair of earbuds, I have found it nearly impossible to remove the insulation without destroying the wire core also. There isn't a good reason to waste time trying something like this on a pair of wired earpods. A new pair is inexpensive and a second hand pair out of somebody's iphone or on some local classifieds will probably be $5 or something. Just buy another pair.

Yes visions is 100% legit. Been shopping at their physical locations for at least 10 years. One of those stores where "everything is on sale" so its always worth cross shopping with other stores to make sure you're getting a good deal, but in general they have some fantastic deals on most products, plus you can always ask for discount and negotiate in store for an even better deal. Great place to find good prices on audio products specifically.

If you like the features you can try using the Peace GUI for it as well - gives you a lot more options for the look and presets and such.

Equalizer APO is fantastic. Give it a try

Without knowing more about your use case I can only try and make some general suggestions. If you want to have proper support from one vendor it would be best to go with a solution from some provider like Dell or HP or Cisco or IBM... DIY whitebox solutions will likely get more raw performance per dollar but at the expense of having to deal with any warranty service or issues with the individual component vendor (and obviously not getting the same level of enterprise support). Threadripper 2 might also be a better option simply because availability of threadripper 1 is a little low, and there are fairly significant performance improvements between them. Threadripper is certainly cheaper than equivalent EPYC gear, but it is only based on a consumer platform and doesn't give you the opportunity to use server boards. If you are considering used hardware, new but discounted E5 v4 equipment is easy to come by and fairly cheaply priced. It might not offer the same level of performance as threadripper, but would still come with a few years of support.

Its never 100% possible to tell from pictures. from personal experience the rack is probably just fine, especially since the doors and panels have zero impact on the vertical racking rails or the ability to mount hardware. Lots of used racks have dings and dented panels and I'm sure much of the damage is easily fixable, and potentially the doors could be straightened too. I would be happy to buy that rack for a decent price. Minor misalignments and stuff on cosmetic panels that you only require for sound dampening shouldn't deter you unless there is something structurally wrong with the cabinet (very unlikely).

If you need the right side panel and it doesn't have one then don't buy it. Unless you find one locally for cheap (almost impossible) then you are left trying to find one on ebay and ship a massive panel that rarely exists without the entire rack. I can't imagine what it would cost to source one of those. You would be better off making your own or buying a different rack.

$350 for a Dell 2420 is a great deal but I am from Canada so I suspect prices are typically much lower for racks where you live. From personal experience the front and back of server racks is where the best noise isolation needs to be added since very little noise comes from the sides of server equipment unless you have many side blower switches or routers. The "best" diy route to isolate server noise is constructing a baffle of sorts on the front/back/both of the rack. This thread has some very simplistic models to illustrate the concept of air channels to let the servers breathe but line the air channels with acoustic dampening. I can't imagine a 24U installation would be cheap or small, but I have seen it done by a few people online who need to keep servers in their bedroom closets or similar. https://www.gearslutz.com/board/bass-traps-acoustic-panels-foam-etc/538696-soundproof-computer-cabinet.html My best technique to quieten my server rack is to just turn off as much equipment as I can, perform fan mods on obnoxious servers and routers, and generally remove all switch fans. All my switches run just fine with reasonable temps with passive cooling in the room. The least time intensive (but not very effective) solution would be to use an enclosed rack and add some basic baffling or foam to some parts of it to dampen a bit of the noise. Keep in mind the airflow restrictiveness of the front panel though, most server documentation will specify a required percentage of the front door to be perforated and open for airflow. I believe these are typically in the 80% range, and most rack doors are around there also. If the close proximity is absolutely required: 1. try and reduce the overall noise output of all your equipment (and condense/reduce the amount of equipment in the rack at all 2. get it as far away as possible from the people as possible 3. add basic acoustic foam or dampening to a rack 4. If needed build some basic air baffle to shut noise out.

In general you can find basic four post racks that have no panels. Enclosed racks with side panels and doors, and sound isolated racks that are designed to put servers in close proximity to people. New 25U four post racks can come from amazon or ebay and are pretty inexpensive. New ones are under $200, and there is likely plenty used ones for sale locally. Enclosed racks are a lot nicer and generally are able to support more equipment and offer a minimal level of sound deadening. New models will be very expensive, but usually used racks like a Dell 2410 or 2510 can be found locally for cheap from data centers replacing their older cabinets. I would expect used half height racks like this to sell for under $100 especially in Socal. Finding a sound isolation rack is very challenging used typically. I have seen a couple sell used in the ~$2000 range and occasionally people find one for very cheap on craigslist or similar, but it seems very uncommon. New prices for a quality sound isolating rack would likely be many thousands of dollars. Also remember that casters aren't useful once you have a rack full of equipment and you should probably lower the stabilizing legs once you have the rack in position- I cannot imagine trying to roll around a loaded server rack anywhere. I would also consider looking into racks that arent the full 1000mm, because finding one will likely cost a great deal more than a half height that is shorter (and your servers and cables can always just hang out the back if you have anything exceptionally long. I have my C7000 and 5108 chassis hang out the back of the rack slightly. I use a fairly basic 4 post 45U rack myself.

No you cannot use the E5-46xx or any of the E7 line in an R620. The first digit after the product line so E5-(2/4/8)xxx is how many sockets that cpu can be used in a server with. The E5-46xx and E7-(2/4/8)xxx were only compatible with different chipsets used in different servers. If you want to get into a system that can support the 46xx line or some of the E7's you could look at R810/R910 or the R820/R920 (or the HP / IBM / Supermicro / other variations of these). Using the chipset in the R620 you have to stick with the E5-26xx or E5-26xx v2

Don't go with a whitebox solution here. If next year you aren't with them anymore and they bring somebody else in, that could be messy. It also isn't worth the risk of using consumer off the shelf hardware with zero support for an application like this. Dell and HPE and lots of tier 1's have "small business" NAS solutions such as the Dell NX appliances. They are relatively affordable and have legitimate one stop warranty and support contracts. There is nothing wrong with DIY solutions for home NAS, but for a legitimate business/enterprise there really wouldnt be an excuse to have a server down for potentially weeks while you go through with an MSI motherboard RMA or something like that. Things are always bound to go wrong, so save yourself the potentially massive issues down the road and get in tough with some vendors and make a proposal for your law firm. It will almost assuredly work out better for them in the end.

For a newcomer to stock purchasing, purely buying companies that you are "interested" in isn't really the smartest move. If you are questioning a tech forum on stock options, you should seriously reconsider purchasing them right now. Schedule an appointment with an investment advisor somewhere who can talk you through all your options. Something like an index/mutual fund might be a much smarter investment to start off with if you have no experience.

In that price range, especially if 4K video is a priority I would suggest a Panasonic GH4, they can be had lightly used or new on sale in the $700 range and lenses are cheap for m43 bodies. It will have a smaller sensor than your a6000 but the GH4 is a great camera for shooting 4K on the cheap, but not as good for shooting stills. If you prefer to stay with a Sony camera you will likely have to give up 4K for that price range, but you should be able to get quality 1080p with a used a7ii or similar (but will require more expensive full frame lenses).

With SSD pricing so cheap these days, C$150-165 / TB makes pretty big SSD boot/storage a lot easier to go with. During video editing the random performance of SSD's is 100% worth it. For simple storing of footage though HDD's are more than enough. Sequential read and write above 100MBps shouldn't be an issue unless you need constant access to the files. I quickly looked at the data sheet for the T5600 and it looks like it has at least 4 sata ports on the board, but keep in mind that many of these machines came with LSI raid cards and support all kinds of drive expansion if you can find room in the case to hold them.

I believe both the T5600 and T5610 only support 2-3 hard drives each so I would probably look into a NAS or DAS for holding the bulk video files. I shoot to a Shogun flame in prores at about 400mbps and just have disks in the servers to hold the files because they simply dont all fit on a couple hard drives in the actual tower I use. On a budget of C$1200 though, it sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what you need and can expand down the line fairly easily when the time comes.

While the prices of many of the parts are high because of NZ, there's nothing really wrong with that build besides the GPU being underpowered. For a primarily CPU bound workload like coding, this is a pretty solid config minus the GPU?

I can't speak to many of the specific codecs and transcodes/renders you are performing, but I can share some general thoughts. I am fairly certain that an updated bios supports Xeon v2 CPU's in the T5600 tower, which would let you use even more powerful CPU's in the future for a decent price. I would seriously look into the specific jobs you are doing and whether they: - can be improved with more cores - can be improved with higher clock speeds on less cores - can be GPU accelerated. I have found that in a vast majority of video transcoding/rendering jobs on most software, a powerful GPU is almost always a good spend of money simply because of the performance increase. If less core counts and higher single threaded performance will benefit you, I would suggest the E5-2667 or E5-2667 v2 CPU's. I use these in my R720's and while they have less cores, the 4.0GHz max turbo is extremely useful. Likely you will want the 1070 Ti in whatever machine is primarily handling the videos simply because the 560Ti is so much slower than even low end modern GPU's. Another route you could look down is server hardware running headless somewhere and simply offloading all the transcoding jobs to it from your main desktop remotely, completely avoiding setting up another desktop/KVM for using that machine. Just a thought, though, either situation should meet your needs just fine. However, I can't stress enough the value of proper storage for use cases like this. RAID on hard drives is not the same as having a proper separate backup for files you care about. And I know from experience on RAW and Prores files that even a couple TB just doesn't go that far if you intend to store "old" footage for a while.

USB serial emulation works quite well in my experience. Best of luck!

Assuming the server stays up (but just doesn't display anything) you might be able to use a null modem cable into a laptop to reset the iLO to factory settings. I'm not familiar with that exact model of server, but most HP servers from that generation have some LED's that can light up to show you if there is trouble with a specific part. If you get into the console on the laptop and reset it, you might be able to get further, or at the very least read error logs from the console to find what is stopping the boot.

You need to find your keyboard shortcut for the real dual quotations symbol- two singles together will never be the same thing.

Meeting all of those requirements while staying on the cheap is extremely difficult. Cheap large scale expansion can be had but it just won't be quiet when its running. Pre built NAS units like synology/qnap/drobo/etc are expensive but relatively quiet and allow decent drop in expansion to an extent. My understanding is you was some network attached storage device that can scale up to many drives and maintain decent performance. And preferably cheap and quiet. If budget is the most important, a used NAS or cheap lga 775 desktop with a bunch of sata ports could probably get you some half decent expansion for the lowest possible outlay. If the maximum expansion is the most important and you can sacrifice some noise/cost then there are options. One possibility is building a cheap desktop out of some used hardware and in a case with quiet fans. For a couple hundred dollars a system with an X58 board and decent CPU could be built to hold quite a few drives, and with a budget raid card, many more drives could be added. Another option would be a used server like an R510 or R710 for ~$100 that can hold 8-12 drives and external powervault drive chassis could be added for massive expansion. for under $800 you could have a system capable of handling 60+ drives but it will not be quiet. For either of these solutions, using some system that allows for tiered storage would likely be your best bet. Load many hard drives for bulk storage and take advantage of cheap ssd prices right now to add some cheap ssd storage on top of the hard drives. Overall the best choice for you is just going to be whatever compromise you make because you can only really pick two from "cheap", "quiet" and "maximum expansion".

It is worth investigating whether this will actually support video output, or only GPU compute applications. I am not familiar with the exact model of server you are using (DL360 G7) but many servers from this generation that had "supported" graphics cards from the factory only allow usage of them for compute/acceleration jobs while requiring video output over onboard VGA or over the network. For some models there are ways to force GPU video output by disabling the low power onboard analog graphics but this poses its own set of risks/hassle. It would be worth experimenting with hardware you already have, or reading other people's experience before purchasing a bunch of hardware to go down this path. Best of luck!

Basically to have any hope of keeping connected in the present, anywhere you need a wired connection will likely need to have a traditional ethernet connection anyway. If you are willing to use some used equipment, some device like a Cisco 3750G switch can use a simple 1G fiber connection as an uplink and will host 24-48 gigabit ethernet devices. If you wanted 10G speeds you would need a much newer switch (maybe a Ubiquiti es16XG?). Before you end up deciding what hardware and cabling to get, you should have some plan of the type/number of devices you might want to use. Because it might be easiest to run both fiber and ethernet in your walls to avoid the need for a fiber capable switch in every room of the house. It's just difficult to run fiber exclusively to almost any device because so little uses fiber today. If you ran both to most rooms you could use a single switch somewhere in the house to provide some connectivity between the two. The other option is just wiring it all and still use copper for everything and let the fiber just sit in the walls until you decide to use it at some point. My only concern is that all this time/money might be spent now but in (5-10-20?) years a new standard is rolled out that consumer devices use for high speed networking and all that fiber isn't useful for it. It's so hard to predict where the industry will go that it makes it hard to justify spending money making it happen today (if it isnt being used today). I wouldn't even start a fiber home networking project unless I was willing to spend a minimum of $2000 for cabling, proper mounting, and even basic fiber switches in the house. Definitely have a look at someplace like FS.com because they have very good pricing on a lot of fiber infrastructure so you can get a quick idea of the rough cost for whatever size house you have.

That is the hardest thing about "future proofing" is that we don't yet have any idea of what the needs of the future might be. However, if you were willing to invest the up front cost and had the infrastructure in your house to use fiber throughout and still adapt your fiber network to ethernet connections for the some devices that would still require it, it is definitely possible. Wall plates for fiber cables are cheap. I would recommend buying pre-terminated fiber cables too because custom length cables require special tools are too much work to be worthwhile given the cost. OM4 fiber isn't technically the newest standard anymore but still supports 100G speeds over ~100m. If you go down this route you really need to do it properly and keep bend radius large and avoid tension in the cables in the walls because maintenance would be a huge pain. Cable raceway corners can be used to drape them nicely when there are many cables all going to one place. I don't think its the "best" idea simply because of the cost and lack of devices that can use it, but for a fun project, or for some devices that can use it, it definitely can be done. I suspect you already own/plan to take advantage of the fiber network if you were to build it. Would be a shame to wire a house complete with fiber and only see it used a decade in the future. I can point you in the direction of some good value fiber equipment and switches and cables if you are interested in going this route. Just consider all the other options before finally making the decision.