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Aeta Systems 4MINX


myke2241

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  • 1 month later...
11 hours ago, David Lawrence said:

Very interesting report.  I have a 4Minx and I never noticed that tone with my unit.  It has been awhile since I last used the 4Minx so I will have to test it to see if I get the same tone that you did.

I tried two units, both with the same problem. Is noticeable with music or ambiences (Very quiet localizations), is difficult to hear with interviews or drama (Noisy localizations)

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  • 6 months later...
  • 9 months later...

Do users of the 4Minx still exist on this forum?

I opened mine up the other day (I'm replacing the button pad) and see that the software/firmware is stored on an internal 8Gb SD card. Has anyone else noticed this and have any improvements been made by swapping this for a faster card?

This means you can back-up the SD card by making an SD card image which can then be transfered should the original go bad. That's probably good practice for the future seeing as its not an officially supported product any more (although they do still have spare parts).

To this end, I was wondering if anyone with 8 channels and ambisonic features enabled might want to make anSD card image and store it somewhere publicly availble to help others who may experience corrupted internal cards at some point.. that would be a lot of investment to loose! :D  Of course, no ulterior motives here.....

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8 hours ago, LuckyNat said:

Do users of the 4Minx still exist on this forum?

I opened mine up the other day (I'm replacing the button pad) and see that the software/firmware is stored on an internal 8Gb SD card. Has anyone else noticed this and have any improvements been made by swapping this for a faster card?

This means you can back-up the SD card by making an SD card image which can then be transfered should the original go bad. That's probably good practice for the future seeing as its not an officially supported product any more (although they do still have spare parts).

To this end, I was wondering if anyone with 8 channels and ambisonic features enabled might want to make anSD card image and store it somewhere publicly availble to help others who may experience corrupted internal cards at some point.. that would be a lot of investment to loose! :D  Of course, no ulterior motives here.....

I was a user (I had a full unit), but I have a friend still with one, I could ask him. 

 

In other hand the ambisonic decoder option (Only for headphones) "only" works with the Sounfield SPS200 and any B format microphone, and sincerelly is a fiasco, the matrix was wrong. I had this option and no used it, IMMO much better use the fron mics as L and R for monitoring.

 

Only I miss the sound of the preamps (But not the noise)

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If you don't mind asking, that would be fantastic! At the same time, he can be backing up the internal card too for the future. I'll see what software I used to back mine up - it worked and I did transfer it to another SD card to test, just it wasn't a faster one, so have no idea if the software would speed up or not (possibly not).

Thanks for the tip regarding the ambisonic option - I don't yet have any ambisonic mic, but was thinking of possibly trying one in the future. My 4Minx is 4-track so can work with one ok, and of course with your suggestion could monitor as you recommend.

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By the way, I asked the guy at Aeta who was sorting out my replacement keypad, if the pre-amps in other equipment could be the same design as the 4Minx or Mixy -  he thought it quite possible as the same designer has been designing the whole range (analogue side? Many be digital too).. I did buy a Scoopy (for audio over ISDN) for €50 a bit ago to see if I could remove the pre-amps to compare. On the Scoopy at least, they are a sperate board with physical controls, a seperate power board (handles both batteries and 12V input) and an output amp board. I don't think it would be too difficult to combine them all, disregarding the rest. I think the Scppoy came before the Mixy... The Scoopy+ looks more like the Mixy but I think has software controlled elements for the pres, probably meaning the rest is tricky..

  Anyway, it would be good to find that the pres in a Scoopy are almost as good... you can regularly find them for around €50.

Scoopy%20AETA.jpg

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  • 1 year later...
  • 1 month later...
On 3/27/2020 at 5:06 PM, LuckyNat said:

Do users of the 4Minx still exist on this forum?

I opened mine up the other day (I'm replacing the button pad) and see that the software/firmware is stored on an internal 8Gb SD card. Has anyone else noticed this and have any improvements been made by swapping this for a faster card?

This means you can back-up the SD card by making an SD card image which can then be transfered should the original go bad. That's probably good practice for the future seeing as its not an officially supported product any more (although they do still have spare parts).

To this end, I was wondering if anyone with 8 channels and ambisonic features enabled might want to make anSD card image and store it somewhere publicly availble to help others who may experience corrupted internal cards at some point.. that would be a lot of investment to loose! :D  Of course, no ulterior motives here.....

Thnx Lucky for pointing this out.

I have briefly looked at the internal card and made a gziped data dump of the card.

The compressed file is 38,8 Mb small. I might also make some mountable images.

It was taken from a unit with timecode, and 8 tracks enabled, without the ambisonics option.

I won't post it here for now, since there might be intellectual property issues that Jeff may not be comfortable with.

I'd consider the thing abandonware anyhow.

If anyone is interested in the file send me a PM and I might send you a private copy for research purposes.

 

Here is some info:

(Sorry for the German locale)

sudo fdisk -lu /dev/mmcblk0
Festplatte /dev/mmcblk0: 7,53 GiB, 8068792320 Bytes, 15759360 Sektoren
Einheiten: Sektoren von 1 * 512 = 512 Bytes
Sektorgröße (logisch/physikalisch): 512 Bytes / 512 Bytes
E/A-Größe (minimal/optimal): 512 Bytes / 512 Bytes
Festplattenbezeichnungstyp: dos
Festplattenbezeichner: 0x00000000

Gerät          Boot Anfang     Ende Sektoren  Größe Kn Typ
/dev/mmcblk0p1           1   510947   510947 249,5M 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p2      510948   717119   206172 100,7M 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p3      717120   923291   206172 100,7M 83 Linux
/dev/mmcblk0p4      923292 15758711 14835420   7,1G 83 Linux

Partition 1 is a squashfs, 2 and 3 are ext2, 4 seems to be without any fs and empty.

 

df -h | grep mmcblk
/dev/mmcblk0p3                    98M     16M   77M   17% /media/xxxxx/e6926ee8-[...]
/dev/mmcblk0p2                    98M    860K   92M    1% /media/xxxxx/50d27041-[...]
/dev/mmcblk0p1                   9,9M    9,9M     0  100% /media/xxxxx/disk

 

The card looks like this one:

Transcend 8GB SDHC Memory Card Class 10

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On 4/3/2020 at 3:41 AM, LuckyNat said:

If you don't mind asking, that would be fantastic! At the same time, he can be backing up the internal card too for the future. I'll see what software I used to back mine up - it worked and I did transfer it to another SD card to test, just it wasn't a faster one, so have no idea if the software would speed up or not (possibly not).

Thanks for the tip regarding the ambisonic option - I don't yet have any ambisonic mic, but was thinking of possibly trying one in the future. My 4Minx is 4-track so can work with one ok, and of course with your suggestion could monitor as you recommend.

Hello LuckyNat, digging up an old post but I wandered if you could tell us which software you used for the working system backup. Are you on Mac or PC? I'd like to backup my system so if the original SD card failed (I bought my unit in 2012) I could quickly restore my unit and avoid costly/lenghty maintenance. Thanks in advance.

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I've opened my unit the other day to reinstall the SD and also removed the part of the housing around the battery bay with the NP-F sled. I've found 2 sets of PCB headers that might be an RS232 serial connection or JTAG and an interface to flash some ROM. There is also a tiny set of dip switches with a position legend and the word "Flash"on the PCB, therefor my assumption of the flash connection.

Scrollinng around the binaries and various other config files gives a good impression and lots of hints of how this machine works, however playing around with some Montavista toolchain or suite from anno 2007(?) is beyond my evening hobby and my linux skills for embedded firmwares are limited. This is an excellent hardware (I can not confirm the 1490Hz wining on my mid SN2XX so far with 8060 and superCMIT, just did a quick test though) with potentials never implemented and still useful as it is so far.

My wish would be, that this abandoned incredible versatile hardware reaches somehow adulthood on a FOSS firmware, though these hopes are rather limited. Few units out there, even fewer coders or even among owners.

 

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