A few weeks ago, I grew extremely frustrated with my cable modem connection dropping out on occasion, and revisited the cable splitting approach to some success. However, something didn’t seem right about the speed test I was getting. I’ve been perfectly happy getting download speeds on the order of 5-7 Mb, and upload speeds on the order of 1 Mb.

With all of the hulabaloo on faster home Internet connections lead by the marketing giants at Comcast and Verizon, it left me wondering…

Could I squeeze out more from my home Internet connection?

A look on the back of my aging Toshiba cable modem gave me hope:

That’s a 10Base-T Ethernet interface from the cable modem to the home gateway (currently an Apple AirPort Extreme). Everything else in the home is Gigabit wiring, except for this one link between the home gateway and the cable modem. Could it be that this 10Base-T interface was now my bottleneck in Internet connection speed?

I upgraded to a Motorola SB6120 (with a Gigabit Ethernet interface to my home gateway), and put the unit to the usual speed test.

And check out the result:

That’s an improvement from 8Mb down to 29Mb down, and from 2Mb up to 8 Mb up. WOW! I was honestly shocked that the home network has now outgrown 10Base-T.

Financially, this was actually fortuitous timing; I had recently noticed on my cable modem bill that we were leasing our cable at a cost of $3 per month, and this was increasing to $5 per month in November 2009. Rather than start paying $60 per year to lease the modem, I simply shelled out $85 to buy the new Motorola SB6120 cable modem outright.

For several years now, I have been dealing with ongoing reliability issues with my cable Internet at home. It’s been sufficiently unreliable to notice, but not sufficiently unreliable to distract me from my infinite “MUST DO” list. We’re talking once every other day, I’ll notice that the connection will drop for about 30-45 seconds. Most of the time, I just refresh the browser and continue along my merry way.

My wife does not share this tolerance. She absolutely hates when a site she’s researching doesn’t load. The swirly browser “I’m thinking” icon sits there, taunting her, mocking her, bringing out the most vile of phrases from her mouth. If I were the Internet, I’d be hiding under the bed. For serious.

OK, not really that bad. But she’s quite vocal when it happens. I finally decided to do something about it.

Step 1 - Call Comcast. The friendly technician explained that the status information she was getting from the cable modem pointed toward a bad connection between the modem and the wireless router I used. Two possibilities there… bad router, or bad cable. I had already recently upgraded from an aging Linksys WRT54G to a D-Link DIR-655 Extreme N Wireless Router, so I more or less ruled that out. Cable? Easy enough to swap. Net result? No noticeable problems for a few days, then back to the same routine.

Step 2 - I swapped out the D-Link router for an Apple AirPort Extreme not too much later (not in an attempt to resolve this issue, but for research purposes). Problem stayed. This prompted me to explore further.

Step 3 - Question the wiring leading up to the cable modem. Took a gander in the basement. Can you spot the problem?

That’s an 8-way passive splitter. Each channel being attenuated by -11dB. That works out to each cable coming out of the splitter having less than 8% of the power of the signal that went in to the splitter. This has been this way since I bought the house, and never really paid attention to how the incoming lines were split.

I put a cheap $10 RadioShack 2-way passive splitter (each channel attenuated by -3.5dB, losing roughly 50% of the original signal strength) in front of the 8-way. One of those 2-channels heads straight to the office, the other into the 8-way to be distributed throughout the house.

The result? Too early to tell for reliability. BUT… I happened to run a speed test before and after the modification.

Cable Modem Speed with 8-way Splitter

Cable Modem Speed with 2-way Splitter

That’s an order of magnitude increase in upload speed. Boo-ya-ka-sha.

We’ve been having quite a bit of fun recently putting together videos at the office. We’ve got some decent equipment, but one thing has been bugging me for quite some time… the quality of our audio.

Here’s an example shot with a Logitech QuickCam Pro 9000 webcam using the built-in microphone, standing roughly six feet away from the camera:

It’s OK, but not the greatest. Here’s the same Logitech webcam, but this time sitting in front of the camera, roughly two feet away, with the direction of speaking always toward the camera (and thus, the built-in microphone):

MUCH better! But we still want to be able to do recordings at the whiteboard, walking around, etc.

Here’s an example using the mic built-in with one of our camcorders (an Insignia HD Flash camcorder, which provides amazing video quality for the money):

What’s the ultimate solution? Well, a high-quality lavalier microphone, of course! And we have one… it’s the Audio-Technica ATR-35S.

So, why then, on our latest (and also most popular) videos, do we still have not the greatest sound in the world?

Insignia camcorder with built-in mic, but noisy environment in the middle of office, with lots of moving around by the speaker (relative to the mic):

Same Insignia camcorder and built-in mic, but quieter area with more control of what’s going on:

Same Insignia camcorder and built-in mic, but a better job of noise reduction in post-production:

So, I ask again, if we have the lavalier microphone, why haven’t we been using it? The answer is … we don’t have any place convenient to plug in the lavalier microphone when using our camcorders.

The camcorders themselves unfortunately do not have external microphone inputs.

We’ve tried using the microphone inputs for some laptops and desktops we had handy (and synching the audio and video in post-production), but the poor quality sound cards built-in clearly had some grounding issues, because a hefty hum could be heard (and often overheard) in the background. Plus, this often meant a long cable from the lavalier microphone to the computer, which was likely to be tripped over. No good.

But as of today, that changes. I just picked up a Sony ICD-UX70 digital voice recorder for the video production team, with built-in stereo microphones, an external microphone jack, and MP3 encoding of audio files. Now, we can throw this in the shirt pocket for whoever is speaking on video (when we’re in a rush), or for the best quality, just have the actress or actor hold it/put it in a pocket and wire up the lavalier microphone to walk around freely.

We’re shooting some video this week… I’ll let you know how it works out (hopefully you’ll be able to hear the difference for yourself!).

Here’s to good quality audio.