Radiating, Convecting and Blown

Back during my self-isolation period in March I had a shift around in the lounge / entertainment room. I wrote about it in this communication. A part of the entertainment system that has always bothered me is tech-corner. In this corner of the room there are a number of heat producing devices all stacked but separated by two layers of Lego bricks.

There is an AV-Amp, the PS4, a Blu-Ray player, PSVR interface ,Nvidia Shield TV Pro and ancillaries. The AV-Amp gets quite warm just by being powered up and the PS4 sounds like a Harrier hovering straight above the house. I have spent occasional minutes searching online for a “stacking system” or something to make this whole collection on electronics a little more stable. Two days ago I tried again and search for hi-fi stands. This produced no helpful results but did lead me to looking at computer monitor stands and laptop stands. I went and found the tape measure and chose a product which seemed like it would do the job well.

Yesterday the stands arrived and I installed them into Tech Corner.

Although it looks as though there is a large gap above the amp – there is – but the whole point of this was to spread out the devices more. The Blu-Ray player is rarely used, but it works better as a disc player than the PS4 and so will maintain its position in the corner for now. Most movies are either streamed through the internet connection or via the LAN from the NAS Drive. The PS4 now has more radiating space and hopefully air circulation around the corner will be improved. A few years ago I had a small fan in the far corner to push the air around and I might consider that again, if I can find a silent one. It doesn’t need to be a powerful fan, just strong enough to push some of the hot air out of this cave.

The devices in the photograph are slightly different from the March picture. Top to bottom they are:

Blu-Ray Player
250GB SSD – expansion drive for the PS4, to the right of PS4
USB-C hub – for the PS4
PS4
LAN Switch – grey, to the back
AV-Amp – Sony STRDN1080
NVIDIA Shield TV Pro – now “standing” to the left of the Amp
PSVR interface – bottom right
Bloody cables are all over the place, caused by length of cables not matching dimensions of room.