docs(tts): record the arm A engine decision and the loopback-publish law

Frank heard every audition pair and passed it, so likeness stopped being the
tiebreak and the engine was picked on the live-output criterion: arm A
qwentts.cpp 5916bf7, resident tts-server, 1.7 B talker, llama-tts-cli kept as
the rollback. Records the discriminators (first audio byte, warm RTF, spread),
the three consequences that are configuration (boot-warm every voice, no cpuset
pin, WAV-only registration), the two follow-ups left open on purpose, and the
corrected addressing law: a host-loopback publish is unreachable from a bridge
container, so the pair shares one quadlet network.

serverAppConfigs-docs/log.md

@@ -2311,3 +2311,48 @@ every restart since the cutover.
   Kokoro-enum-only — so "the agent talks in my voice" needs that provider row or
   a `pi.registerProvider` extension, decided in phase 2.
 
+## 2026-10-18 — TTS engine picked: arm A `qwentts.cpp`, on the live-output criterion
+
+- Frank listened to the four audition pairs (`qwentts-*.mp3` against their
+  `armB-*.mp3` mainline partners) and **passed every clone**. That deleted the
+  only axis the A/B could not measure, and the question was reframed: **which
+  engine is better for live output**. On that criterion RTF only has to stay
+  under 1.0 with margin — the discriminators are time-to-first-audio and
+  run-to-run spread, because an arm whose RTF can cross 1.0 stalls a live
+  stream mid-sentence.
+- **Chosen: arm A `qwentts.cpp` @ `5916bf7`, the resident `tts-server`, 1.7 B
+  talker Q4_K_M + Q8_0 tokenizer, in a `frank-tts-engine` container on 8880.**
+  The `TTS_BACKEND=llama-tts-cli` path in `scripts/frank-tts.env` stays in the
+  repo as the rollback. The numbers that carried it: first audio byte 86–451 ms
+  against a per-request model load, warm RTF 0.55–0.67 against 0.93–0.99, spread
+  ±0.01 against ±0.25, and a native `/v1/audio/speech` against no HTTP path at
+  all. Three consequences are configuration, not preference: boot-warm every
+  voice, do not pin a cpuset (threads are `hardware_concurrency()/2`), register
+  every pack with its WAV (a lone embedding is rejected).
+- Two follow-ups deliberately **not** decided: the **0.6 B talker** (0.44 RTF,
+  3.4 GiB, never auditioned — every clip is 1.7 B) and **ICL vs
+  embedding-only** conditioning. Embedding-only is the shipped default because
+  it is cheaper and needs no `ref_text`, which this fleet cannot transcribe
+  honestly; `.spk` + `.rvq` still ride in every pack, so ICL remains a per-voice
+  opt-in for batch work where total time beats first byte.
+- **Addressing law corrected** in
+  [[Local TTS and Voice Cloning]]: the pair may not meet at a host-loopback
+  publish. netavark DNATs published ports only and a bridge container cannot
+  reach a host `127.0.0.1` bind — the lesson that 502'd hermes — so
+  `host.containers.internal:8880`, which `scripts/frank-tts.env` documents, is
+  correct only for a routable bind. The deployed pair shares one quadlet network
+  and the façade addresses the engine by container name.
+- **PR #12** (`feat/open-notebook-podcast` @ `114dd7a`, 8 commits, 403 tests,
+  mergeable) is open: open-notebook + SurrealDB quadlets on the private bridge
+  `10.89.4.0/24`, API published on **5056** because seerr holds
+  `127.0.0.1:5055`, and `ESPERANTO_TTS_TIMEOUT` moved 600 → **660** to sit one
+  round-trip outside frank-tts's own `SHIM_TIMEOUT`. Stated in its body: it is
+  **not runnable end to end** — nothing listens on 7772 until the voice stack
+  lands, and the episode destination (`/home/dank/media/podcasts`) is interim
+  pending Gitea #7.
+- Still in flight, not in this branch: `feat/frank-tts-engine` — the arm A
+  image build, the quadlet pair on one network, the boot-warm step, deployer /
+  planner / `test-changed.sh` routing, homepage and docs. Whoever merges second
+  among the open branches resolves the overlap: `log.md`, `index.md`,
+  `deploy-remote.sh`, `deploy-plan.py`, `test-changed.sh`.
+