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Comment by foxrob92 | Hacker News Reader

I inherited a pair of speakers my dad bought in the early 80s. They still work well, though the amp died last year and I wasn't able to repair it.

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You can get a number of small amps these days that will plug into the speakers and sound great.

Many will also support Bluetooth so you can stream to your stereo.

Bluetooth is the biggest joke foisted on audio. Even at its best there is mandated compression, which means the highest quality signal will be mashed into a lowest common denominator piece of garbage.

Not to mention all the basement "remixers" who use audacity or whatever to "improve" the sound before they stream it, or max the volume to the point of constant red-lining, nevermind downgrading it to mp3 instead of using a lossless format.

The damage you do to your music is on you. I'm talking about damage inflicted automatically that you may not even be aware of.

That's why I said, "not to mention". That means not specifically to what you were saying, but in addition to it. I think I was also clear about the fact that it's not what I was doing, but what other people were doing. This is simple stuff.

Sorry if I wasn't clear, what I meant is that messing with your sound files should make it obvious that you're changing the sound - there's no surprise. BT is different because the expectation is that it works just like a wire.

By the same logic that there's mandated compression when you are forced to encode your stream as PCM. Bluetooth mandates compression, sure, but it's been repeatedly proven to be transparent at the bitrates used by even crappy hardware...

Just Google for 'SBC codec transparent' if curious.

Bluetooth's A2DP only real problem is the unspecified latency requirements.

As I said in my post, the bluetooth is optional. It's just a stereo amp so it has inputs for line level and phono. Buletooth is convenient for ad-hoc playlists.

Do you have a link to these small in-speaker housing amps?

I was referring to amps that don't house speakers but instead connect to speakers with traditional speaker wire. If you search for "stereo amplifier" on Amazon there are a bunch of them.

Several companies make all-in-one bluetooth speakers that have amps built in, but they tend to be lower quality in my experience.

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