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Comment by robbrown451 | Hacker News Reader

I like Neil, saw him in concert long ago and have listened to a ton of his music over many decades. Admittedly, hardly any in recent years unless I go on a nostalgia binge for a day or two. He is, or at least was, brilliant.

I agree with him here, mostly. I wish a bunch of other artists would do the same. Censorship is a complex issue, but there is a lot of mass delusion going on recently and a lot of lives lost because of it.

I haven't really listened to Rogan except clips of what he's said on this issue. But I liked him a lot on Newsradio.

It's not like it is going to hurt Neil, he doesn't need the money. I can't see a huge amount of people streaming his music anymore.

That said, if Neil wants to be "pro-science," he should have never pushed his high res music stuff which sure doesn't stand up to double blind testing.

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Neil Young had a whole album that made allegations about GMOs that were not backed up scientifically.

A link from MSNBC :

https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/neil-young-gmo-monsanto-msna6499...

Have GMO advocates scientifically backed up their safety claims?

The burden of proof lies on the side deploying self-replicating novel agents into the environment.

Such things are investigated before they are released, that's the whole point. Thinking that some corporation sticks fish genes into tomatoes and then just gets to sow that wherever they want with no investigation whatsoever is frankly delusional.

So, the burden lies with our ancestors who turned teosinte into corn?

The highlight being the chorus: "mon-san-to let our farmers grow"

So where is the problem? It is not something in realms of scientific discussion. More like with open-source or right to repair. When someone has issue with GMO lot of people assume that it is because of the 'technology' - not the politics.

It's a fun one. I'm not pro-censorship either, but I also don't think he should do business with platforms he finds unethical.

In a world where competition exists, this is simple - one publisher can carry one author, other publisher can carry others and you just buy the content from the one you prefer.

In a world where everyone defends consolidation into monopolistic platforms and you need to choose which tech platform will own your life this becomes a problematic political issue. At least it's convenient right?

Not dealing with platforms you don't like is one thing, blackmail is another.

I don't see any evidence that NY was blackmailing Spotify. Wouldn't that require NY to be threatening to release some kind of compromising information about Spotify?

I think we both agree that he did not only make threats, but also follow up on them. Weinstein could also have made arguments that he never threatened any actresses to sleep with him, he was just withholding jobs from the ones who didn't. Call it the way you want, but the guy clearly abused his position

The difference being that one of those examples is illegal.

and the similarity being that both are immoral

Tying market participation to conditions within said market is just doing business, almost prototypical even.

I haven't seen NY saying the spotify CEO won't see their kid again unless Rogan disappears from the platform - that would be blackmail.

> should have never pushed his high res music stuff which sure doesn't stand up to double blind testing.

Not necessarily, e.g., AAC is pretty bad: https://forum.shotcut.org/t/crackling-distorted-audio-in-exp...

Apart from that, you're being severely shortsighted if you think playback is the only thing to do with an audio track.

> you're being severely shortsighted

Do you mean the royal you, or me specifically?

I think mastering is far more important. And I agree other audio formats aren't all great.

But uncompressed CD quality audio is perfectly fine, in terms of resolution, humans can't detect beyond that. Neil's Pono stuff was a waste.... it was MASSIVE datawise for no good reason.

Keep in mind there are 2 axes.

In the time domain, you're absolutely right, Nyquist–Shannon proves that we don't benefit from sampling higher than twice the upper bound of human hearing. Rates like 96kHz or 192kHz are useless for quality (although in specific live situations, they have utility in that the latency would be half or quarter that of typical rates, for a given buffer size in samples).

In the amplitude domain, CD quality (16 bits/sample) is pretty damn great for typical mastered audio (~96dB undithered, ~120dB dithered) but if the audio is unusually dynamic (i.e., loudness is not maximized) like with a symphony orchestra, you might actually turn up your sound system to the point where quantization noise becomes evident in the quietest parts, at which point you absolutely would benefit from more bits per sample (say, 24, yielding ~144dB of range undithered).

So in practice, you're right, CDs are fine; but "humans can't detect beyond that" only truly applies in the frequency domain. We can detect latency (not applicable to playback of recordings) and we can detect quantization noise when cranking up the volume knob.

Right, but of course on most recordings (including Neil's own), that seems very unlikely to be an issue.

More significantly, though, the Pono format took about 30 times the amount of data as lossless CD quality. While you are talking more like 1.5 times.

https://www.mouser.com/applications/high-resolution-audio/

Meta: I have no idea why someone downvoted you, and gave you an upvote because your explanation is accurate, and unusually well-written, IMHO. Although I'm curious what you mean about "detecting latency". You mean between two sources, for positioning? I'm not sure the relevance of that here.

Thanks. I love the stuff!

> You mean between two sources, for positioning? I'm not sure the relevance of that here.

It's only really meaningful in scenarios like a recording studio where the performer is listening to themselves live, in headphones, if the signal undergoing A/D and D/A conversion with some processing in between. It could mean 2ms instead of 8ms, which can be the difference between distracting and not. Not relevant here (I admitted "not applicable") but just an example of where some utility does exist, but the utility is definitely not audible frequency response.

>latency would be half or quarter that of typical rates, for a given buffer size in samples

Would reducing the buffer size be another way to solve this?

Yes, but buffer of some particular (possibly noticable) size is a necessary evil to avoid underrun glitches.

Is it the the size of the buffer in samples, or in milliseconds that matters?

In my experience, samples, although I don't know exactly why. But it's why you can get lower latency glitch-free audio with higher sample rates.

Yeah, FFMPEG famously had a troubled AAC encoder for a long time. It's a bit better since FFMPEG 5.0 was released recently. There is a huge difference between AAC as a codec and the quality of file FFMPEG can generate for it.

> Censorship is a complex issue

Sure seems to be simple: "speech I like is good, speech I don't like is bad".

I imagine that is how someone who doesn't understand nuance would characterize it.

If you understand why such legal concepts as fraud and defamation exist, you would understand that there is indeed nuance to the concept of freedom of speech.

That's not what's at issue here though, is it.

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