Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013)
audioasylum.com
audioasylum.com
There are those that are obsessed with objectively measurable sound quality. They want to reproduce the recorded waveform as accurately as possible, and they want products that can be measured doing that, but they often pursue accuracy beyond the limits of any human to hear.
There are those that like a little distortion or degradation if it sounds nice to them. These are the people who collect tube amps and will openly admit they're not as accurate, but accuracy is not what they're after.
There are those who embrace voodoo. I knew a physics professor who was one of these. He had hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, "ambient field conditioners"... You name it. He knew there was no scientific basis for any them to work, but he had very deliberately deluded himself. If asked, he'd explain that the ultimate goal of the audiophile's pursuit was pleasure. If he could shut down his reasoning and spend hours moving resonator stones around on top of his CD transport until he thought he had improved the sound, and this gave him pleasure, was that pleasure not real even if the sound was exactly the same?
Then there are those who combine contradictory aspects of all of the above without any self-awareness or critical thinking skills. That's the sort that will torment themselves, and others, arguing on internet forums about why their own snake oil of choice is legitimate, real, and how anyone who isn't using it is a cretin.
Usually, errors and distortions stack across multiple system components. While really bad components can be A/B/X tested accurately, good ones rarely can be. Still, imperceptible errors that accumulate/amplify can result in actual, audible differences. One can liken it to floating point computations where the error ranges grow each time and can reach unacceptable levels.
I just wish there was any competition left in the big players to push measurable home audio performance higher.
Not really that expensive: https://www.parts-express.com/Dayton-Audio-OmniMic-V2-Acoust...
https://www.parts-express.com/search?order=relevance:desc&ke...
Not as real as the pleasure obtainable by spending all that money on hookers and blow instead of hideously expensive snake oil.
Money can buy happiness, but it's not always a good deal.
Not simply beyond human hearing but beyond the limits where any information is preserved at all. There's a class of audiophiles who have never even heard of Shannon-Nyquist.
Of course it was, the placebo effect exists and works after all. Where these audiophiles turn into audiophools is here:
> hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, "ambient field conditioners"... You name it
They allow themselves to be duped by unscrupulous snake oil merchants instead of simply telling themselves that the rocks they collected on the beach are just the thing to liven up their sound stage.
This reads like "I feel totally alone in diverging from the norm that microwave TV dinners are as good as any other food, I much prefer home cooked meals". Like... that's not a controversial opinion, that's normal. OP taking an elitist stance about doing something that everybody else does and having an opinion that everybody else agrees with.
And now they don't. Your comment conflates two things: what people agree is true vs what people do. Everyone knows that decent stereos or audio setups sound better than phone speakers. That isn't up for debate. But they stopped buying decent amplifiers and speakers because music precipitously dropped as a cultural cornerstone with the mainstreaming of the Internet. If you ask someone with headphones on today what they're listening to, it's just as likely to be music as it is to be podcasts, news, youtube videos about video games, or youtube videos about a random topic that you would never think people would care that much about.
> Do you think people wouldn't notice if a cinema replaced their 10.2 surround with a couple of phone speakers?
This is actually a pretty good example. Obviously they would notice. But it turns out that they don't actually care very much: the masses are perfectly happy to watch shows and movies on tiny screens with terrible audio.
25% of US adults, say, spending on audio gear may be a huge market segment, but it's still a minority!
The reason sound systems aren't as popular as they were in the 80s is that most modern TVs come with decent stereo sound, and bluetooth headphones are excellent. People are buying decent amplifiers and speakers, built in to other things because manufacturers know that they will get more sales if they make the built-in audio quality of their devices better.
> People tolerate watching things on small screens without good audio, sure, but that doesn't mean people prefer it.
Their actions indicate their preferences. If they're doing it a certain way then they, by definition, prefer to do it that way. No one is forcing them to do otherwise. Audio equipment is not expensive.
I doubt that $40 billion of AirPods would be sold every year if most people didn't care about audio quality to some extent.
The original airpods did not sound good at all, so I don't see what your point is here. Yes, they're still better than phone speakers, but if people actually cared about quality they wouldn't sell as much.
The point is that there's a $100b+ industry towards selling audio devices.
You can debate to what extent people care about audio quality, and what tradeoffs they're willing to make for better quality, but you can't deny that the majority of people appreciate that phone speakers are not the optimal audio setup.
I don't ask people for their IQ score before I spend time with them, but this has held true across the entire cross-section of society that I've personally experienced. When I was working as a dishwasher, everyone would bring small Bluetooth speakers to their area if they wanted to listen to music.
Do you think that people with a certain background / IQ score are not enlightened enough to recognize tinniness or poor sound quality?
I can't claim to speak for everybody, but I think that as high-end (relative to previous standards) audio tech has become very mainstream over the last decade or two, most people recognize that the default phone/laptop speaker setup isn't ideal.
If you're talking about someone hosting a party where they're playing music off their phone/laptop, that's something I've never personally seen before lol
I think you hit the nail on the head- people think a big stereo is for volume levels, not quality. They will obviously switch to it when they want things louder, but often not before.
When I went to public high school in rural America, pretty much everyone I knew owned some sort of headphone/speaker system, and they would be used at every party / larger gathering where audio was important.
It depends on the context though. Obviously if someone is just sharing something casual like a Youtube video on their phone, they're going to use the built-in speakers.
But like always “most” depends on the population. Most people would have no opinions or nonsense opinions on programming languages I guess, because most people have never written a line of code. It doesn’t tell us much about the popular programming languages, the general population is just the wrong one to sample for that kind of info.
Considering the top100, yah, no one cares about audio quality. Airpods are a symbol of status, not a relevant audio accessory, and from a hifi perspective, they are shit. Im not saying they dont sound good, what Im saying is that equalization does miracles when the sound isn't there. The compression format is lossy.
I consider myself an enthusiast/hobbyist, not an audiophile, and hold a pretty high level of scepticism about the truly devoted tbh.
That said I've never had the pleasure of listening to anything north of around the £10k mark, so I would love to be convinced of a genuine move-the-dial listening benefit of the really high end gear!
Some really nice floorstanding speakers though offer a jaw dropping improvement that’s measurable.
Be a while before I can justify even contemplating that sort of hifi spend anyway so I shall proceed in blissful ignorance for now :-)
Is that in USD?
https://shop.martinshifi.co.uk/products/b-w-nautilus?variant...
Can be yours for the bargain price of GBP 57,750
I think the gentleman is looking for something a bit more high class sir.
https://hifi-products.com/Transmission-Audio-Transmission-Au...
That's the price of a Yamaha HS5 and some other speakers in that range.
And yep after that you definitely start getting diminishing returns.
https://www.amazon.co.jp/-/en/Yamaha-HS5-Active-Monitor-Spea...
Only reason to spend more is aesthetics, features, and SPL (fair enough).
Most of the budget in high end production facilities goes into room design and acoustics.
1. Studio monitors are chosen for their flat response curve over a given range not because they: a) accurately cover a large frequency range including bass, b) have exceptional clarity and ultra low distortion. 2. Bookshelf speakers can get really good but they ultimately require subwoofers to cover lower frequencies and that requires not only a good subwoofer with excellent clarity. 3. The vast, vast majority of studios master audio to sound good on a wide range of devices ranging from smartphone speakers to earbuds to $50 soundbars. And ultimately with the "loudness wars" still in full swing, dynamic range compression is widely used.
I don't disagree with you that room treatment is of paramount importance. But there is a very, very noticeable difference hearing a good recording over a pair of floorstanding full range speakers with excellent tweeters+woofers and a decent amp. My point a good setup including subwoofer+crossovers+bookshelf speakers that hits the point of diminishing returns tends to approach the $10-15k mark including amp.
Some things are a total waste of money. Fancy power cables, super-expensive amps with zero measurements to justify the cost. Snake oil stuff like special ethernet cables, etc.
But speakers, as the highest distortion element of the audio chain, absolutely improve noticeably even up to $10-15k or so. I purchased some GoldenEar Triton One.R speakers a few years ago and they still blow people's minds when they listen to them. Everything from the bass to the treble are crystal clear yet not fatiguing.
Except, they don't. The only reason to buy a 15k speaker is to gain a higher SPL before distortion kicks in, or you want some cool feature or aesthetics.
For a home user just seeking good (accurate) music reproduction, there is not much point to spending more than a couple grand on a 2.1 system.
Beyond that, you are best to spend money on EQ, then room treatments and extra subs to try and sort out the low end (the most challenging aspect of music reproduction).
Great. So I really don't need the expensive stuff then. It will actually be a distortion of what the engineer intended
Additionally, a few genres (notably some jazz and Western classical) as well as select recordings here and there actually do not have "loudness war" issues and might actually have good dynamics. For these, it's nice to have a system that can handle, say, the full blown volume swings of a Romantic-era symphony.
You can probably fulfill these requirements with a system far under $15K. :)
I actually was under the impression that the audiophile market (at least the stereotypical) was fairly "dead"; it was more of a thing in, say, the 1970s-1980s phenomenon (with a follow-up in the late 1990s with the home theater boom) when the gap between consumer electronics and hi-end electronics was a lot bigger, and there was a lot less technical information out there (so mythology over things like cables and flowery descriptions of sound were more rampant).
There’s also many other brands in high end production facilities like for example ATC which easily exceed 10-15k a pair.
I often see fairly high quality floor speakers for near free at thrift stores, etc.
To be fair, I am talking about things that were probably $1-2k new, and I don't feel that I could personally tell the difference from that and something $10k new. Especially with the real world high noise floor- vehicles outside, pets, kids, etc.
I think I scored worse than a coin flip when it came to 320 files
If you cannot distinguish, you will be the same as a coin flip; i.e. random.
Anyway, not to take this sub-thread too seriously, but obviously it depends how reproducible your deviation from 50-50 is :-)
This becomes a curse if you practice it too often. Yes, if you strain your ears during cymbal crashes, you'll hear warbly bits in compressed audio, especially if that's all you're looking for. And then you'll start hearing it everywhere. In terms of casual playback, it's not terribly important, and if you don't tune your ears, it won't matter. (Lossless is important for archival copies though, IMO)
My favorite/worst example of falling into this trap occurred for me when I was mixing an EP by my band. We had terrible recording equipment, so I was trying my 22-year-old best to carve something workable out with EQ and panning and whatnot. On the kick drum, I wanted the 'click' of the beater hitting the head, but it accentuated this squeak that my pedal made every time I hit it. I spent a little too long trying to cut this squeak out, to little avail. It was like an icepick in my ears, but no one else in the band could hear it.
Later that day, I got in the car and put in a CD by the band Cake (this being the early 2000s) - one that I'd heard countless times. On this playthrough though, clear as day, I heard the squeak of the drummer's kick pedal.
I switched to pure electronic music for weeks just to cleanse my palette.
I worked on a big studio in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it was kinda funny how professionals have (or at least had) an attitude of just not caring about those things. Try to fix with a gate in about 10 seconds, if it doesn't work just turn it down a bit. Or not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
That said I've never had the pleasure of listening
to anything north of around the £10k mark
Ultimately, we're talking about signal reproduction here, and inexpensive gear can put out some seriously accurate sound thanks to onboard DSP processing that uses software to compensate for less than amazing hardware. As long as the sound reaching your ears is correct, doesn't matter how it was achieved.
The one thing you can potentially gain once you get in to the realm of paying thousands of dollars is oodles of power from the amplifier and oodles of power handling from the speakers, which may or may not let you begin to approximate the sound of live music.
If you have ever had the pleasure of hearing an orchestra perform live, the average SPL (sound pressure level) may not be that high, but the fleeting momentary peaks from something like a timpani might be north of 100dB. That's a bit of a feat for your stereo system to pull off and there's no substitute for horsepower there.
But even then, this doesn't necessarily cost megabucks.
I heard this system in person at this event. A million dollars of objectively great gear, and the end result was it sounded like the PA system at a high school football game.
https://www.stereophile.com/content/vac-statement-452iq-powe...
The reflections in that room were a nightmare. Look at the giant glass wall behind the seating area, perpendicular to the speakers. Holy jesus. So you have the speakers putting out some massive waves, and then you have waves reflecting off of the glass wall with nearly equal energy, and then you have everything coming together and canceling out and/or creating resonances... right at the seating area. Absolutely insane, absolutely pathological.
It's just that most loonies like to argue more than most sane people care to respond.
On the other hand, TVs, sound bars, and the HomePod mini produce audio so bad I can't believe people put up with it.
I can chime in on this one. I used to be like OP: Not an audiophile, but someone who can appreciate the difference between a $1000 setup and a $100 setup. Once I got married, and someone with better interior decorating taste started having a vote on home decor, that appreciation had to go out the window. Nobody with any taste wants floor-standing big ugly black boxes positioned at the "Optimal" listening positions in the living room. Do an image search for "high end speakers". Yuck.
You definitely will, but at lot of it will come from the fact that the latter system will be set up well in an isolated room with proper speaker placement, while the former will be some speakers thrown in a living wherever they fit.
I more or less agree with this but the main problem is that people listen in untreated rooms with horrible acoustics.
Once you hit that "medium good" threshold, which is pretty easy these days, more expensive speakers aren't going to make a difference until you get your acoustics under control.
If you do have a nice room, you will definitely notice the difference between the medium good setup and a nicer one, although you will hit diminishing returns WAY before you reach the $100k speakers.
The biggest differences are almost universally going to be detected when you move from a loudspeaker with minimal volume to one with large volume.
Basic physics, dimensions of rooms, etc are way more important than anything else.
Sure - more lumber costs more, but there are clever ways around this too.
For almost everything, unless you're really, really into that thing, there's a segment of the price curve where more money == more better, but afterward you're just shoveling cash into a black hole.
You should be able to hear the difference between a $100 speaker system and a $1,000 speaker system.
But there are other things like room acoustics and stuff that can cause issues. If you put a really good system in a bad room I could imagine it would be harder to tell a difference.
$1,000 to $10,000 might be a lot harder to tell the difference assuming you sourced a good performing setup at each price point.
Same for MP3 vs Lossless, you could probably hear the difference between 320Kbps on specific songs if you know what to listen for but I doubt you can hear it on everything and you would have to concentrate pretty hard rather than enjoying the music.
We've since built our own subwoofer and also mounted a bass shaker[1] (transducer) below the bed, which produces actual vibrations in response to low frequencies, by moving a heavy weight instead of a speaker cone.
The tactile stimulation from low frequencies actually significantly helps with immersion, focus, and relaxation, similar to some can easily fall asleep in a running car.
Of course, it also helps when we're just in the mood to transmit high-power bass frequencies straight into our fricken' bones...
Anyway, I think the total for our sound system is below $1k. We never made a parts list for our subwoofer but we estimate the cost to have been around $300–400. The rest of the system consists of the $180 (at the time) bookshelf speakers[0], the $50 (at the time) bass shaker[1], and the $80 (or so) amplifier to drive said shaker[2].
We also use a device called a "line driver"[3] (around $20) to raise the signal level for the input to our bass shaker's amplifier. "Line driver" is indeed the magic search term, and "preamp" will get you garbage (either $2 op-amp boards, or phonographs).
But aside from all the engineering effort that went into it, because it was a really fun hobby project, it's mostly just a mediocre system. We're totally content with that, and proud because it is a great experience for us, and very fun to listen to.
At this point, the only upgrade we would really want would be to find a new living space that can accommodate a rotary woofer[4], which changes the air pressure of the entire room to produce frequencies from around 20Hz down to even 0Hz.
But our current setup is more than enough to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate. <3
Also we store our entire music library in mp3 format >:3
[0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GMPDAHM
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CDDPJTI
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TTMN51V
[3]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/271412659106
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_woofer
-Emily
The thing is, I think of it like I do many of my "hobbies" which are really just about improving my actual quality of experience/quality of life in the things I do every day. I am typing this comment on a custom-built $900 mechanical keyboard, and just got off a conference call where I was speaking into $1k worth of microphone gear, with a $3k camera setup pointed at me, and listening to the other person through $2k worth of audio output gear (headphones + DAC/Amp stack). To the casual observer that's utterly ridiculous and I've wasted all this money for nothing. On the other hand, I spend 8+ hours a day wearing those headphones, on meetings, and typing, anything that even marginally improves the quality of my experience doing the things I do for 8+ hours every day and intend to do for most of the remainder of my life, means that I am improving my overall quality of life in a meaningful way.
I do this for the exact same reason I spent big on my chair, desk, lighting, and my bed. Between my home office and my bedroom, I spend 75% or more of my entire life (roughly 18 out of every 24 hours) in those two places until I retire. It is absolutely worthwhile for people who spend a lot of time listening to audio to optimize the way they listen to audio. You just have to really keep your critical thinking hat on, though, because the market is full of snake oil.
I've always felt totally alone falling somewhere between
hardcore audiophiles
The lunatic fringe gets all the attention, because they're comically delusional, but they are not hardcore to me.
or whatever audiophiles spend
At $500 you are already getting a system that is not doing a whole lot wrong. But not massive output or deep deep bass.
By $2500 you're getting something that's doing very close to the full 17hz-20khz at output levels that will more than exceed just about any reasonable residential situation. And in fact your listening room is the bottleneck now.
Above that price you're paying for very boutiquey exotic stuff that can pull off certain tricks, very high levels of output, etc.
Those prices are very approximate and assume a well researched and set up system.
Stereo speakers are not made to go very low, that's what a subwoofer is for. Not all subwoofers even go that low!
Above $2500 for a good stereo system will get you a better sound, but as always, the more you pay, the less you'll be able to hear the difference. Also, the better the sound is, the more you'll have to be careful about amp pairing and room acoustic.
A stereo system with subwoofers is still a stereo to me. My main system is 2.2 and I call it a stereo. But I see the confusion. Some people don't call it a "stereo" unless it's strictly 2.0!
That said, every system has distortion - the question is what sound do you like/want. Do you want a sound that's more forward or more laid back? Do you like more midrange? Vocals?
Audio also becomes more complicated because of hearing loss. I can't hear anything over 12-13k, so I'm sure that's affected my audio setup at some level.
"found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy."
Lots of audiophile communities (ones based around actual engineering) who laugh their asses off at this insane lunatic fringe stuff just like HN does.
The more likely explanation is that these people are simply delusional.
(There’s a famous exception on ambient noise: the PowerMac G5 was like having a hair dryer running in your office.)
Of course that was 25 years ago on a Pentium 133, I understand things are better now.
If not, all the effort on the memcpy is going to waste.
However this can all be sidestepped with an affordable external DAC connected with optical or USB.
There are battery-powered USB DAC/amp combos, primarily designed for portable use. I think FiiO makes/made some. That should solve or at least isolate the problem further to some extent.
Like in, is really one less memcpy doing all that difference?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16167594
https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/25435/com...
If you're avidly listening to music this is less than a year.
The vast majority of vinyl junkie audiophiles are not replacing their stylus anywhere near that frequently.
Sorry, no source/ link atm.
Also the high end sounds better the faster the vinyl is going so the outer tracks win there too. 45rmp records have more sparkle. The speed of the vinyl is like sample rate.
Just some nuggets from that thread:
"Sounds awesome, the previous version had a slight tendency to defuse the treble, but with VS2012 compile it is a much more complete sound with absolutely no digital harshness, some 16/44 albums I could hardly play before without getting a headache are now rendered in their full glory."
"It's just lazyness on the part of the player developers that they rely on the old methods, I guess they think bits are bits."
"Goto also sounds better than anything else I have tried." - the "Goto" in the quote means a goto in C used to replace a loop.
"also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."
Wow...
Poe's law is an adage of Internet culture saying that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, any parody of extreme views can be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miracle_Mineral_Supplement
I used to consider these to be pretty worthless things too. After a while I started to realise that a lot of these things provide a lot of the same random platitudes that therapists typically provide too.
Given that therapists are a bit of a dice roll as far as the quality of advice you get, why not just instead make the advice given itself a dice roll. At that point, there’s a non negligible probability that the advice given by a half decent palm / star / tarot reader might actually be relevant.
Sure, it’s all just chance and luck, but when the advice ends up being relevant (or becomes self fulfilling in its relevance) and actually helps the receiver, why not?
(These learnings are brought to you by my ex who very patiently explained to me one of the ways I was an asshole when we were together. I’m now a bit more open minded and keep my eye rolls to myself behind my sunglasses)
In most cases, the advice those people give probably isn't random at all. It's likely tailored to the client, based on "cold reading" techniques, the practitioners general experience with life and people, maybe the practitioner secretly scouring social media for information about the client, etc.
If you're going to the fortune teller or priest for advice, that's what you're getting and the quality of the product might even be good in some cases. If you're going to the fortune teller or priest to receive magical services, then obviously you're getting scammed.
It's like homeopathy: still a mixture between fraud, pseudoscience and sometimes outright dangerous advice, the ratio depending on the provider. And people can and do lose entire life savings to that shit. Just because someone's cold "went away" after downing a ton of sugar pills, it doesn't mean the homeopathy caused that - it was the person's own body all along.
The worst thing about all pseudoscience stuff is that accepting it as a society means that non-scientific opinions are accepted as an equal in democratic discourse - and that is the foundation on which quackery, vaccine denialism, MMS and a whole lot of conspiracy myths grow.
Besides: there's a reason why therapists (at least in Europe) generally have to be licensed similar to doctors... bad advice can literally kill people.
We, as a society, should push for equitable and accessible actual mental health care for everyone, provided by trained and continuously educated professionals - not for quackery.
You're jumping to call it quackery without having an open mind. That's not science, that's prejudice.
1: https://www.academia.edu/442955/Tarot_As_a_Projective_Techni...
2: https://psychcentral.com/pro/using-tarot-in-psychotherapy
Tarot reading goes hand in hand with reading people's fortune. I don't see how you can separate the 2 and therefore have an ethically acceptable treatment, and that's assuming the placebo isn't entirely based on the fortune reading expectation.
Tarot as fortune telling is only something I've seen used for entertainment purposes. In the clinical setting I've only seen them used as projectives.
Denying that is like walking around with a swastika armband telling anyone who calls you a nazi that it's got nothing to do with the Nazis. Even if you're a Buddhist you still have to accept there an association there.
That is the problem with tarot cards. Some people are going to think you are reading their fortune, no matter how much you preface it.
It is because alternative practitioners with bad bedside manners don't stay in business very long.
If you have a minor problem, sitting down with someone who you trust and talking about it for half an hour (much longer than the 5 or maybe 10 minutes you'll get with a traditional doctor), who then gives you some sugar pills and some other good advice (get up and stretch very half an hour), is almost always going to result in an improvement of symptoms.
A lot of problems, including pain, measurably improve when a patient feels they have been listened to, and that advice they are given is tailored to them.
Those longer, and often more frequent, appointments, also means the practitioner gets to know the patient better, which means underlying lifestyle problems can be identified. If the alternative doctor finds out someone is eating a lot of canned food, recommending they switch to "fresh natural vegetables" is a damned good way to lower someone's sodium and potassium intake.
The actual treatments are woo bullshit, but the care setting makes a huge difference.
The solution to the severe understaffing is not enabling quackers that end up recommending their patients MMS or against chemoterapy like they did with Steve Jobs.
I agree it isn't the solution.
> We could have actual doctors giving that device and detecting symptoms early,
One potential lesson is that we don't need full on doctors giving advice. We need people trained to forward to a real doctor if something really wrong is going on, but for a crap ton of problems, someone with basic medical (or just lifestyle/health) training is enough.
Heck there was one study that showed that elderly folks talking to each other about their arthritis pain while getting an evening drink at their local watering hole served to reduce pain symptoms.
Chatting with local bartenders and barbers can be nearly as good as professional therapy for some issues.
Having someone trusted just listen and parrot back common sense advice works really damn well.
Trusting the source of the advice, and believing it will work, has a huge impact on treatment.
Tarot readers are selling a fake good. You can't really escape the ethical implications of that.
I know many people who use them but none believe they have a magical power. They're projectives, like a Rorsach test.
The card will give you something abstract and you fill in the blanks. What your mind fills in can be quite elucidating. Your feeling as well, in terms of gladness or disappointment at what card you pull, can also give you insight into what issues you'd rather think about.
The demonization of tarot in my mind mostly stems from internalised misogyny and a desire on the societal level to paint anything which appeals mostly to women as "kooky," "overly emotional,". "illogical" and "unscientific" (projectives are well studied and used in clinical settings).
Yes, absolutely. The patriarchy likes to dunk on magic future telling cards.
But I don't think power structures have most of the blame for the fact that every single advocate of tarot reading I've seen until today said the cards were magical.
" The I Ching insists upon self-knowledge throughout. The method by which this is to be achieved is open to every kind of misuse, and is therefore not for the frivolous-minded and immature; nor is it for intellectualists and rationalists. It is appropriate only for thoughtful and reflective people who like to think about what they do and what happens to them -- a predilection not to be confused with the morbid brooding of the hypochondriac. As I have indicated above, I have no answer to the multitude of problems that arise when we seek to harmonize the oracle of the I Ching with our accepted scientific canons. But needless to say, nothing "occult" is to be inferred. My position in these matters is pragmatic, and the great disciplines that have taught me the practical usefulness of this viewpoint are psychotherapy and medical psychology. Probably in no other field do we have to reckon with so many unknown quantities, and nowhere else do we become more accustomed to adopting methods that work even though for a long time we may not know why they work. Unexpected cures may arise from questionable therapies and unexpected failures from allegedly reliable methods. In the exploration of the unconscious we come upon very strange things, from which a rationalist turns away with horror, claiming afterward that he did not see anything. The irrational fullness of life has taught me never to discard anything, even when it goes against all our theories (so short-lived at best) or otherwise admits of no immediate explanation. It is of course disquieting, and one is not certain whether the compass is pointing true or not; but security, certitude, and peace do not lead to discoveries. It is the same with this Chinese mode of divination. Clearly the method aims at self-knowledge, though at all times it has also been put to superstitious use."
https://www.iging.com/intro/foreword.htm
By his "pragmatism", I understand something along the philosophical pragmatism of Wittgenstein and his "usage is meaning" line of thought. Jung is saying it is not clear how or why this stuff works, but subjectively a "thoughtful" and "reflective" person seems to discern meaning and gain (personal) insights through the process. In other words, a psychological phenomena.
He also touches on the point of your well aimed remark in noting "misuse". I personally think Jung is understating the dangers involved. (For relative reference, think of the not-so-hot topic of "dangers of meditation" to understand the underlying common pschological issue of probing your culturally protected taboo zones that keep you "normal"/"stable").
The fact of the matter is that occult "divination" tools are dangerous, more dangerous than even "scripture". They have been consistently proven to be culturally corrosive as they undermine rational thought and provide shelter for charlatans, undermine decision faculties of the diviner, and undermine the necessary coherence between our inner life and our outer reality. And the symbolism involved require deep study to avoid misunderstandings. People also seriously discount the inevitable impact of 'divination' on the mind of the inquirer, the careless and ignorant dabbler in occult tools. So promoting them as if they are harmless little nothings is very irresponsible. One has to be very thoughtful and reflective (to say nothing of the erudition required) to not misuse such tools. Very few people meet the required standard. I personally think it has been an error to promote esoterica to the masses. Its like giving guns and bullets to children.
Sources? Should be easy it's so consistent.
From what I understand of history this kind of fear mongering is much more harmful. It wasn't long ago that women were being burnt alive for using traditional medicines in Europe and the US.
Out of curiosity, would you say professional wrestling is culturally corrosive? I have to suspend my rational thought every time I enjoy watching that stuff.
> So promoting them as if they are harmless little nothings is very irresponsible
Has anyone done that here? They've only been defended for their therapeutic use as projectives. No one has said they're "nothings."
"defended for their therapeutic use"
Therapeutic means are to address 'ailments'. The ailments in this case are existential and psychological. Projectives are dangerous and require guided initiation. It is highly irresponsible to push these things.
Tarot Cards as self-administered "therapeutic" remedy on HN. We've been banging on the doors on paganism in the West for a few decades now. And here we are.
I can buy rorsach cards now on Amazon. There's no health warning on those. Maybe there should be but I think we can accept that most people buying them will use them responsibly. It seems very knee jerk to put a warning on every single thing that could be harmful if misused.
> Therapeutic means are to address 'ailments'. The ailments in this case are existential and psychological. Projectives are dangerous and require guided initiation
I understand the meaning of therapy and the types of ailments that can be helped by the use of projectives.
If you buy a set of tarot cards they inevitably come with usage instructions so that you can use them successfully and responsibly.
I'm not sure the danger is as great as you suggest. Have you got data showing the harm of using these cards?
> We've been banging on the doors on paganism in the West for a few decades now. And here we are.
Tarot cards have no basis in paganism, they are the creation of well educated men in the 19th century.
> But your quick response here indicates you did not really reflect on what was said.
This was uncalled for. I read your post and responded to the points you made.
Are you saying tarot cards are logical and scientific?
Fwiw, I associate them more with gypsies than women, so I guess I'm racist rather than sexist?
You can find a tonne of literature on the clinical use of projective. The famous rorsach test is based on the same psychological mechanism.
In terms of logic they do actually have an attempt at systematising both a range of common emotions and a number of archetypal points along life's journey. I know that's maybe not what you meant by logic, but a system that differentiates its output based on input like "Cups, 6", "Coins, 2" etc. works for my definition of logic.
Lastly, and I know you asked in jest, but If your association between the cards and a specific ethnic group is what leads to you judging them as unscientific without first checking then there probably is a level of racism at play. That's nothing to be ashamed of, as everyone carries internalised racism (thanks society). As long as you can recognise it when it comes up in yourself like this and you do the work to combat it then you have nothing to worry about.
How can you ethically give a tarot reading knowing that X% will understand it as a prediction of their future?
>If your association between the cards and a specific ethnic group is what leads to you judging them as unscientific
Why don't you apply the same nuance when deciding whether sexism is at play?
They're almost always used as tools for self reflection, which is supported by the science I linked to.
I've only seen fortune telling done on an entertainment basis or on television shows.
> Why don't you apply the same nuance when deciding whether sexism is at play?
Can you tell me how I could do this?
You keep trying to separate tarot reading as fortune telling/ entertainment and tarot reading as a legitimate tool. It may be both but you can't split the 2.
>I've only seen....
And I've only seen tarot cards used as a tool for fortune telling. Is my experience unique? Is my experience less valid than yours?
> In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.
FWIW I'm also fond of the Tarot, and the I Ching, and find both surprisingly insightful and useful (me of 10 years ago would not believe that I just wrote that).
For the low, low price of $3800, you can be the proud owner of an audiophile grade, 100Base-T network switch: https://innuos.com/phoenixnet/
UDP is another story and it’s normal to hear things.
A patch cable or its connectors would need to be in a dreadful state to get packet loss though, i.e. physically damaged or defective.
For lossless CD-quality audio you need about 160kbyte/s.
So on a gigabit network (125Mbyte/s), you'd need over 99.999% packet loss in order to not keep up.
So they're comparing to an almost completely faulty cable.
I feel like a lot of audiophile stupidity is not understanding scale.
There is a difference between the fancy speaker cables and acceptable cheap ones, but it's so ridiculously minuscule as to be completely inaudible compared to, say, whether or not the listener is wearing socks or not.
And that's not an exaggeration, that difference will literally be more than the difference in cables, probably by an order of magnitude.
The only real difference between the cables will be at frequencies over, say, a GHz. ie RF frequencies 50x higher than cats might be able to hear.
But the audiofool will say, "see, there's a difference - I want my system to sound the best".
And they focus so much on ridiculously overkill cables, amplifiers and stupid stands, yet seem to often ignore room treatment which could really make a difference. It's often massive speakers in horribly reflective minimalistic rooms, driven by amps running at 0.1% of their power rating.
Another thing is not understanding tradeoffs. Everything is a compromise, so when you buy the amp that's rated at 2000W but only run it at 2W, it won't measure as well as the same quality amp that's rated at 50W, also running at 2W.
Similarly a speaker with a max rating of 500W running at 2W won't be as accurate as a speaker with a max rating of 50W running at 2W, because physically the material the speaker is made out of has to be more resilient/less flexible to handle that kind of maximum power.
But they focus on one particular thing (usually the expensive thing) to the detriment of other things.
Also not understanding wattage.
Because sound is logarithmic, it is really eye-opening how little power you need for quite loud audio. Most systems you wouldn't want to listen to at over 5W.
Eg for, say two Kef R7 speakers which have a sensitivity of 88dB, at only 5W, from 3m away is 94.4dB.
That is LOUD.
At 2W, it's 90.5dB. Also LOUD.
https://mehlau.net/audio/spl/ (+6dB for two speakers)
You don't need a 5000W amp. But they don't understand any of this so they just think higher number and more expensive equals better.
It's like buying a Mack truck because you heard it carries more than a hatchback when you're going to the supermarket, and thinking it must be better because it's more expensive.
My FLAC files live on a SSD attached to a Raspberry Pi that serves them up over NFS. The data passes through three gigabit switches before arriving at another Raspberry Pi running Volumio, which is connected to my DAC.
There's enough there to keep an audiophile awake at night, but the bit tests have passed perfectly whenever I've run them. No expensive cables, linear mode power supplies, or audiophile switches would make the tests pass any better.
Storage -> TCP Stream -> Sound output.
However, it never works like this, except maybe in some rare live conditions (in which case, why are you even running this on TCP?). In reality, it goes:
Storage -> TCP Stream -> Ring buffer -> Sound output
Unless you manage to empty your ring buffer (which, in the case of modern hardware can easily be 32+MB, or multiple seconds of audio), you will not hear a single bit of difference. And if you do, it won't come in "after you were meant to hear it", you'll either get a massive gap, or repeats. There is no such thing as "data coming in too late/out of order".
If you’re getting audible errors from your network then literally everything you do on that network would feel like 90s dial up days and with lots of corruption. Most websites wouldn’t even load due to TLS errors.
The problem such arguments as yours is that people have subjective experiences that can be influenced by a multitude of personal emotional states and they then retrofit pseudo-technical explanations for why they perceived those experiences. Or in layman’s terms, you basically just buy an expensive placebo.
The are lots usecases for nearly live audio where TCP stalls cause problems you would never notice browsing the web and would not be a TLS error (which is ushally how networks are 'tested' leaving the problems unfixed).
And before you comment about listening to live performances at home: the broadcaster would be compressing your audio stream anyway. That would be far more impactful to your audio quality than a few dropped networking packets.
Source: I used to work in broadcasting.
Edit: and just to be clear, the biggest reason that live performances are sensitive to latency isn’t because of sound quality. It is because latency is distracting to the performers (eg if their ear piece is ahead of the speakers) and annoying to the viewers if different systems aren’t in sync (like with a movie where the sound is half a second behind the video). So it’s got naff all to do with satisfying audiophiles.
If you want trouble free audio streaming it is worth checking the network.
https://www.wired.com/2008/06/snake-oil-alert/
(unfortunately this was from Denon who I've had great luck with an entry-ish-level AVR from for years)
> For the low, low price of $3800, you can be the proud owner of an audiophile grade, 100Base-T network switch
That buys you a seriously good piece of switching gear with 10GBe (or even higher) fiber optic links to whatever devices you could possibly want in a home. Heck, even a little over $100 buys you a switch with 4 SFP+ (Mikrotik CRS305).
I guess audiophiles will claim that the optical transceivers introduce latency and _they can hear it_
Jitter on the Ethernet transferring the file will have no effect.
The audio isn't played directly from the ethernet packets. It has to be decompressed, decoded, buffered. In the end of it all the audio goes into a ring buffer and it is played very precisely by the sound card.
The playback itself is a hard-real-time process that needs time guarantees. Failure to fill the ring buffer by any reason can cause audible skips, but not jitter. But most players in practice will simply stop the playback.
You could 100% design a network switch to be good for audio.
- ensure periodic packets like say arp don't introduce jitter
- do qos on audio streams vs other data
- favor latency over throughput
- maybe tune things like MSS to keep packet sizes smaller, but no fragmentation
etc..
For one thing, timing is important. A simple example would be getting video in sync with audio. You could go deeper and manage timing for speakers side to side or front to back. It would get lots harder if a microphone was introduced - then latency would be a big big deal.
These sorts of things are probably why bluetooth isn't used as much with a/v systems.
(lol, here I am arguing the merits of an audiophile network switch)
So long as the amount of audio sent in a packet is larger than how long it takes the next packet to get there, you'll be transfering audio data faster than it is playing, making minor fluctuations in timing between packets irrelevant.
Bluetooth isn't used because BT audio transmission is lossy, audio gets recompressed. Newer BT standards have good quality compression, but you are still recompressing the audio. BT isn't meant to be a high bandwidth protocol.
BT's latency around audio is because 99% of BT implementations suck. Latency can be as low as 50ms or so, but it is often in the 100s or even 200s of ms.
Even major fluctuations. Not talking about the quality here (but the received quality is identical to what is being sent), but just think about Netflix & Co, Imagine if they had to maintain an "ideal network, with no packet loss and constant ping" to your device or otherwise audio and video would be out of sync?
There are protocols that shuffle more or less raw audio streams over the network (Dante for example). In that case yes, you do things to make sure the variables are within a certain range by (usually) segregating the traffic etc, but even then if the timing is off the playback will stop until the stream is reestablished properly. Theoretically it's the same as with any other media stream, just much more sensitive to fluctuations as it is real time (i.e. delay so low you are unable to hear it).
Should you buy an audiophile network switch? God no.
Please don't. You'll make Nyquist sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
On its way to your speakers, a audio file sampled at 192khz will ideally be identical to a recording done at 44.1khz, except over sampling can introduce audio artifacts that degrade audio quality so you can end up with worse audio.
So, please, don't unnecessarily over sample.
The main place you will see this issue is playing audio in something like a video game due to an action like pressing a button, firing a weapon, etc then it can be very noticeable if you're buffering too much audio because it wont sync to what you're seeing and the game will feel laggy even if it's running at a high frame rate.
Excepting subs, it seems many speaker systems are hardwired together downstream from the dac, but there should be a good way to have multiple independent speakers networked together that could be time consistent. and audio <-> video consistent with whatever display you have.
and bnc cables.... would be another whole network.
Is not that every packet is "output" as soon as it arrives to the PC.
Or I didn't understand what are you saying.
A playback device creates a stream of audio and video data that is consistent and together. But if there's a network involved, say you have stereo wifi speakers, then the video and audio streams are separated. Maybe the playback device sends the data to the display using hdmi, and that device sends data over the network to the speakers. Now there are two delays - one for decoding and presenting video, and a second separate one for transmitting and then decoding audio. The second one is variable depending on the network.
But it's delay, and not integrity of the data being played back. If the network sucks and there are retransmissions, your data might still be integrous without loses (depending on the protocol).
It also happens for musicians on stage. They play and after some delay they hear their own sound back. So they use monitors to hear themselves and the rest of the band.
While in lockdown people gathered together to play music with special software. That tells you something about how this problem is well known and how it can be solved in every situation.
Audio data frames are interleaved, ie RLRLRL. There's no point managing timing of network packets because after going over the network, all the data goes into a buffer at the other end before being played.
To do the same with ethernet you would have to use an industrial ethernet implementation of which I know at least three and they are all incompatible with each other and even then you would most likely benefit from an audio focused implementation.
All of this is much harder than just buying a better switch and claiming it improves the sound. Your audio playback device and speaker would have to support the same implementation of industrial internet.
But it’s comically small and solvable much more easily than spending this kind of coin.
I was expecting an AVB switch with locking connectors and redundant power. You know, like a pro audio mission-critical device. Instead it’s basically like using stacks of hundreds to vibration insulate your CD player. It might technically improve things, but the return on investment is poor.
I haven't used a scope, but I have had some laughs plugging things into the same circuit as high gain guitar equipment.
Yes please, let's amplify those audible frequencies to audible levels. A good PSU goes a long way.
To me it really highlights the difference of those who seek to understand deeply, and those who interact with the world only in superficial and aesthetic ways. The latter really want to depend on the "magic" within the machine, and can get upset if you try to shed light on how these things really work.
My PC is very electrically noisy on account of the GPU. This noise was coming out of all the ports, including the Ethernet port. It was making it through that port, by CAT-6 cable, to my switch. The switch then sent it to my Raspberry Pi I was using as a streamer, then into my DAC, amplifier and finally speakers. You could hear it, it was loud when a game started up.
The solution - swap out the CAT-6 with CAT-5 cable which doesn't connect the ground planes. Instantly solved.
I'm considering putting a sacrificial switch from my junk box inline to that one computer so maybe the rest of the network can survive its crashes.
You could verify this by running Wireshark on another machine, or try disable sending pause frames on the machine before it crashes via eg ethtool
In my case just a few weeks ago I had an AP that went bananas, and was directly connected via ethernet to a RPi4, and made the Raspbian kernel panic on the Broadcom driver, randomly. Not long after the AP stopped working completely.
I've also heard it in the 2000s.
There was one song around 1999 that included the sound and also had my ring tone.
It was a very confusing time.
Found it: https://youtu.be/y8ClVMzt9Dw
[edit: added link]
Memcpy can have second order effects due to EMI radiated by CPU, motherboard or coupled via power fluctuations.
There are audible and measurable effects of audio system clock jitter which in turn depends on oscillator power quality.
Someone mentioned that ethernet has isolation transformers. But isolation transformers have parasitic common mode coupling which can inject the noise to ground plane if interference is strong and device is susceptible enough
Watch the EEVBLOG on company which designed scope capable of measuring 1kV common mode signals. (present in EV electronics) https://youtu.be/I7ppDNLlEL4
Audiophile stuff is a weird mix of real effects and snake oil.
If a $10,000 power cable makes your amp sound better to you, who’s to say it doesn’t?
on the other hand, they spent hundreds of dollars for nothing and if they eventually recovered they'd tell other sufferers about it, dragging them down too.
does the victims glimmer of hope justify her scam?
background: she herself suffered from an "incurable" illness for months, where she paid other angel conjurers (that's where she got the idea from). turns out it was just iron deficiency and easily cured with iron supplements. at that point she'd already paid several hundred dollars to those charlatans.
Looking over the product page, it's marked as S/FTP
At least that’s what I was told once upon a time since EE is definitely not my forte.
I'd definitely prefer a DAC with good filtering on its inputs so I wouldn't need to use a middleman, but that is expensive. One with a proper USB module with complete isolation can run ~$5000.
And anti-audiophiles are sometime becoming even worse than manical audiophiles - because of their deep blind belief in their educated superiority (while in reality it's a bit .. untrue).
AVB is a set of IEEE standardized 802.1 extensions that provide better control over bandwidth and latency. This is important when you're playing multiple audio and/or video streams to multiple endpoints connected at different points in the network and they need to be low latency and still kept synchronized.
I've seen professional switches from a large vendor where the AVB license cost as much as the rest of the switch.
It is a one or zero, it will checksum and TCP either gives the correct packet or drops it. Also I do not know many audio streamers that do not buffer since TCP works way faster than a song can play. Plenty of time to make sure the packets are correct.
I have no idea why the audiophile network switches irritates me the most. At least with audio cables I guess you can do measurements that show the signal is cleaner, even though there is zero chance of you hearing a difference most of the time (I just make sure cables have good shielding and if the cable has to be seen it better look cool too, haha).
Ya know there are even audiophile USB cables.......not a joke google it.
one amongst the many ways to signal status to 'peers'
Had they said "I bought these expensive network cables because I like the way they look and they match my furniture" that would be an entirely different thing.
I have however been shocked by how good a meal was with a proper wine pairing--having it being a firework of taste in my mouth and wishing I had the knowledge to know how to pick wines for meals.
The problem is that a small percentage of people don't stop there and start chasing smaller and smaller 'improvements' in the experience until they're forced to make things up and delude themselves to find a new 'high'.
The problem with testing Hifi using Metal is that only the recording engineer really knows what it originally sounded like. Metal recordings are also generally very compressed and so not a good test of dynamics and transients. A good test of a Hifi would involve acoustic instruments, violins, cellos, pianos, orchestras etc. You also need very well recorded source material.
Is matching the original recorded sound really the purpose of a good hifi system ? From what I understand, studio monitors as used in production / mastering have this goal (to sound "neutral").
Hifi speakers are supposed to add their own character to the recorded sound, no?
When talking about acoustic instruments, doesn't each one sound different? Like you could buy two violins from the same manufacturer and they wouldn't have the same exact sound, esp as the years go by. Same goes for analog synths & drum machines, and that's the good thing about them, the fact that they develop their own character.
Yes, at least it used to. Hifi means High Fidelity, which means a high degree of exactness in reproducing the music, as the artists and recording engineers intended.
> Hifi speakers are supposed to add their own character to the recorded sound, no?
I would argue they should not. But consumer "Hifi" certainly does often colour the sound. This is why many audiophiles had to seek out "studio" monitors and earphones. However, even this term has lost its meaning. You will not find "Beats Studio" earphones in any studio.
> When talking about acoustic instruments, doesn't each one sound different?
Maybe slightly yes, but only in certain ways. A bad audio system might make them sound unnatural. Pianos and violins certainly have much less variation than electric guitars.
I did not attempt to define Metal. I only tried to point out that it is often heavily compressed, as is pop music, see for example:
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/sep/17/metallica.guit...
I certainly find the idea of playing this stuff on a 10K Hifi amusing, which was perhaps your original point?
EDIT:
You can check your favourite albums, by using this resource: https://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list/1/dr/asc?artist=Epic...
Compare with e.g. some classical music recordings: https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Berliner%20Philharmonik...
That seems like a huge claim. There used to be different mixes for vinyl, radio, and cd. It’s hardly inconceivable that streaming would have a dedicated mix (I’d assume something which “pops” so it’s noticeable as standalone in the middle of a streaming session, whereas the CD would be part of the album flow)
It would make sense since this is the way most people listen to music these days.
Knowing almost nothing about DSP is this something you can do?
It's close with using hybrid anc but still too many variables to claim no sonic difference.
Today a lot of them are checking on Airpods and the like.
On mastering it is completely usual to have extra compression/limiting, some light EQ and even extra "color". It is supposed to be subtle, but that hasn't been the case for quite a while.
Mastering is also when you get the final "bits" that go into a CD, so you need two different mastering sessions to get two different sounding CDs.
Sometimes I noticed older people going into tech discussion about things which were super important once but no longer is relevant.
Most are able to recognize their nostalgia as such and are willing to accept it (e.g. by doing cb radio or retro game development on deliberately limited hardware).
Lots of 60+ people trying to find the holy grail they dreamed about when they were kids. But HOW can a 2000, 1000 USD guitar be a "holy grail"?
So they end up with collections of six, seven, eight high-end Les Pauls, Strats, etc. Or perhaps buying USD 5000+ custom shop instruments. Some of them get to collections of 30, 50, 60.
Of course it's a lot of fun, and not as expensive as, say, a Cello or Oboe collection. So I get why they do it. But as someone who moves often, I'd rather have just one :D
I can imagine someone giving you a taste and you already assume it must be nicer so you confirm the lie. It is also possible that other variables like the fact it has been standing in a jug for longer allowing the chlorine to evaporate make people think that it tastes nicer for the wrong reason.
https://darko.audio/2018/03/for-the-audiophile-who-has-every...
"Think about that for a moment: the network streamer is directly connected to a router designed for functionality but with zero made concession to audiophile sensitivities."
When it comes to hardware: if you have a great and clean signal chain, good ears, decent monitors +/ good room, good headphones, you can record and hear the difference of good gear (diminishing returns though, you are paying for throughput (channels), latency, or even just build-quality/brand (Apple esque) etc at some point).
Of course marketing adds hyperbole and takes certain aspects into woo territory. At the software level: sampling rate can (depending on programming of individual plugins) make a difference in your mixing session (you get nasty artifacts, like EQ cramping, in plugins that don't have internal over-sampling).
This is all the professional gear with a track record rather than the "prosumer" gear (maybe that's the definition of audiophile you were connotating).
Most audiophiles seem to be men in their 50s+, which makes their claims of exceptional hearing extremely dubious. Degradation of hearing with age is a virtual certainty.
If audiophiles tended to be teenagers I'd be more inclined to believe them. But old guys? Old guys with a long habit of listening to loud music? Their ears are not golden.
All of that was gone when we arrived in our twenties. I couldn't hear the TV anymore (younger people: That applied to analog CRT TVs back in the neolithic). I was tested in the military when I was 22. They didn't even bother testing anyone up to more than maybe 14kHz - intense volume would anyway be needed to hear that.
I can't imagine even very careful people will be able to hear a particularly wide audio range when they're 50+, not even people who walk around with ear plugs all the time for protection (some audio engineers do).
/s...maybe
But I have met at least one genuine flat Earth believer, who was a Biblical literalist and considered it must be true to match his other beliefs.
I don't do it, but IMO it's totally fine to spent thousands on a speaker or even hundreds on a cable if it brings you joy and doesn't cause financial problems, but you don't have to justify it to anyone, even (and especially) to other audiophiles. The problem is when you somehow believe that you have to justify your purchases and come up with crazy excuses. :(
Because a lot of them went to that.
Was totally worth it!
Here's some pictures of my amps: https://www.bursonaudio.com/pa03-gainclone-power-amp-by-pave...
And then there are people who buy vinyl records of video game sound-tracks, in which case it doesn't even make sense to remove sampling artifacts since those would be present in the original game.
Isn't the point to actually reduce quality by using imperfect media so recording has more oldschool vibe? Kinda like all the lo-fi mixes being so popular today. At least thats what I always thought, I didn't really research that at all.
Back in the day music was definitely less compressed, but I thought that was more due to different mixing philosophies.
Digital allows for far higher compression - historically digital released have been compressed to hell into a "brick" with very little actual dynamic range. This is so that when they're played on radio they're going to sound louder than anything else. Vinyl doesn't allow for this same amount of compression. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Modern streaming services will recompress songs to a common standard, negating all of the loudness war stuff, but I haven't looked at new releases to see if heavy compression is still common practice on the master releases but I'd assume they still do it because practices change slowly. In that case they're just throwing away bit depth for no reason.
I assume good mastering engineers create dedicated masters for each major streaming service because of their different requirements.
I am not going to debate if one is better than the other, but they will sound different just due to mastering. So it is not a direct apples to apples comparison.
I think most people buy video game vinyl just to display them, haha.
...Unless you happen to like the particular brand of distortion that every song you loved growing up happened to have.
By the by : I'm almost certain this has to be satire.
There are many things like this. Coffee people, for instance, who will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool" 5 times or 10 times, and who will post "recipes" for soaking ground up beans in hot water.
Just let people have their thing. They like it.
Sure stirring grounds to break up clumps seems like a good idea. But it's mind boggling someone managed to name the technique after themselves and get everyone to refer to it by an acronym with their name in it.
No idea if it impacts taste though.
I definitely stir my espresso grounds after grinding for this reason, but the symptom of not doing so is very evident in how long it takes to pull the volume of the shot I'm making. A distribution tool may help do it faster, but I'm not at the point where I'm willing to invest in more than the toothpick I currently use.
Claiming that bits are not bits is on a flat earth level stupid.
Yes, but unless the analog error reaches some certain threshold, the 0 will still read as a 0 and the 1 will still read as a 1. The bit is still a bit. The bits only cease to be bits after they reach the DAC.
It's at least as likely as the coffee scenario.
I would bet money on a blind taste test on a well pulled shot of espresso vs just dumping some water on some ground beans would show a substantially bigger difference than these people using an audiophile grade network switch or a different version of memcpy. The two aren't even in the same league and it requires some real magical thinking to come to any other conclusion.
Not necessarily, just a statement from the starting end of Dunning-Kruger. Try 0.1 + 0.2 with enough decimals and you'll see what he's trying to say. It's not that stupid of a thought if you think about it.
Something else that might seem equally stupid the first time you hear about is the fact that 1s have weight compared to 0s. Don't believe me? Look it up.
You comparing him to a flat-earther despite domain knowledge is worse than him having enough outside-the-box thinking to entertain the thought.
Want to explain the 1 and 0 comment? Because depending on your silicon design and encoding either could be…
Outside the box thinking is great, but being bounded a bit is essential.
You're doing the same kind of "affect wisdom by alluding to the elephant without mentioning the elephant" hand-waving that conspiracy theorists do, but as yet you haven't shown a meaningfully concrete example (other than your misapprehension that the same sort of implementation-specific inconsistencies that are found in floating point calculations exist in the fixed-point math used in most audio systems).
It was an example I don't know how audio works and don't claim I do. But I do know moving bits doesn't always end up the way we expect, and different functions has different outcomes.
I shouldn't have to explain sort and sort-reverse has different outcomes, it's implied and not my point. All I'm saying is don't call people without domain knowledge idiots when they're on the right track, kind of. The rest are strawman arguments I'm supposed to explain. I'll give you an example:
> ME: 1s and 0s in the same order are the same, but some data may be lost in the transfer
> Poster: Please explain? If the 1s and 0s are still in the same order, what data has been lost?
What I say: 2 files 1010 and 1010 are the same at start, but might be 0101 at the destination. How is irrelevant, there are a million ways.
What I'm asked to explain: If 1010 is 1010 at destination, how are they different.
Then I mentioned transfer, oh-oh. Now we're going into transport protocols and not just moving bits no matter the means. Incredibly frustrating and ironic given the context. I see the misunderstandings, I just can't seem to explain it. It's not hand-waving I just don't get why I have to explain things I never claimed.
Look at my first post. I'm trying explain how I read "bits are bits" and that it doesn't necessarily mean that he's stupid. Are bits always bits?
Tell me where you're confused instead.
> Then I mentioned transfer, oh-oh. Now we're going into transport protocols and not just moving bits no matter the means. Incredibly frustrating and ironic given the context.
How is it still happening. Did you read the post? Do you see the irony?
I don't want to ban you, so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
OK
> All I'm saying is don't call people without domain knowledge idiots when they're on the right track, kind of
What makes you think you're on the right track?
> But I do know moving bits doesn't always end up the way we expect > What I say: 2 files 1010 and 1010 are the same at start, but might be 0101 at the destination.
Your assumption is wrong. Moving bits around is very well understood, and uses error checking where needed. 1010 does not turn into 0101 at the destination.
> How is irrelevant, there are a million ways.
Your explanation is inconsistent with the knowledge and experience of millions of engineers and users, so it's up to you to explain how.
I'm not claiming I am. Read the first comment I made. I'm simply stating the quote "bits are bits" is misunderstood because the one who made it doesn't have domain knowledge. I'm discussing in general terms but people expect details and proof of concepts.
I'm not arguing anything, everyone is reading me as if I was. Then I'm supposed to explain how TCP will fail and so on. Never even mentioned TCP, I said transfer.
People are too literal. But it's fine I've given up trying to explain it, this discussion has turned into the special olympics of misunderstandings. And you're all winning, congratulations.
> Your explanation is inconsistent with the knowledge and experience of millions of engineers and users, so it's up to you to explain how.
Since you insist, explain what, exactly? Quote the claim you want an explanation of.
Things you said:
> But I do know moving bits doesn't always end up the way we expect
> What I say: 2 files 1010 and 1010 are the same at start, but might be 0101 at the destination.
I'd like to know what makes you say these things. The reasoning behind it, or maybe experimental data.
When audio data is digital, it works in exactly the same way as all other digital data, something computer scientists, electrical engineers, network engineers, etc. happen to have a lot of knowledge about and experience with. We know how it behaves, we know bits don't just change. Therefore I say it's up to you to explain how bits can move in unexpected ways, and how they can be different at the destination than at the start.
You can't just say you're discussing in general terms as a defense for using unfounded assumptions.
Like that one time I set all RAM in my phone to 1s and couldn’t lift it anymore. /s
I'm not sure if RAM would have extra weight, as I know less about how it works.
[1] https://electronics.stackexchange.com/questions/505361/how-m...
1s don't have weight compared to 0s, electrical "high" has mass compared to 0V. Which is "1" and which is "0" (if any) depends on the particular electrical specification of the protocol. E.g. with Ethernet signals are differential, ±3V, with 0V only ever reached momentarily as the + and - switch. There are also lots of cases where the "active" (i.e. "1") is the 0V value, and the "passive" (i.e. 0) is the nonzero voltage. Most reset signals are active-low.
Which is exactly my point with 0.1 + 0.2. Depending on the methods it will give different outcomes, some more precise than others. Guess it wasn't as obvious as I initially thought.
1s and 0s in the same order are the same, but some data may be lost in the transfer and I don't see why that has to be explained, here of all places. And that's where the Dunning-Kruger reference came from, he thinks it's the bits, when in-fact he would mention the transport had he had more domain knowledge.
Please explain? If the 1s and 0s are still in the same order, what data has been lost?
0001 == 0001. But 0001 + 0001 does not necessarily end up being 00001. Do you see my point now? You're missing the forest for the trees. 2 things are being discussed, not the outcome. Transport and bits, at the same time, but as separate things. Another analogy in another comment was analog wires, also good, break that and the resistance changes etc etc etc.
This many comments for something so simple. Breathe and stop going out of your way to misunderstand me. Ironically exactly how this thread even started. You clearly understand the subject since you already explained floating point arithmetic.
I'll give it one last shot: The person being referred to as flat-earth level stupid mentions bits, while he should've mentioned transport. And not taking into account his lack of domain knowledge and using the wrong lingo to misunderstand him and calling him stupid when he is right, just not wording it correctly is the problem.
Except all of the transport-layer protocols before the DAC are working in digital logic and have checksums applied to them. A bit flip is going to be detected and corrected or the packet will be dropped and resent. So the transport isn't going to have any impact on the bits whatsoever (barring effects like a packet arriving too late to emit the sound on time).
I won't go into your description of why those may be lost in transfer, others have commented on that, but NO, data may not be lost in transfer. Send data whichever way you want, over Ethernet, fiber, pidgins (POaC, RFC 6214) - it doesn't matter, as long as it's TCP and it's transmitted faster than the audio output - the transport and bits and all that doesn't matter. It's all buffered at the endpoint before being slowly (relatively speaking) ending up in your audio speakers if it's audio, or if something else - in its final destination, every single bit in its correct place.
This is a simplistic view how memory and data transmission systems work.
Even in days of yore it took a schematic to figure out whether bits were being stored as "lots of electrons means a 1, few electrons means a zero", or the inverse.
Modern memory systems and fast serial buses often use whitening to reduce noise and improve clock recovery. A 1 is a 1 when the CPU decides it's a 1, and even then its physical representation is not necessarily static.
I could probably distribute the coffee by simply shaking and tapping the portafilter on the counter, but stirring it makes it more even and I'm less likely to make a mess that way.
Smile & wave boys!
Who am I to judge? I will fight you over spaces instead of tabs and don't you dare remove my trailing commas. If it's not supported by the language I'll write a transpiler and add it to the CI flow just before deploy, because git history.
It seems like how one packed the grounds would matter more. If it’s slightly uneven, one side will get more water pushed through it.
If you already had perfectly even flow, it's not going to improve anything. That might be true with great equipment or a very forgiving bean. It might also be true if WDT isn't enough to fix your channelling alone so there is more left to fix. This leads you to watching slow-mos of your pulls and inspecting pucks :)
Distribution tools are for espresso, not pour over or immersion brewed coffee. In espresso, you have extremely high pressure, so if there is a density differential in the coffee cake, you will get most of the water flowing through the spot that has the lowest density, and the rest of the cake will not be visited, making for a weaker drink.
Also, the "recipes" are usually just a ratio of coffee grounds to boiling water by mass, a rough idea of how fine to grind, and a brew time. If you take these parameters and vary them by any reasonable amount, you will definitely taste the difference.
Overall, it's not an apt analogy. There is no "fidelity" for coffee like there is for audio. There is a quantitative loss function you can define for audio quality - just the sound you're trying to replicate versus the sound that your system actually ends up generating. For example, no human ear can hear frequencies above ~22kHz, meaning anything over the normal ~44kHz sample rate provably makes no difference.
When you have different beans, especially from different climates, regions, and preparation methods, and taste them side-by-side. You'll notice characteristics that you would not otherwise notice drinking from day-to-day; and the ability to taste and emphasize those characteristics is why coffee nerds use different techniques and forms of equipment.
It's easy enough to make a quality coffee that is tasty (a sub-$10 of supermarket ground coffee, a sub-$10 french press, and a pot of boiling water can produce a good coffee). But to emphasize things like fruity and floral notes requires extracting coffee in particular ways to bring them to the forefront; like ensuring that coffee is constantly exposed to fresh unsaturated water, for particular amount of time, with a certain surface-area, within a narrow temperature range.
The real fun is when "audiophiles" give you music with high sample rate (e.g. 384kHz) and it sounds objectively worse on a standard playback device because the playback device only supports e.g. 48kHz natively and has to resample internally, with a resampling algorithm that's worse than what you would get if the audio was resampled with a high quality resampling algorithm and directly stored as e.g. 48kHz.
Many human ear can hear pure ~28kHz tone under ideal condition [1]. Some can hear higher.
[1] Ashihara, Kaoru (2007-09-01). "Hearing thresholds for pure tones above 16kHz". The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America. 122 (3): EL52–EL57
I can hear bats, which I have been told is impossible.
The electrical whine from a crt used to really about me...
I can't hear much at all in a noisy room and sometimes miss whole conversations, which can be bad for one's relationships. I was recently diagnosed with 'auditory processing disorder'. With my 'perfect' sonogram (is that the right word?) in hand, a hearing therapist suggested that I may have lost a tiny bit of my exceptional hearing and that may have triggered my brains confusion with sound.
I once debugged a switchmode power supply this way. I was in my late 20's-early 30's and walked into a room where an engineer in his 50's was testing a power supply. First thing I said, was "what's that annoying noise? Oh, it's coming from your test bench." He blinked at me, but immediately realized that I could hear a high frequency noise he couldn't and that it was related to the problem he was troubleshooting.
IIRC, the problem was that his oscillator was running at a lower than expected frequency: it should have been well outside hearing range but was actually just barely within mine.
>The example is loosely based on an event in Fisher's life. The lady in question, Muriel Bristol, claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup. Her future husband, William Roach, suggested that Fisher give her eight cups, four of each variety, in random order. One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct (in fact all eight), but just by chance.
From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea
interestingly.
For the undiscriminating palate (mine?) you probably wouldn't notice a difference. But someone who pays attention could, especially if they have a particular tea they're drinking regularly.
It's just physics, and something you can check for yourself in 5 minutes or by asking any chemical/food engineer who knows the basics of extraction.
With religion being the biggest of all.
Humans are predisposed to believe in something even if it makes no sense.
What if my thing is making fun of such people?
Could say that about your comment, right? Let the coffee fans enjoy the process of improving their coffee. Unless they start gatekeeping shit or insulting my (very pedestrian) taste in coffee, I don't care.
For instance, there was a time where if you had told me that the number one thing that would improve my coffee was the purchasing of a conical burr grinder, I would’ve raised an eyebrow. Now? I find it is almost more important than the beans I buy. Even my first cheap $50 one elevated my coffee to a whole new level. Despite years of people complementing the quality of my cold brew, I still have to insist that they buy even a cheap burr before anything else. And every single one of them that has followed my advice has thanked me later! All because someone else told me first and I said “screw it why not?”
Anyway, the point of the above is not to brag about my coffee at home (which I’m sure isn’t even that impressive). It’s mostly to illustrate that sometimes what sounds ridiculous does actually matter. We just don’t know it.
You also can’t wrong going with an aero press. They’re like $30 and super easy to clean. Only good for making one cup of coffee at a time though.
If you’re looking for beans, mammoth espresso and cherry coffee roasters are both incredible.
There are some silly things and not all are required -- I don't do espresso or distribute my grounds, for example. I just Chemex with too many beans and let the flood of taste flow. And the little things really do make a difference (proper filter to catch the oils, blooming, light pour on the water, burr grinder (!!!!), freshness of the grind and the right age for the beans, etc). I'm not the snobbiest of snobs but I can tell! And at a certain point, its like looking at a painting. Even the littlest 'off' brushstroke can ruin a whole piece of something like the Mona Lisa.
A lot of roasting software is computerized these days too, so there is some precision in the process and in very particular roasts from certain boutique manufacturers these days. It's pretty nifty stuff. If you want to nerd snipe yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t8DZ2yHs8
So at that level, basically we are super far up the log curve of diminishing returns. But then again, if your coffee is an experience, pulling away some not-insignificant-% of those last notes of bitterness is really and truly helpful.
On the audio side -- Yes, I'm an audiophile, but a very practical one, and I try to stay by the very old adage (as it were) that music enjoyment is 90% our emotional state and 10% equipment. That said, I can tell the difference pretty clearly between 44khz and 88khz on TIDAL -- it's really not that hard for me personally, at least. Both sound great but the 44khz feels like it's projected onto an awkward hexagon, whereas the 88khz is very semicircular and doesn't 'feel' unnatural. I really have to be into the music to be noticing though. It really is worth it for that 'art museum' experience (and yes, I did check to see if I could tell 24 bit 44khz and 24 bit 88khz apart. It's a very very clear difference to me! Above it is harder and I really can't say tbh). I do have a good DAC and lower mid-tier headphones (well-worn 598s, well over a decade at this point! :D got my originals somewhere between 7th and 10th grade. man, these have been around a while, dang). So anyways I know what I like and I get to have access to an experience that I haven't been able to before. It makes me want to cry, some songs are so beautiful. I'll go downtown to live jazz just to vibe if I can, that's the best. But here, I get to get a little bit closer to that experience, and I can tell when I'm not there. The emotional side can cover the gap, but...man. The little things do matter.
So that's why I think maybe it's not so silly that some people distribute their coffee grounds. If you're interested, there's this extremely practical bloke named James Hoffman who uses it as part of his core routine, he has some phenomenal coffee videos as well. Here's a great video where he discusses some of the nuances of the different methods here, and I think he has a pretty great, balanced opinion on it! (Usually I defer to him, tbh. He does refer to at least one method as 'incremental gains'): https://youtu.be/xb3IxAr4RCo?t=239
Hope that was interesting to you. This was interesting to write, many thanks for reading and greatly appreciated for whoever stuck it out to this point! :D <3 :)))) :D
I'm guilty as charged.
Comparison is the thief of joy, and the only thing audiophiles do is compare.
It may be true, but the audiophile in question didn't bother to do any blind test.
And I believe that actually most of the audiophiles don't do any blind tests, otherwise they'd use twisted coatangers as cables and save themselves a lots of money.
That's why it's so fun, though. Audio reproduction can be measured objectively but the experience of listening to something can only be measured subjectively. Ultimately, if the $5k D-Link router sounds better to someone, who am I to argue?
I have a mid-fi setup by audiophile standards, but it's still more of an investment than most people I know have made. When asked for advice, I tell people to focus on what sounds good to them. If it sounds good, then it _is_ good, assuming one isn't buying something to impress others.
Also, if they ask nicely, I'll give them a discount on my optimized-for-their-CPU-architecture, hand-coded, machine language version of malloc, free, and memcpy.
This is very true. I bought an earphone recently because it had the best technicals for its price-point. I was nice, but somewhat overwhelming to listen to for a long time. Some songs were harsh and sounded too airy. As much as I wanted to love it, I couldn't.
Then I bought a cheaper one that lots of reviewers said sounded good on anything they tried (Tin T2). It had "worse" technicals but guess what, I'm using it more than the older one and finding it way more pleasant to listen to.
Chances are you hear production mistakes/errors in these songs that you simply couldn't notice on the "worse" headphones. And if you produce music yourself, such "better" headphones might allow you to avoid making such mistakes/errors.
In older recordings those things were masked by other instruments, sometimes even by the room's reverb or analog noise floor, or sometimes engineers just wouldn't care about soloing tracks as much because they were on the clock and studios were expensive as heck.
Now we have everyone with super low-noise digital recording, great headphones and unlimited (home) studio time. So people spend hours obsessing about things that weren't an issue before.
I'm in the same camp as you, I've got way more in my setup than the average person, but its mid-fi at best, and mostly on the headphone side. I like music, and I have headphones on for 5-8 hours a day, I'd like to optimize that experience. The good news is the average pair of headphones today is SO so much better than it used to be, and in a weird way some of the overpriced stuff from Apple/Sony/etc... is actually getting better sound to people that hadn't experienced it before.
I really wish there was more emphasis on the transparent + objective measurement side of things industry wide. There is in some places, but at the end of the day entire companies are built around not having objectively perfect sound reproduction, because there is a following of people that like the house-sound they engineer in to their speaker/headphones. And there is value there, its just hard to quantify.
About 12 years ago I built a pair of large (relatively) full-range bookshelf speakers for near-field studio monitor type use at my desk with a wild 3 chamber porting setup. No traditional physical filter-network whatsoever, I borrowed a decent mic, measured the response, generated an inverse impulse filter that I could use to preprocess the signal going to the amp to arrive at a "perfectly" flat frequency response. Guess what? it sounded ok at best.
Audio is hard. Your ears are weird.
Basically this.
In the interest of disclosure, for my senior project in college (a full-year capstone project), I was on a team of students that built an analysis rig for a company that made club/venue/stadium sized speakers. Our rig reduced analysis time from 3 days to about an hour or so. However, that was just one piece of the puzzle, as the "room" also had a massive impact on sound.
That company's "demo room" was amazing. It was the first floor of an old mill building with speakers on one end of the room, and furniture at the other. At least 100-200ft if distance. It was acoustically treated, but not overmuch since one of the goals was to demonstrate the room adjustment capability. Several 5000W amps powered the whole thing, and the audio quality was amazing. It felt and sounded like listening to headphones at a moderately high volume, but when you tried to speak to the person next to you, you could barely hear your own voice.
15 years ago that was only for the nerdiest of the audiophile nerds, and its available to any moderately enthusiastic consumer now.
I think perhaps this comes from our own hearing not being objectively flat in it’s sensitivity.
Personally I don’t want to analyse my music (or my equipment) too hard, I want to enjoy it and the emotional response it invokes in me.
There are also many techniques in hardware that make a piece of audio equipment measure objectively better, but sound worse - like feedback.
Audio is really complicated and can't be boiled down to one or two comparison charts.
ASR is essentially worthless, unfortunately.
You can argue just fine when they fail the blind comparison test.
Or wear the punisher skull while literally being a corrupt cop
Or say that drag shows are grooming kids while the preachers in your church keep getting outed as kiddy diddlers.
Or blame the insurance industry for the problems with american health care and then adopt a system they basically designed.
People need to feel superior. So they choose a subjective field and claim to be objectively correct. Audiophiles are a relatively harmless version of this; other sorts of "truther" become actively dangerous.
After living through the past several years in the US, this is not a question I ask.
this is why IQ tests are BS. You can be smart in one thing (taking IQ tests) but not another.
> "also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."
I think they must be the guys who understood the Matrix visuals.
It strikes me as plausible that there might be differences in how the compiler treats goto vs whatever other loop. Pretty sure GCC can't optimize goto in the same ways.
A colleague on a Zoom call noticed I had audio equipment in my room, and excitedly asked what my headphone setup was. He didn't recognize the Sony MDR-7506 cans on my head, which were running out of a Focusrite audio interface that I use for multitrack recording. Sometimes I listen on my Yamaha MSP7 monitors. He went on to rattle off some absurdly expensive equipment that I forgot immediately upon Googling. I forget if his amp cost four figures or five figures.
I didn't have the heart to say: I'm just using what they use in recording studios.
I understand chasing fidelity, it's driven me to upgrade my own equipment over the years, but capital-a Audiophile stuff is kind of its own thing. People extracting outrageous amounts of money in return for a certain kind of marketing copy and bespoke physical presentation. It feels cynical to me, but it seems to be an ecosystem that exists on its own without much harm to the rest of the world.
I'm speechless. I wanted to write a witty comment but I just can't.
https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-6-56-Braided-Cable...
Q: If I plug this into my Flux Capacitor will I finally be able to time travel?
A: Yes because I am actually answering this question from 2035 and its best supported with the flux capacitor
Monster's pitch to TV/electronic retailers in the early 2000s was that there was basically next to no profit margin on TVs themselves, so instead you could sell the customer a bunch of extremely high margin accessories to go with it.
This worked well in the early 2000s, because myths like "you should spend 10 percent of the cost of your AV setup on interconnects and cables" were still widely believed, and TVs still expensive enough that 10 percent was often a pretty big spend relative to today.
I worked for a major big box electronic retailer at the hight of the Monster cable era, you would not believe the pressures that were applied to sales people to include Monster accessories with every TV. It was quite common for the profit on the Monster accessories to exceed what little was made on the television being sold, and margins on almost all Monster products exceeded 50 percent. I used to wince every time I sold a 300 dollar set of component video cables.
Everybody knows how to write a for loop and wire up a CRUD app these days, but satisfying a low-latency audio buffer request while decoding media and applying effects feels fraught and often (genuinely) looks like a garble of translated Matlab with countless inscrutable variable names and seemingly random constants peppered everywhere.
From that sense of awe (traditional meaning), it’s only a small leap to start wondering if even “known” textbook truths about things like memcpy matter differently than normal. And then the cultist gossip begins, you get the echo chamber effect on casual forums and meetups, and this is where you end up.
While there are good 4K sources like UHD Bluray discs and a few decent streaming sources (but it's spotty and inconsistent), the vast majority of "4K" sources look pretty awful due to being wildly over-compressed. And the level of self-delusion from some of my friends – who are otherwise very smart – is near-emperor's-new-clothes level.
A recent example was the Super Bowl which was one of the few "special events" Comcast aired in 4K (only available on the latest version of Comcast's streaming boxes which few people have – and 4K is not available if you use DVR). I checked it out on a current-year higher-end 65" 4K TV (~$3k) which I adjusted myself to disable the myriad default settings claimed to "enhance" signals but often mangle them in unexpected ways.
Even set up properly on a good TV it looked terrible. The tell-tale DCT macro-blocking was rampant and in many shots the base 4K-ness of the resolution space seemed to highlight the 'peggishness' worse than the 1080p version (which I was cross-checking against out of now-morbid curiosity). The super bowl is widely claimed to be the best quality 4K live broadcast. $250,000 lenses on the best cameras sent through the best signal paths managed by hundreds of engineers across a small city of the world's best production trucks. All stomped into a peggish mess so that cable and satellite companies can shove hundreds of channels of infomercials and decades-old Murder She Wrote episodes down the pipe simultaneously. I guess they'll keep doing it until enough people demand better or someone offers an alternative. Afterward I searched online and it appears the only widely accessible way to view the SB in decent 4K was if you live in one of the few cities that currently have broadcast TV stations airing true 4K and you set up an over-the-air antenna. While it's still compressed, due to FCC specifications for signals actually broadcast OTA, it's pretty mild and apparently looks sensational compared the what most people saw at home on their "awesome" new 4K TVs.
Are you saying that streaming a movie (say a recent Marvel one) in 4K from Disney Plus will look noticeably less good than if I played the same movie from a Bluray player?
What about a Bluray torrent?
A streaming service would probably compress that same 4K movie down to around 10-15GB tops, but probably even smaller, again depending on the same factors. In my opinion most people probably wouldn't notice a huge difference, if any, but it would definitely be noticeable if you knew what to look for (loss of fine detail in fast-moving scenes with a lot going on, a smooth gradient in a low-light scene on the blu-ray might have noticeable banding on the streamed version, and other compression artifacts like that).
Blu-ray torrents could fall anywhere on the spectrum depending on how it was compressed by whoever is distributing the torrent. If you see one labeled "remux" that usually refers to a video file taken directly from the Blu-ray without any additional compression, so watching that one would give you the same experience as watching the blu-ray directly.
When downloading video, you can grab a remux (the raw video files off of the disk, just stripped of DRM), or a re-encode (those video files compressed again using a better codec). A re-encode will be about the same size as a streaming release and generally has higher quality. Re-encodes tend to use cutting-edge video compression, and pirates are willing to throw more compute time at a single output format than a streaming service which has to produce video files for many target devices.
A 4K Blu-ray (or remux) will get you the best quality, followed by re-encodes, and then web-dl's.
But also the bitrate alone should tell you something. You will typically get around 15-20 Mbps for 4k streaming, and often lower, though Apple's service apparently will occasionally hit up to 40 Mbps. 4k discs have a bitrate of around 128 Mbps.
https://preview.redd.it/1l50i8zynts51.png?auto=webp&v=enable...
For a more recent example, I found the desert/spice scenes in Dune to be unwatchable on HBO Max but very pleasant in my subsequent theater visit and later on the 4K disc. In my experience Netflix is the worst offender of the major streaming platforms, and iTunes/Apple TV+ can approach some Blu-rays (though there’s no trick here: they send more data down the pipe).
Oh not from where I see the world! hehe - infact I see most stem educated people of reasonably good IQ by and large living a mythology they do not even know they are living in because they've never really understood the difference between knowledge and understanding and the whole purpose of the humanities.
Mythology is the stories we tell about how we as individuals relate to society and the cosmos.
Elon Musk functions as a sort of deva or heroic god myth that many people do not even realise they are buying into.
Mythology even includes how we structure science - the "genius", the archetypes and roles and stories we tell about heros and how scientific activity takes place - these are myths that have causal effects in producing actual science. Mythology is meta to everything. Its literally the meaning about who we are and our place in the world. There's many cases. Pick your mythology wisely because if you don't you'll get a poor version of one by cultural default.
I can tell you a lot on Hacker News does not look too much different from the audiophile community from this perspective hehe
You don't have to be clever to be a software engineer. It's not that difficult.
Reminds me of comments when CD's came out int he 1980's. Audiophiles and magazine articles insisted they could "hear the aluminum".
What they were actually hearing was songs mastered for Vinyl or casette that had not been properly remastered for digital. Vinyl and casettes required pre-emphasis of highs to offset the limited high frequency response and noise of analog media.
Of course, anything recorded with digital recording equipment and pressed to vinyl is simply for aesthetic reasons. Some people just like playing records and listening to music this way.
I would guess that most of the time a CD made from the master tape sounds better than the vinyl even without a remaster. Of course the remaster is almost always the best bet.
There’s no masters of a lot of rare, non-mainstream things, or at least not known masters. And a lot of great music that wasn’t going to be mainstream for a variety of reasons. Think regional funk, blues, punk, psych, etc. You just can’t get a great digital recording in many instances.
Another huge factor that affects the sound is the damned stylus. It's like switching speakers. Each one has its own signature. Then there's the phono preamp/RIAA filter too! I prefer our modern times where only the choice of speakers matters that much. Think of all the permutations of stylus, preamp, and speakers you had to consider in the early HiFi days.
It's called the RIAA equalization curve.
Basically when you master the record you put something down that has rolled off bass and lots of treble onto the vinyl LP. This is to encode the music in a form that is compatible with the physical disc + stylus.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIAA_equalization
The preamp applies EQ to bring it back to normalcy.
The crappy CDs were a result of dumping a phono mastering onto a CD without realizing that a CD player was not going to apply the RIAA curve.
I don't believe this is the case. The RIAA curve is a very aggressive curve (40db) and no one would tolerate an uncorrected signal (plug your turntable into the line in for a taste, all you hear is sibilance). Also the filter would be applied by the person mastering the vinyl - it would not be applied before the master tape.
IMO the thin sounding CDs were because producers were used to vinyl which still has issues with bass even with the RIAA curve in place. Also because CDs were new and we lacked the knowledge and tools to use them to their potential. For example my teachers in college would have me turn in my DAT tapes with peak levels around -18db (late 90's).
This is true of tape but not vinyl. High frequencies are difficult for vinyl and are better off rolled off. A lot of exciters were used before the tape to get a certain, pleasing distortion. Sounded bad when people started switching to ADAT from analog tape.
I consider myself an audiophile because I hear a difference between no amp+dac sennheiser hd650 vs with amp+dac. so when you ask "How can audiophile continue to exist" ? thats a bit of a dumb take aint it?
Humans are not rational. This is easy to say, and hard to swallow - so, pretty similar to when you'd confront anyone's beliefs with rational refutation.
Today's PCs and cables aren't particularly well shielded. In fact I switched routers because an unshielded USB cable inside the router had a significant impact on Wifi performance if I used the USB for connecting storage.
I also bought a USB connected SDR (software defined radio) and I can tell you that position relative to my PC and the quality of the shielding of the USB cable was directly visible on the waterfall display. Moving the SDR (but not the Antenna) showed significant changes in reception across large swaths of the frequency range.
I've definitely had fan, coil whine, and related interference with different CPU utilization before. I've also had speakers, even wireless speakers get interference from my computer that varies with load, not to mention things like an incoming cellphone call.
Doesn't seem that crazy that different memory allocation and memcpy implementations could impact sound quality of any local audio equipment. Or that playing from ramdisk could sound better than from disk (assuming said disk is emitting noticeable RF).
Because not all audiophiles are gullible
So maybe in a sense it does "sound" different, but it's more because what they are thinking about leaks into their aural experience.
But then again I actually met a person who believed the moon landings were fake.. brilliant guy otherwise, but too young to (unlike myself) having lived through the time period. He (and some others) seemed to believe that it was all CGI, not realizing or grasping that the watch he was wearing had way more computing power than the whole space program at that time. And that every illustration of the moon surface before Apollo 8 (they didn't land, they just took photos) were so very different from the real thing.
I think having a look at the current political climate answers this by itself.
Knowledge has lost much value, and anecdotal reasoning is at pre-education system levels.
Intelligence are declining in all ages [1]. And now top that with hallucinating AI:s that people without contextual knowledge can't even spot when they are making things up.
We're in for a good ride.
1: https://phys.org/news/2023-03-online-iq-scores-century.html
How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge
being so easily available?
An example would be https://www.audiosciencereview.com - he has reviewed a few thousand projects using industry standard measurement gear like Audio Precision analyzers, Klippel scanners, etc.
Same with Erin's Audio Corner: https://www.youtube.com/@ErinsAudioCorner/videos
Most of the audio-related subreddits hew to this approach as well.
I like to think that isn’t the same madness as thinking a different memcpy, because I figured different implementations would map different inputs to different outputs and thus could definitely affect the sound, but any context or knowledge would be appreciated!
All you could want to know about audio encoding, including listening tests (with original posts from the heyday) is still online at the Hydrogen Audio forum.
There are some great threads there, and they've been debunking audiophile snake-oil for decades. Enjoy the rabbit hole ;)
You ever discussed religion with anyone?
The listening experience differs from person to person, depending on everything from hearing, to noise to the individual listener's preferences and tastes. The audiophiles you mention try to justify that individual experience using whatever argument available, including false ones.
I would get messages from customers that were completely insane. And if you say "yo, that's insane" word gets out and it damages your brand. So you're rewarded for perpetuating these weird myths.
If I could build these really cool headphones without having to deal with audiophiles, I probably would. It was challenging and a lot of fun, and I was pretty good at it.
I guess if that's your thing, go for it?
If memory serves, there was somebody saying that exiting the program cleanly sounds worse, you need to crash on a page fault reading the input buffer instead, and that's your end of file behavior.
Someone else said FLAC makes it sound worse, but I suspect they just couldn't figure out how to use libflac.
In other words they were bad programmers writing buggy, half baked shit, and they explained away their broken code as sounding better.
Even the snippet I see in the linked post, right off the bat they start their loop with WaitForSingleObject, that's kind of suspect; the first thing they do is enter the kernel to block at every loop. I suspect they aren't doing that in an optimal way.
Honestly, that's not so ridiculous. Lossless will sound different from lossy, and someone may prefer the lossy version.
I suppose it's possible there's a software bug with the actual FLAC decoder they were listening with. However it of course seems much more likely they're imagining it.
As any EE knows from linear elements course A, a linear two-port network is reciprocal. If it is not reciprocal it is not linear.
The simple conclusion is that if it matters how you orient the cable, then it has distorsion.
You might get the same response in a data center if you say “the color doesn’t matter because the cables are all reciprocal.”
Additionally, labels on datacenter cabling tends to be less cryptic like "DCX-IN-FQP_9".
Jesperwe said they confronted this salesperson about the cables. They then lectured the salesperson on theory. There’s no indication a question was asked with an honest desire for the answer.
When a conversation becomes a confrontation nuance is the first casualty. Jesperwe and the salesperson may have been participating in completely different conversations from their perspectives. Without more information I can’t draw a further conclusion beyond jesperwe participating in (or instigating!) a confrontation with a retail salesperson.
Directional cables have the shield disconnected at one end to ensure there is no LF current path through the shield, thus minimizing mains hum picked up by high-impedance instruments.
Of course, balanced cables (where the shield is exactly a shield, and not also a signal path) do not have this problem.
The Rane Note on sound interconnection has more info: https://www.ranecommercial.com/legacy/note110.html
Ideally you want to write your audio rendering code in asm, too, since newer C compilers add a lot of junk to binaries that reduce the quality of the output. If you can't do this, simply use older compilers.
But if you're going to write in C, I suggest Cosmopolitan Libc and running directly from BIOS since operating systems end up doing a lot of work that produces electrical noise on your hardware.
You're better off running literally only audio rendering code for the best quality rendition.
/s
HolyC or _nothing_!
The poster showed the code and what was done to it.
The code does strange things, though, like wait for a Win32 event on every iteration. And not only one time; there are multiple calls like this:
WaitForSingleObject(hNeedDataEvent, INFINITE);
Is that an auto-reset event that some other thread has to be constantly banging on to keep the loop going? its odd since the code has supposedly buffered the entire file of samples; so you'd think it would just be iterating over that buffer in some chunks and shoving them into some pipe/device. There is also a puzzling ZeroMemory call.
Next time I came around, he tried to sell me this CD player with a huge brick in it. "You get much better sound quality when the player has a brick in it," he told me. So I answered, "For sure! It makes the sound a lot more stable! Badum, tsch!"
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09LYMRWLX
It had serious problems (randomly stuttering image and failure to transmit HDR). The signal test in the TV confirmed it had to be replaced. Chinese no-name junk I guess. 4K 10-bit at 60FPS was at the limit for the cable, even though it said it could do 8K. Clearly not.
Went with this instead, no problems since.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YWBVRVH
So yep, even in the digital world there can be a big difference in cable quality, especially at the very highest transmission speeds.
JPLAY is the kind of thing that offers, among its features, the ability to use a dedicated PC (ideally running Windows Server) for playback.[2] This includes selling their own SSDs "selected for their sound properties" and "Reference SATA cables to ensure absolute best sound quality", and playback-optimized USB cards and denoisers, network adapters and power supplies.[3] The best examples are the 375€ "USB Isolator", which "blocks all noise coming from a PC and re-generates clean USB signal from a (sic) scratch resulting in vast sound quality improvements"[4] and their
12,000€ 4TB server featuring "the only...motherboard designed exclusively for high-end audio playback" that avoids the common pitfalls of worse "office work and gaming" motherboards that "pollute other hi-fi components and contribute to irritating 'digital' sound". Its signature review, pulled out in the product page, says it's indistinguishable from an analog recording - the highest of high praise.[5]
The poster in the linked thread was like, nah, they suck, this sounds awful, but THIS is obviously better. And look how easy it was to do! These C++ developers are all idiots.
2: http://jplay.eu/ml_post_slider/jplay-dual-pc-mode-how-it-wor...
3: https://jcat.eu/; doesn't work in Firefox
4: https://jcat.eu/product/usb-isolator-usb-audio-galvanic-isol...
Can humans tell the difference between a laptop DAC & an external DAC. Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? Do high-impedance headphones actually achieve anything ? Do frequency response graphs mean anything if you can digitally EQ & is digital-EQ fully lossless ? Are planar magnetic headphones a scam ? Is FLAC practically overkill for a human ?
I think I can tell the difference between a 100$ and $400 audiophile headphones. Amplifiers are more straight forward, because it is simply a loudness thing. And at high-enough volumes, I can still hear some white-noise on high-gain settings. But I am less sure about the other questions.
It's important to distinguish price from quality here, though. For example, the $10 apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is known in the (non snake oil obsessed part of the) audiophile community for having very good characteristics for its price, including an extremely low noise floor. I use one on my laptop instead of the built-in 3.5mm.
What I really liked is when claims are backed up with ABX tests. What these determined regarding codec settings is really useful I think, and I also liked that they determined "transparent" encoding settings this way. Very useful when looking to encode your library yourself.
I’ve got some HE400i’s from them. Unfortunately I can only compare against some closed back Sennheisers (HD 380 pro) so it is not really an apples-to-apples thing. But the difference is pretty obvious, there’s more diaphragm and more power behind it. Bass ends up sounding a bit more crisp.
I have a JDS Atom + Sundara setup, and I can hear the difference vs my Galaxy Buds 2 pro (Crinacle's best wireless IEM winner). But, I have been wondering what percent of it is placebo, given the effort it takes to use a wired setup routed through an amp.
It is hard to say how much is placebo. I definitely see how having a “plugging stuff in” ritual could get you in a different headspace. But FWIW, I ended up having the 400i setup in another room that I wasn’t able to use every day, just because of the vagaries of pandemic era “adjust the apartment for multiple people working from home” stuff. One of my strongest “oh this sounds better” moments came from realizing I’d gone through a couple room changes and (without thinking of it) been sitting next to the 400i’s, all plugged in and ready to go, for a while and just using the Sennheisers without thinking, hahaha. So there was not much ritual in that case. Could have still been influenced by placebo or some sort of pseudo-nostalgia thing, though.
IEMs are even stranger, right? I had them mixed up with earbuds for a long time and assumed they were all just junk, but of course they can get really good sound quality by virtue of their position. Don’t need to push a big diaphragm if you are right up there in the ear canal!
I'd say amplifier topology matters more than absolute noise figures.
For example, you can build a 2kW class D amplifier that fits on a PCB weighing ~1lb. A 2kW class H amplifier is going to weigh over 40 lbs. Why would you ever want the one that weights 40x more and likely costs more as a result? The numbers are the same? Maybe even the THD is lower on the class D...
The reason is the path the electrons take. In class D, there is a finite/discrete amount of energy available per unit time. The computer knows precisely what these limits are and controls the signal accordingly (clips/attenuates).
In class H, there is a gigantic toroidal xformer that is responsible for directly stepping the raw line voltage to required DC rail(s) which then goes straight to your loudspeakers by way of basic mosfets. There isn't a discretized energy mechanism involved anymore. The entire chain is analog.
As a consequence of topology and other factors, certain types of program material and loudspeakers can perform substantially better than otherwise possible. If you are looking to set up a system with ridiculous LFE that extends well-below 20Hz, class D amplification is probably going to get in your way.
a laptop DAC & an external DAC
Compared to a competent onboard laptop design (e.g. Apple) the audible difference with an external one will be more power, which is something a lot of pricy headphones benefit from. But for most normal headphones no, no huge difference.
Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp?
Is 0.000225% THD audibly better than 0.01% THD? Honestly, generally not in my experience. Your average room has probably 40dB of noise floor if not more and your speakers are distortion machines too.
Do high-impedance headphones actually achieve anything ?
Do frequency response graphs mean anything if you can digitally EQ
For speakers? Yeah and no. With speakers most sound that reaches your ears is reflected. If your speaker's off-axis sound is markedly different from the on-axis sound, this severely limits what can be accomplished with EQ because we can't EQ them separately. You fix one and the other breaks.
is digital-EQ fully lossless
Are planar magnetic headphones a scam
Is FLAC practically overkill for a human ?
And the good news is that despite what lunatic fringe "audiophiles" believe, this stuff has already been solved to a pretty large degree for decades. I mean, think about the size of the audio engineering industry. It's been a zillion-dollar industry for over a century. We as a human race know how to make sound that sounds good.
JavaScript devs: Foolish audiophiles think they can hear when someone calls malloc!
Mis-diagnosing a problem doesn't mean there isn't a problem. If you call memcp in a way that calls malloc, and your app has been running a while or your system doesn't have a lot of free memory, you're going to get pauses while malloc looks for a free address block. If that pause takes too long, your audio buffer will stall and cause a harsh crackle. People will hear that differently, and explain the problem in different ways.
TL;DR: audio and game programming sucks, and if you allocate heap memory people will actually notice.
In the extreme:
Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said "Of course it leaks". He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number. They added this much additional memory to the hardware to "support" the leaks.
uh... How exactly?
memcpy copies memory from one place in memory to another. That's all it does. There is no "calling memcpy in a way that calls malloc".
well, you asked...
Imagine: They're on a super low-end chip, feeding a bufferless DAC, and they're experiencing buffer under-runs, which cause really noticeable degradation ?
Imagine: They're using some API so wrong that it "works by accident" but only really when timings are "just so" ?
I've had thinkpads in the past that would output varying degrees of noise on the analog line+headphone outputs. It was highly dependent on what the CPU was doing, how much data it was moving around. It was kind of fun as a sort of audible system instrumentation while developing/testing software. The more optimal I'd get things, the higher pitched the noise became.
But no "audiophile" should be using such cheesy analog output from a computer... At least get some S/PDIF off to the fancy preamp.
Go back 10 years and many laptops had issues with cpu frequency scaling and sound quality. (Cheap components that would either start producing audible or em noise that would impact sound)
Q: What's the difference between an audiophile and a musicologist?
A: A musicologist uses a stereo to listen to music, but an audiophile uses music to listen to a stereo.
I don't know about their ears but their marketing sure smells like it's been through a herd of bulls:
> Q. Is MQA lossless?
> A. It's better than lossless!
[https://www.mqa.co.uk/newsroom/faqs/is-mqa-lossless]
I'm pretty sure they used to claim the format was lossless instead of just implying something around those lines by using what they call a "lossless file" as a "digital container".
I opened up Stereophile magazine on apple news recently and their was a breathless review of a $10,000 external DAC.
They had a gut shot, so I started looking at it. The whole thing was just a fancy box & power supply driving a $20 off the shelf DAC chip.
I'd go out on a limb and guess you can probably find a $100-200 DAC with the same chip in it that no one is ever going to be able to tell apart from the $10,000 one.
The $10,000 one didn't even have a particularly flashy looking enclosure!
there's a lot of engineering going on to reduce noise and the analog part in the DAC is greatly affected by the rest of the electronics, it's not just ones and zeros.
most people won't notice the difference of course but there's a reason professional audio equipment costs a fortune.
Therefore, it's potentially easy to tell low grade hardware and simply market it as being legendary
I took a marketing class once that talked about this effect. If you have a crappy product, there are two pricing models you can go for: sell it cheap, or make it pretty and sell it for a lot of money.
Often the latter, which is a scam, is the better option from a pure business point of view. The reason is because people perceive expensive things as being higher quality regardless of whether they really are or not, and also people are very resistant to admitting to their friends that they got ripped off -- so they'll frequently keep singing the virtues of an expensive piece of junk even when they know it has no virtues. So products can still get good "word of mouth" advertising regardless, as long as the price point is sufficiently high.
Another part is less reaction to unclean power. "Thanks" to everyone and their dog using Powerline ethernet, having a clean power supply is ... difficult. You won't notice that in your audio setup unless your neighbors are all blasting the power lines, but if you're working with high-frequency stuff it's definitely noticeable.
The Apple DAC is actually insanely great, the best price/performance ratio of any bit of new audio equipment ever. They are not particularly mechanically well-made, though, and can easily be broken from repeated bending.
In a real world level-matched double-blind ABX test, $9 wins.
Here's how cheap USB-C dongles from Apple and Google stack up with objective measurements: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/r...
Those mini dongles are pretty good, although they're not necessarily exactly world beaters. They're DACs + amplifiers and their amplifier sections don't exactly deliver a lot of current. But for e.g. desktop use you can get a really good DAC + headphone amp combo from Schiit, JDS, Topping, or others for $200ish.
I'd go out on a limb and guess you can probably find a
$100-200 DAC with the same chip in it that no one is
ever going to be able to tell apart from the $10,000 one.
You're right, and there are a lot of inexpensive, engineering-driven "audiophile" products that do exactly what you say.
Topping, Schitt, JDS Labs, and SMSL are a few who offer outstanding products in that $100-$200 price range.
For example, here's a unit from Topping that combines a top notch DAC and headphone amplifier for $200. Objective measurements taken with a very expensive AudioPrecision analyzer: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...
$129 DAC, made in America, also very close to state of the art objective performance: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...
It's fun (and actually, important) to laugh at the audiophile lunatic fringe, but most of us don't play that way.
A top of the line DAC is just a few bucks in quantity: https://octopart.com/ak4493eq-akm+semiconductor-88954630
But, a naive implementation (say, throwing it on a computer motherboard where the analog output stage is subject to interference hell) is maybe not going to sound great, compared to a better implementation of a lesser DAC.
Apparently, this is literally a vanilla D-Link ethernet switch (which costs like €70) with various bits (literally) stuck onto it internally to make it sound better.
A bargain at €798, I'm sure.
LAN Caps, that is something which you can cover your unused ethernet ports... I wonder if they lower my ping in gaming too...
I was thinking of gold plated optical cables, but this is pure snake oil...
EDIT: I think it might be joke as it is in "Voodoo Corner", but the rest of the stuff isn't so...
And here is the real sad part: the seller only need to sell ONE, even as a joke or for the lulz, for this scam to be worth it.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Diamond-2m-Braided-Cable/d...
This shouts to me to be a direct con, someone deliberately taking advantage of the brainwashed. Like psychics and cancer-curing-crystal sellers¹. They are basically one step up from the fraudsters calling to try get access to our elderly (grand)parent's savings².
----
[1] though in defense of those ripping off audiophiles, at least they are not taking advantage of the desperate.
[2] the psychics & such are not one step up, at least not a full one.
I run my hands over my stubbly chin and gaze deeply into my own eyes, wondering.
"Why can't I figure out some way of ripping off audiophiles?"
"Some dude sold a marker used to color in the edge of CDs to audiophiles for like $20. A $0.50 marker for $20. C'mon man think of something."
"Am I too moral, or just an idiot?"
"They're so god damned gullible. Why can't I figure something out? They're all old and rich, it's not like I would be hurting anyone..."
I then sigh and continue on with my day.
Considering that special oils, special shiny tapes, special rocks, special boxes of rocks, special cable lifters, and very special cables have all magically delivered an incredible improvement in imaging and the soundstage etc etc etc, it's very much a sellers' market.
The result of the compilation is recorded on custom 2-inch wide magnetic FeCr tapes, aged for two weeks, and then compared three-way in a vintage Ahmdal Corporation 470V/8 that is carefully maintained by a squad of vegan hermit celibate engineers with the highest DoD security clearances, and kept permanently in an inert atmosphere of CO2 and Argon.
If the comparison shows no errors, only then can the binaries be deployed to customers.
You really need an all-analog process to bring through more of the original punch of the compilers and avoid making the resulting program woolly and harsh.
Sure, mainstream compilers give you the best performance. But doing all the computations at once will result in spiky performance and power draw, which of course will propagate through to your ears as noise. Our compiler rearranges the instructions to present constant load level, resulting in more constant sound flows.
In fact modern computers are too fast to play music properly, back when you were young and the computers were slower, programmers tuned their programs to maximize throughput which naturally resulted in this smooth flow of instructions. It is only recently, conveniently right outside your nostalgia window, that computers became fast enough that they could fly through the code and then stop, resulting in this digital noise.
Plus, modern CPUs change their frequencies all the time, to save power. By keeping a steady flow of instructions, we keep the CPU from going to low frequency mode. If it has ever felt like you are having trouble hearing high frequencies, it is probably because they are missing on a computational level.
As a test, we have set up this laptop. Put on these headphones—we assure you, they are high quality open back headphones. When we unplug the laptop from the wall, it will naturally go into low power mode and naturally smooth out the instruction flow. Listen, no hum. But when we plug it in, you can hear some high pitch whine in the background. That’s the peaky instruction flow.
This is actually kinda fun.
Maybe you can create an audiophile BIOS, as well that automatically tweaks the CPU to optimize enabled core count, turbo and voltages, etc. Of course, it's a chargeable add-on for the custom PC service, and only available on supplied hardware.
Oh, do you think you could get the audiophiles into RISC CPUs too? Find a reference board, custom brand it, and charge 10x for a purer CPU. It's reduced instructions, so there's fewer of them to disrupt the pure audio quality. You've hand tweaked the RISC instruction set to remove any that might impede the logic flow of audio processing for a purer, clearer sound.
> Music reproduction is clearer, with more liquidity, dynamics and focus. The improved inter-transient silence allows the listener to hear ambient cue information essential for accurate perception of stage depth, width and unwavering imaging. High quality video systems will benefit from SHAKTI devices near power supplies, projection guns and laser disc/DVD players. Reduced color noise and improved convergence alignment are some of the improvements that can occur.
Even more amazing promise... So it is snake oil for both cars and hifi...
At the same time, I venture to say none of these folk could pass a double-blind test with much better than random chance. There's not much else to say. Demo that and color me surprised.
The issue is that most of the snake-oil comes from some truth. Here we are at the how much profit is fair debate. Contextualize for your own industry and/or product and you'll find it tricky to justify a 'fair' value for anything. Whatever the market will bear, right?
Audio hardware is one of the oldest electronic tech segments.
'good enough' for even the most persnickety audiophiles happened late in the 1960's.
Since then it's been about repackaging and doodads.
There are a few technologies that haven't found fit yet for market or manufacturing reasons. Some of those will enable big leaps, but require scale and cooperation from content producers.
I strongly disagree. Since 1960's we were getting better component base, better schematics, better measurements. Even analog amplifiers were evolving not only in audio quality, but also in efficiency. But I still hate the PWM (class D) amps. )
As I mentioned, IMO 'good enough' occurred late 1960's; Audio quality is the context surrounding that statement.
I have multiple systems. Generally speaking I have them matched by generation.
I have a pair of Dynaco A25s being run by a Quad 33 & 303. All of them made in 1969.
To your point, I have upgraded the passive in the A25s with more modern components. They now sound better. But before the upgrade, to an average person, they were already way good enough.
This old system gets the most unprompted compliments of any of the systems in my home.
Can I make a GaN based integrated amplifier with a state-of-the-art DAC and wireless inputs? The size of a deck of cards!? Sure! Smaller? We do that! But the real-world in-room 'normal' user/use case will have about the same experience as the system from 1969.
An end-to-end analog system when done 'properly' will generally sound better. You sacrifice cost, space, and energy consumption for that privilege. You can get 95%+ of the performance for 10% of the sacrifice if you choose components carefully.
We're currently way past the point where the devices or efficiencies are having a big impact on the intended experience. Unless you're in the 0.001% of people who have a dedicated listening room, the hum from the compressor in your refrigerator in the next room is louder than any distortion on a properly implemented system.
Yes, room treatments are very important, but with all the cheap signal processing tools - a lot of which was indirectly funded by the voice assistant boom - we have gotten very good at compensating for that as well.
Now we have neural network ICs that are insane at environmental noise cancellation and can run years on a small battery.
But you still want to listen to your stereo music, probably from a streaming service, or maybe your surround sound movie.
The content side is the bottleneck on any big innovation in the space. As long as the focus remains on the sonic nuances of Hotel California, we will be repackaging as opposed to innovating on a sonic experience.
I've definately heard hums in computer audio stemming from EMI when the computer is doing something heavy. Granted that was back when having your cellphone near your PC screwed with the sound when someone was calling.
I also remember a friend of mine learning graphic design many years ago, who told me that their teacher told the class Photoshop on Mac produces higher quality images than on a PC. I don't remember what the basis of that was.
valid argument in late nineties when cards did it really badly.
I mostly listen to soundboard recordings of live music (Grateful Dead and Phish) where some recordings are fantastic and others aren't. My personal favorite reference to listen to is Dave Brubeck's Take Five- although it has a high noise floor, the recording is still excellent (I like to listen to the creaking of the bass during the drum solo because it's quiet and in the background).
Over time I moved away from speakers because I'm rarely in a situation where I can listen at the volume I like without people either asking me to turn it down or leave. I got a pair of Sennhauser headphones- nothing fancy- and am quite happy listening to my desktop computer through that. Switching to another set of headphones- it immediately sounded terrible and I had to play with various settings (turns out the audio driver was trying to send through lots of very low frequency and the headphones made a shambles of that).
There was a period where mp3 encoding was terrible and generated obnoxious artifacts. Nowadays many mp3 128k recordings are fine for me.
So for me, while not an audiophile, these things matter: reduce hiss to an acceptable level, get headphones or speakers you like, and use EQ to tune it to a sound that works for you.
https://www.marketcalls.in/fun/vanilla-ice-cream-that-puzzle...
What they actually need to realise is that there's no magic in computers, and sometimes digital systems are literally identical as long as they aren't erroring. For example, copying over a network has integrity checks at several levels, so you can't receive a different version of the music.
Anyway, I don't know much about this stuff, but the biggest problem is always lack of education, not that people are stupid. There's a lot to know and people usually don't and can't know everything. I'd say in certain cases intelligent people are more problematic because they're capable of constructing a plausible explanation that makes sense only because they lack the complete picture.
First, the analog-to-digital converters (ADC) of the time were absolutely terrible. Which resulted in CDs being actually worse than their vinyl counterpart.
Then there was also the people that liked the "warmth" of the vinyl, which is something real that can be measured (at least for old vinyls, don't know for the modern ones). Funny enough, this was due to the vinyl being less 'precise' than the CD, but it had a sound signature that many people preferred, and still prefer today (most modern headphones and speakers aren't neutral-sounding by choice).
Some implementations use lossless copying, while other methods are 'lossy'. The differences between GNU libc and Boost are subtle, but important. What this means is that for each year your audio sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have NVMe - it's about 15kbps on M.2, but only 7kbps on eSATA, due to linear velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001 (on Windows 98 using an ancient version of malloc and memcpy), and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. If you ever used uClibc, I hope you kept your original vinyls! Proper memcpy rips (or better yet, ripping directly to factory-fresh RAM) from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place.
Seriously, stick to audiophile-grade library functions: you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.
Out of a gut feeling I've been taking out my music SSD and storing it in the freezer when I'm gone for the weekend, or on holidays etc, as to retard the lossy decay process. But I've never actually measured, maybe you can throw in some expertise here?
If you're serious about this, install Gentoo so you can compile everything yourself! Are you really going to entrust your music collection to a distro full of precompiled packages of unknown provenance, likely riddled with dirty bits from cheap second-hand hardware and possibly coal-fired electricity?
I think this might be the origin? https://www.head-fi.org/threads/why-flac-is-better.451369/
If the computer isn't able to keep up with the playback, you would probably get extremely obvious sharp clicks, very far from "the sound has a slightly 'hard edge'".
New and malloc are identical. Neither one will initialize any of the data. You also wouldn't call either in a loop; you would allocate a buffer once and then copy data into that buffer. You can see this in the code they posted:
BYTE *sound_buffer = new BYTE [sizeof(BYTE) * nBytesInFile];
hr = mmioRead(hFile, (HPSTR)sound_buffer, nBytesInFile);
:p
He didn't like the concert. "The bass response was not good".
The opposite if you happen to use a big endian system.
source : https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-xbox-hdmi-cable-has-anti-...
I run MiXXX waveforms at 60hz, it takes about 5% CPU, so it has lots of CPU time to spare, and even then, there are graphic imperfections. Every couple of seconds or so, there's a frame skipped, and it is impossible not to perceive it.
This has nothing to do with sound, but I think it is relevant to this discussion :)
Occasionally, small changes are observed in high end equipment with high precision instrumentation - but a subjective interpretation to a psychometric observation is applied as cause and effect.
Arguably, the cost alone is enough of a placebo to sell anything for a desired effect.
Is there a way I can measure how well it does at sound quality other than the "listen to it and see if it seems ok" method? Because as with glasses, you get used to a prescription that is slowly degrading over time, same with hearing.
How are people measuring fidelity in a home environment?
Because they're the kind of men who love maximizing making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive.
Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem.
The actual problem is self is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever.
See also:
* Car tuning
* JavaScript front-end frameworks
* Barbeque
* Linux distros
* Cycling
* Optimizing passenger flying experience
Whiskey is another one, but... I like nerding out about whiskey so maybe that hit too close to home. :)
In the Subaru tuning community, there's a company called Cobb that sells a product called AccessPort that you plug into your car and change its performance using a map file. Cobb themselves include off-the-shelf maps designed to fit vehicles with varying parts and varying conditions, and you can also pay a professional tuner to build a custom map for your car, which you would want to do if you have custom parts that an off-the-shelf map would not account for or if you have a very specific tuning goal.
Here's the issue that I've been confused with: the community tends to advocate for using a pro-tuner over an off-the-shelf map whenever possible - even if your car has the same exact parts specified in the map notes, and even if your climate and elevation are the same as specified in the map notes - because "every car is different".
If I don't have exotic performance goals + I have the parts supported by a given OTS map + I drive in the supported climate, why should I trust some rando in his garage to make a map for me, over Cobb who sees way more vehicles and configurations than any single shop ever could? A lot of the time reading these forum post endorsements sound like "the tune is so good this guy is totally a scientist yo".
Anyway, partially a rant but since we're talking about enthusiast communities thought I'd share and I really am interested to learn!
I assume because Cobb, because of the reasons you stated, has to be more conservative than the guy in the garage can be.
Whether or not that's a good thing is according to your risk tolerance/wallet size.
Running programs on modern hardware; the explosion of complexity increases the amount of impure copper; pushing you away from direct and immediate feedback, and towards an abstraction soup that makes my eyes water
How can we still trust programs running on todays hardware?
That is why I've ported quake to run on an abacus
Even though that level of (sometimes willful) ignorance is scary, the whole thing is fascinating, in a train wreck way.
But the part where he says that the c++ new[] operator sounds better than malloc is just ridiculous. I'm not good enough at mental gymnastics to make that one seem remotely plausible.
It matters quite a lot for effects processing and synthesized instruments.
I kid you not.
It seems to be about reducing latency, which definitely varies with memcpy implementations.
And the 32 bit CDs. (They were remastered at 32 bits).
Audiophiles will eat anything.
It's a status game.
Including very funny ones who use these unfortunates to show own intelligence or even (save us, Lord) wisdom.
For the most part, funny audiophiles are completely harmless old people (see photos from any audience of audiophiles), such children who are constantly waiting for Santa with new beautiful toys.
Of course, the music player will sound better if you're not a programmer but managed to build some hell of a source code in a dubious version of Visual Studio :) This is an old story about expectations. If something subjective is expected, it can always be achieved.
Yes, I know vinyl doesn't sound better. I have much better sound sources. But I like my turntable and I like the process of getting ready to listen to vinyl. It gives me pleasure, and I like turntables as very beautiful engineering structures, and no psychopathic fighter with Santa Claus will deprive me of this pleasure :)
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-scal...
If X product exists. Then Y comes and is largely considered an alternative to X, and someone says Y is slow. Does it not make sense to compare it to X?
I would note as well that the Mastodon instance clearly struggled with the initial load from the HN traffic. Testing its load time when few users from HN were being directed to it won't be a very good benchmark against Twitter.