Some high-end amplifiers offer a relay based volume system where the knob simply switches resistors in and out of the audio path using relays to adjust the volume, and although this does result in "steps" of volume, it does mean the stereo balance is always perfect.
Ganged log-taper pots have something like +-3 or +-6 dB ganging mismatch even for relatively high-end (10-15 € ea) units.
Their $100 units are some of the best testing amps/dacs in the price range, so even from a purely subjectivist standpoint they make stuff that generally works pretty well. If you're encountering issues, then they will usually make good on it.
The stereo imbalance is just something you're gonna see at basically every amp at that price point.
Balance and tone controls are still useful. You can treat your listening environments to be neutral (bass traps, absorbers and diffusers, etc); but when you have a few friends over to listen you need to compensate for the sound absorption by their bodies. Or if it's a nice day and you open the window. Or you have a recording made by a friend on their phone. All sorts of reasons.
One is to convert the L/R Stereo image to Mid/Side do the volume control and then convert it back to L/R. This way any mismatch of the potentiometer would translate into a change in stereo width instead of shifting the image around.
Another solution would be to use one pot as a voltage divider, buffer that voltage and use the resulting current to drive two Blackmer VCA ICs (e.g. THAT2181).
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...
I've seen so much "expensive" gear in rooms that are absolutely horrid in terms of sound reflections. Just a carpet, curtains or a couple of cheap sound panels can make wonders in improving sound if you know just a bit of the physics of sound. You don't have to invest in super expensive equipment to do that.
Furthermore, there is a healthy DIY community these days, where you can build your own speakers, cables, amplifiers, etc, with very little effort, and get a lot of enjoyment in the process and with the product. I built a set of LX521.4 and LX Mini speakers from Siegfried Linkwitz [0] and it changed completely the way I listen to audio now for an order of magnitude less money that what I'd had to pay otherwise...
I was fortunate enough to meet Siegfried at one of his listening sessions about a year before he passed away, and we had a fun conversation about physics and electronics. Very nice man, with the right mix of formal (with his super nice diagrams) and informal (with his scrappy, clever, practical designs).
I want to make two sets of speakers. First, a two channel set up for my home office, to play high-quality music while I work and handle conference call audio. Second, a monitor for my synthesizers. They produce a crazy range of detailed sound, and I want something that reproduces all that detail across a full range, even at lower volumes, and ideally without strict placement/listening position constraints.
I dream of building a battery powered custom speaker bank for synth busking / disturbing the peace.
The posts are old and I moved since then, but my experience has not changed. The minis are unreal. The quality of the sound you get in such a small (and cheap to build) package is to my knowledge, unmatched. Actually, I had them in my home office until recently [2]. As long as you have 1 to 1.5 ft of distance from the walls, they'll work like a champ.
The LX521.4 will go down to 20Hz, but the dipole open baffle bass is not "punchy" in the sense of pressurizing a room, but rather, you feel it all around. So it depends on the kind of music you listen to. I prefer classic rock and jazz, and some electronica, and so far I find them very rewarding.
The community in Oplug Support is very friendly and will help you in anything you want to know.
[0] https://ramirosalas.com/2016/02/on-my-lxmini-speakers/
[1] https://ramirosalas.com/2017/11/complete-linkwitz-setup/
[2] https://oplug-support.org/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=4941&p=44858&...
It doesn't require you to purchase overengineered or overhyped technology any more than being a cycling enthusiast requires you to weigh your accessories in grams. :)
I always thought... how can there be such a thing? maybe you let the non-recurring costs get a little high, but don't you end up with a better product in the end?
Turns out overengineering is a thing.
I had a friend who was a real sound engineer.
You just need a good (not overpriced) set of earbuds.
Any recommendation?
One tesla website has a thread hundreds of pages/thousands of comments long of complaints.
https://teslamotorsclub.com/tmc/threads/comprehensive-usb-bu...
Depends on how you define lossless, but for a sufficient informal definition, CD audio definitely is lossy.
You draw the line at the limits of human hearing, which turn out to be about 20 bits from softest audible sounds to "hearing damage inside a minute"and a sample rate of around 48 ksa/s.
CDs weren't quite there. Modern stuff recorded with 24 bit depth and high bit rates is effectively lossless.
One of the goods things about the limitations of the CD format is that we learned a lot about masking noise via dithering (deliberately introducing more noise) and noise shaping.
Dithering gives about 120 dB of useful dynamic range, so I can't imagine a case where someone wanted more. You can't go much lower than the noise floor of the environment and you don't want to go too far above 100 dB, because this already isn't pleasant (nor good for your ears; 85 dB is considered the upper safe SPL limit for longer exposure). I'd risk stating that even without dithering, the default 96 bit depth is good enough in typical listening conditions.
https://web.archive.org/web/20200310174634/https://people.xi...
Yep, that’s part of my point, but CD audio in particular isn’t that great of bit depth or sampling rate, even by standards of the time for uncompressed digital audio. There’s also the point that the “audio wars” era covered the era of CD audio and that’s certainly another major audio quality factor.
No producer or technician has any basis to complain about CD audio quality for listening by humans; the deficiencies of their CDs are entirely their fault.
Ok, so since I can still identify sound frequencies >22khz despite being now 40yrs old, I’m not entitled as a human to critique the CD audio format, especially as I can tell you the exact moment when the audio range is being clipped in the songs I enjoy?
https://web.archive.org/web/20200310174634/https://people.xi...
Do we need to cover the site rules again? Is it assuming best intent to try and straw man my argument to serve what purpose, boost your ego?
1) of course the audio engineers knew what they were doing who created the CD audio standard.
2) of course they also had constraints from picking “best”, cost among them, and designed something that satisfied the demands placed on them as best as they could.
How does any of these tangents y’all have went on disprove the only point I made, that CD audio is not lossless (close, but no cigar) in the audio sound quality sense.
Sure the situation might exist, but it's exactly the kind of bad engineering I'm calling out.
I guess is the same as on iPhone where if you hold backspace, it will not zap all the text, but go one by one with a visible delay. These companies simply treat end users as babies.
I can't tell the specific concept you're talking about though. If it's the auto-repeat rate (your iPhone example), then of course there needs to be a delay before that kicks in, and a steady repeat rate. I'm talking about single button presses.
If you're talking about the requirement to debounce buttons, the proper way to do this is to act on the button press immediately, while setting a timer that disallows further button state changes while waiting for the contacts to settle. This time is a balance between how long it actually takes the contacts to settle, and how rapidly a user could possibly push a button (missing a deliberate button press is also extremely frustrating and dangerously demanding of user attention, even with tactile feedback).
For sure you don’t act on a button press imediately. If you do that in automotive, all the electric noise will trigger the button randomly.
If you open the door there are a few more buttons for setting power levels and a timer, and the only useful preset button (popcorn), but none of the useless ones.
This LG NeoChef model: https://www.lg.com/ca_en/microwave-ovens/lg-LMC1575BD
This is just another example of the brain-dead designers and coders running around ruining the world.
It sounds extreme to say, but I suspect quite a few of them have blood and misery on their hands, because some poorly designed control cascaded in effect and caused a catastrophe elsewhere. It's easier to imagine with medical equipment than microwaves, but its still putting someone's desire to write fancy control algorithms over a simpler more effective design.
Start out by punching any jackass insisting everything be digital, you will go a long way to solving the problem of bad designers.
https://www.fisherpaykel.com/au/cooking/ovens/contemporary-o...
My parents bought a new microwave with all kinds of fancy digital features that nobody uses 99% of the time. In addition to being really difficult to use, it also makes a very loud BEEEP on every button press. Insanity.
I got a new microwave recently. It beeped on every button press, 5 beeps after a cook cycle, no way to mute (yeah, I checked). Within a day of owning it I took it apart and ripped the beeper off the board. Problem solved.
Another great feature is that it doesn’t have a rotating platform, I have square plates so that’s also super convenient.
I get buying a simple microwave if that’s all you need it to do, but don’t dismiss the models with more bells and whistles, they have their place as well.
Saved (fallible) me from a lot of cold meals.
My current microwave doesn't have that and in ascending order of silliness I have 1) forgotten food and eaten it cold 2) gotten hungry and gone to heat up something only to find there was something already in the microwave 3) (worst) opened the microwave to find something there from the night before.
But the UI is utterly absurd. The default presentation is to select timer or cook. Who uses a timer anywhere nearly as much as the cook function? It is like a car always first asking if you'd rather drive or pop the hood.
One more button press has never been enough to annoy me anywhere nearly enough to replace it. But I wonder how many times I've pressed it.
I guess you only need to understand ~50% of the course material to get your degree though.
Considering they already need digital control circuitry to interface to a touch screen it shouldn't be significantly cost-prohibitive to use that to make knobs that are immune to oxidization.
I'm surprised the potentiometers work at all given the abuse they go through. Early desks had no memory, so it was often a huge rush to set the next scene in the fader bank before it was needed.
When it comes to cars a touchscreen definitely isn't the best way to control things
Gas stoves are the next most responsive because the fire doesn't "store" heat; only the grill does.
Finally electric stoves are the slowest-responding because the coil stores quite a bit of heat even after power is cut, and that heat continues to transfer into the pot. Conversely, when starting them up, it takes quite a while to heat up the element hot enough to only then transfer some of that heat into the pot.
You do want a quality induction stove with an analog knob for the best experience, though. The low-end induction stoves typically have touch-step controls and pulsating simmer, which IMO is still way better than an electric stove if you're on a budget, and still responds faster than gas stoves but lacks the fine-grained simmer controls that some of the higher-end models do, if that is important to you.
When I travel, for instance to cook for the inlaws on holidays, I have to spend time physically correlating how hot each of the burners is for its particular settings. It seems to vary between each individual burner, which are different sizes. The way I correlate is to use my bare fingers to quickly touch the bottom of the pan. Or I lift the pan up and touch the bottom there. This seems suboptimal. When I travel to AirBnBs, induction ranges are all the rage. Same process. I suppose if you're boiling a pot of water, the induction speed is great. If you're making something sensitive like a hollaindaise, lordy what a PITA, in my experience.
I make delicate sauces like hollaindaise reliably and speedily on my nominal 15,000 BTU gas range. I have had the family twiddling fingers more than once waiting on me to get results from an induction burner. Same burner is an outstanding large volume frier.
Now I get that the induction technology is safer, but then I use a big chainsaw with a real chain to cut down trees on my property. Chainsaws are highly dangerous and exceptionally useful. Similarly I raised up a child that learned to cook quite sophisticated things on that big gas range. She was also using very sharp 12" knives from an early age. There can be a deep pleasure in "be here now", paying attention to your tools, using them competently and safely.
(It's possible I've only ever encountered crappy induction cooktops...)
Again, I don't know the safety characteristics of induction so maybe I did something really stupid...
I believe higher-end stoves will either not pulse or pulse fast enough to effectively be continuous when you factor in the thermal inertia of the pot.
One of those little traps that it's often hard to know about in advance.
They had a lock button, but every now and then one of their paws would stand long enough on the lock/unlock touch control to activate the entire panel.
We resorted to flipping the breaker any time we left the house. Guess none of those engineers had a cat.
I hate it on my oven. It defaults to 200 degrees, and to change it to 450 takes almost a full minute as it plods along in five-degree increments.
It's a lot easier to accidentally melt a plastic chopping board onto an electric stove than a gas one, and much harder to clean off when you do.
That's only true for the type of electric stove that is still (bizarrely) popular in the US, with exposed spiral heaters. At least in the EU electric stoves are all glass. And many of them are induction heaters, which means your plastic chopping board wouldn't even notice being on the heater.
Cleaning melted plastic off of the vast majority of surfaces, including glass, is hardly easy.
OTOH, leaving a plastic (PP or some other thermoplastic) board on non-induction glass heater top would smear in a horrific way, close to impossible to clear it. The heaters do have LED illumination, though.
As long as I'm ackchyuallying, I'll also point out that radiant cooktops don't have LEDs in them (at least I've never come across one like that). The red light (which I assume you're referring to) is just what happens when the element in an infrared heater (space heater, toaster, etc) gets hot.
Three legs come into the house, two hots and center tap neutral. Either hot to the neutral = 120V. Either hot to the other hot = 240V.
(×) I can't believe it's 2020 and I'm writing this. I haven't had any significant hardware issues on Linux in almost a decade. What's even worse is that Dell specifically claims that the laptop is fully compatible with Ubuntu.
But ovens with controls in the front are definitely available in the US. So you can have whatever style you want.
I agree, though, it is stupid when they are in the back. Presumedly this is just to save money by putting all the controls and displays in one place.
Still, those are better than buttons.
If I want to set a timer for an hour, theoretically I hold it and it repeats and jumps in increments of 5, but it's too flaky sometimes. So I alternate between trying to get that to work and just pressing the button a zillion times.
Incidentally, you can press both the crown and the side button at the same time to pause and resume a workout even when the display is water-locked.
(Never got the point of a touchscreen on a smartwatch. The surface is too small to be useful.)