[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.

Tarot readers are selling a fake good. You can't really escape the ethical implications of that.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AES3

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.

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)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NMFQ3YvR3Eo

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.

> 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.

UDP is another story and it’s normal to hear things.

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.

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.

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 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 1% of their power rating.

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.

If you want trouble free audio streaming it is worth checking the network.

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 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 single 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 Les Pauls and Strats. Or buying USD 6000+ custom shop instruments. Some of them get to collections of 30, 50, 60.

Of course it's a lot of fun so I get 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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

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).

My point is bits moving from point to point. Passing through my buggy function handling 64 bit numbers as 16 bits could be another example, and using transport in that sense is probably wrong and I'll have to discuss TCP and everything related.

My only point is that there are a million different ways data can change from point A to B, some expected (.1+.2 example) others unexpected. The more I explain the more I'm being downvoted and I don't really understand why it's so controversial.

Starting to believe it's a HN thing I'm unaware of, if someone tries to explain a misunderstanding troll him and misunderstand as much as possible.

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.

The level of autism in this thread.

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...

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.

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.

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.

No idea if it impacts taste though.

[1] https://coffeechronicler.com/wdt-tools-technique/

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.

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.

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. 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.

Smile & wave boys!

>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. 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

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.

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.

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.

> "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.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ofq_nl366VM

By the by : I'm almost certain this has to be satire.

Wow...

After living through the past several years in the US, this is not a question I ask.

https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Engineers_and_woo

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.

I'm guilty as charged.

this is why IQ tests are BS. You can be smart in one thing (taking IQ tests) but not another.

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.

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 ;)

https://hydrogenaud.io

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.