I have a pair of powered studio monitors (Mackie MR5), and I completely relate to this problem. Many PCs and phones will emit an audible hissing noise while plugged in. I've tested on a dozen different devices, with integrated and external DACs, five hundred dollar sound cards, massively shielded cables, practically every modern OS you can name, tweaking every audio setting exposed to me. The only devices that work perfectly are (1) my TV output, and (2) every single Apple product.
I'm wholly convinced that the computing world is, in general, regressing. Audio has been a huge loser in this fight. Today, many modern phones don't ship with 3.5mm jacks. If you want lossless audio, you literally can't find it, even though there's zero reason companies like Spotify couldn't stream it when available (even if it costs extra) (Spotify literally asks artists to upload the masters when they publish, they have that data and then throw it away). Many artists don't even publish physical CDs anymore, so its a game of luck if they have a website where I can buy the FLACs/ALACs. And if you want the actual files to, you know, live your life in a completely legal way, those are gone.
Its more than just audio. Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies, and have them taken away at any time. eBooks are the same and always have been; the world's oldest technology has been coopted by companies like Amazon to increase revenue, and there's practically zero competition. Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere, eating up every conceivable megabyte of memory available literally only because developers are lazy, and now you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy. Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
Somehow we took systems and workflows that were amazing throughout the 90s-00s and, in the course of a decade, completely ruined them.
Except you’re leaving out all the positives and only focusing on the negatives.
Sure, Google can revoke my access to a movie at any time but I can watch on any of my devices and I dont have to worry about finding it in stock at the local store.
I can carry literally thousands of books with me in a device smaller than a paperback.
I can’t stream lossless music from Spotify but I can stream high enough quality that most people can’t tell the difference. Not to mention you get access to pretty much every song you want for 10$ a month.
Electron apps and the web are replacing desktop apps but they are also making it easier than ever to make a cross platform app, meaning we will get apps that we otherwise wouldn’t. This is especially good for Linux, which would be much further behind macOS and windows without popular electron/web apps available like slack, Spotify, etc.
It does nobody any good to have 1000 books on a single device if the whole thing is subject to revocation, especially when you paid full retail price for the privilege of being allowed to read it. This is regression.
Previously you paid your $10 and received a paper book. You could read it, re-read it, lend it, sell it, or burn it for warmth. You owned it for as long as you kept it dehydrated. The $15 you now pay per book gets you one of these rights, temporarily.
Whether most people can tell the difference between 320k and lossless is irrelevant-- the retail price is the same for a technically inferior product. This is a regression. And again, for your money, you own nothing.
And for apps, the cross-platform compatibility comes at the expense of consumers, who have to continuously purchase and maintain newer computer equipment to do the same damn word processing, email and shopping tasks that used to be possible on a 486. And of course, since everything is a subscription, it's a double punishment for the consumer-- they have to maintain hardware to run software they don't own.
The entire premise of modern technology has become a new vector to extract the most money from the consumer while delivering the least amount of value, power or control.
It worries me that you believe there's a natural conflation between the genuinely valuable services products like Kindle offer, and the specific business model of purchasing ephemeral licenses to media content. Kindle, Google Play, iTunes, whatever; they're amazing services that provide a lot of value. But that value could still be conveyed if the products they offered didn't have additional restrictions beyond those restrictions already present on physical media.
I'm not going full RMS here and saying DRM is evil. I'm just saying that: I should be able to loan digital content to other people. I shouldn't be afraid that Apple will, one day, just say "I know you really enjoyed spending $200 on all that media, but its all gone. See ya." Maybe that means they need to offer downloads of the content, or maybe it means we need legislation which says we can sue the hell out of them when they try it. I have no preference. But consumers need more protection.
Also its worth clarifying: I don't hold subscription services to the same standards. That's a different business model.
Not “most people” - pros on high end equipment cannot pass an ABX on 256kbps MP3. Spotify’s “extreme” quality setting is 320kbps.
This isn’t some “normies”/“audiophiles” thing. 256kbps mp3 is acoustically transparent to human beings in ideal listening situations.
The bad rap mp3 got was from 128kbps that was more common pre-broadband.
Also, using lossy compressed sources (even 256-320kbps) in derivative works (eg dj mixes, samples, et c) that will be later lossy recompressed (podcast, satellite radio, spotify, et c) is a good way to make your production sound crappy, which is why lossless is important. Any audiophile who tells you they need lossless for final listening simply hasn’t tested it. It is religion, not engineering.
>Not to mention you get access to pretty much every song you want for 10$ a month.
If you listen to mainstream shit where the artist does not have enough control of their work to opt out of the scam that is the pay scale for streaming music.
I have had to resort to ripping vinyl and CDs from my collection to get digital versions of tracks that Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music do not have. If I had to do it all over again, I'd keep the vinyl and CDs in the box and just grab the music from somewhere like REDacted instead.
The "positives" you've listed were basically the case for the standard 00's setup. You just had to undertake some deliberate action to adopt it as your setup, rather than going along with that period's sharecropper option.
Re. flac downloads, Bandcamp (almost?) always offers a flac download option. You'd be surprised how many bands have a Bandcamp page, even if they're signed to labels.
The option is not well advertised. After you purchase a digital download, there's a tiny arrow next to the 'download' link that allows you to switch the download to flac.
I always download flac and consequently spend a lot of money at Bandcamp!
They also have an app that offers streaming and a bunch of social features so you can make a page for yourself where you show off the music you like and make playlists and interact with others. It's probably a great feature, but the thing that really sets Bandcamp apart is that you can just ignore the fuck out of it and pay money for some files that you can download using a browser and put on your own drives and devices.
Bandcamp is pretty much single-handedly keeping high quality audio alive. I exclusively buy music from them and then load it on to my own music streaming server.
Wow I can sympathize. Sounds like you're discerning a S/N ratio problem that would have disqualified the designs from 'high fidelity' in the late 70s and through the 80s. And you have to wonder if in your TV/Apple the hiss is there but is being noise gated. I too believe there has been regression. All it takes is one generation to 'interrupt' consumer expectations of ever increasing quality.
Not so long ago widely used audio codecs (the actual ADC/DAC part in the PC) had big problems with idle tones at low signal levels (which were simply gated off at silence, otherwise you would have gotten constant, looping artifacts). I managed to reproduce over 100 % THD+N with my old Thinkpad X200, i.e. more, very clearly audible, noise and artifacts than signal.
This is a separate issue though from the usually high output noise floor and poor isolation from other components, e.g. many complaints about many makes and models where CPU/GPU or even disk activity will induce audible pulse noises in the heaphone outputs or speakers.
The only way I found to minimize/eliminate HISS while using high quality monitors/pro speakers is to pair them with a proper external USB Audio Card.
Those External Audio Cards receive the signal in digital form, thus free of any noise they could pick up in the process. These are decoded inside the external DAC which then feeds audio to the speakers. since this part of the signal path is analog, any interference picked up by these cables is gonna appear on the speakers, which is why the good gear usually supports BALANCED SIGNALS so that the speaker can reference the signal and weed out noises added while in-transit.
My gear is a pair of YAMAHA HS8 speakers and a YAMAHA AG06 external audio card. Both support Balanced audio so that's what I'm using regarding cables between the audio card and the speakers.
Checked out the AG06 but it has internal DSP and other things I don't really need, plus it seemed like more of an audio interface than a sound card, do you have any recommendations for balanced audio usb external cards without all of the extra stuff?
None of this is the computing world regressing; it's just businesses regressing, or the law regressing, or convention in your social bubble regressing (regressing from what you like, mind, not what other people want.) The time with maximum availability of lossless audio and high-quality movies is right now. You can go join a private tracker and have the largest catalog of them in existence available to you for free, and you have the most bandwidth, most storage, and best tools in existence to organize and consume them. With books, you have to exert even less effort, because there is a huge global search engine where you can instantly download them without any registration barrier. If you don't choose to do that stuff, it's not software stopping you.
Test your system (and your room) with this audio quality quiz, comparing lossless audio with several compressed bit rate streams [1]. With my 50-year old ears, and an outboard DAC/amp and audiophile magnetic planar headphones, I could only score 50%.
That said, switching between Spotify and Tidal on the same track, I hear a pretty big difference. The lossless music has a depth that just isn't there on the compressed streams
What I will say about lossy MP3 audio is that in a blind ABX style test, I imagine I would not be able to point out which is which if the bitrate is high enough. However, if you play the lossy audio and lossless audio back to back in a good critical listening environment, there will often be small detectable differences between the two.
The difference is usually very, very subtle (my description for it is "soundstage differences", like slight differences in audio imaging) and if you are in the situation you are 99% of the time where you are not in a critical listening environment, you probably won't be able to even hear this. But if you are absolutely gung-ho about preserving the full spectrum of the recording, MP3 won't work. It's not an archival format by design.
FLAC is best for archiving songs. MP3 is outdated tech and if I wanted lossy audio I would use opus but transcoding MP3 to opus will destroy the quality of the track so you have to go FLAC -> opus
> we're puking web and electron everywhere ... literally only because developers are lazy
No. This is done because developers are slow and expensive. Reusing most of your web app as a desktop app, same for every platform, saves a lot of money to companies.
> you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy
No. This is because companies want recurring revenue, not one-time sale. It's vastly easier to get you into ("only $3.99/mo" vs "only $199.95 for lifetime of use"), and it keeps dripping every month.
There's not a bit of laziness here, only business shrewdness.
Businesses are inherently lazy. Business shrewdness and laziness are literally the same thing; businesses always take the easiest path to the greatest profit. "Lazy" just means "unwilling to expend energy".
Let's say Dow Chemical wants to start dumping chemical by-products into the Mississippi River. Thankfully, we have the EPA and strict laws which make this impossible. The only other force which would stop them from doing this is consumer outrage, which only works in some situations and even then tends to be very fleeting.
Now, let's say Slack wants to build their app in Electron. By doing so, they are collectively forcing their 8M users to burn more CPU cycles and purchase machines with larger memory footprints, all of which literally waste resources and cause pollution. Not to the same degree as the previous example, but the comparison is very valid.
> If you want lossless audio, you literally can't find it,
What audio could you get lossless before that you now can't that you're claiming there has been a regression?
> Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies
You can buy most movies on physical disks. The old physical copy ownership option still exists. There has been no regression, just new options you personally don't like.
> Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere
Clearly the market has decided that the heavier versions are just as fine. Also, in pretty much every case there's also lightweight non-electron alternative. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
> Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
That is absolutely your own fault if your OS restricts FS access. Applications are just as unportable as they have been. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
You're just looking at the past like it was some gold standard and a wonderland of software, development and user freedom (of choice or of software), it's ridiculous.
Regarding your Mackies, which exact DACs and sound cards have you tested them with? According to the manual [1] they expect a +4dBu input, which will lead to unnecessary noise if you use them with "consumer" -10dBu gear. Most audio interfaces (i.e. designed for recording, not Schiit-type DACs) with balanced output will do +4dBu - I believe it's standard on all Focusrites.
> If you want lossless audio, you literally can't find it.
While I agree with your general thoughts, I have to disagree with this particular point. In my opinion there's never been a better time for lossless audio.
My collection is made of digital, lossless material only. I buy a lot of music - about 5-10 releases a week - and I have no problem at all finding everthing I want in a lossless format. I understand that this may differ depending on what you listen to and ironically obscure, niche music might be better served by lossles music stores, but I just wanted to provid a different perspective.
If I don't what I'm looking for at Bandcamp, Boomkat, Bleep, Qobuz or various label stores chances are that it's a physical-only release, in which case ripping it myself is always an option.
> If you want lossless audio, you literally can't find it
If you like electronic music, Bandcamp and Beatport (thankfully) sell stuff in lossless.
Bandcamp is arguably the best: largest cut for the artist; large range of format wth no extra cost for lossless.
I think management has a lot to do with this, or priorities in general because at the end of the day working with electron and web everywhere is on a superficial level just as difficult as working with other languages-- it's a matter of training and hiring the right people for the right jobs.
Any advice on a quality Lightning to 3.5mm adapter? The official Apple one is so flimsy that one or both channels cut out anytime I move the phone. My workaround is to heatshrink the cable and both ends, so it’s rigid enough not to cut out. But it’s ugly and probably won’t last more than a few months.
You have dust/lint inside the bottom of the port that is preventing your connector from going in all the way. Get a fine tool and reach in and grab out the crud at the bottom. I had the same problem until I did this.
Yeah, there is no standard for high level APIs provided by operating systems. Everybody has always just done their own stuff. And it's not like the Open Source world is any better, with Linux and the BSDs coming up with their own solutions for common issues.
There's POSIX which is pretty great because it at least allows to write somewhat portable networking & io code. But for pretty much anything else, you'll have to write separate code for every OS, and it's always been the case.
I typically recommend Fiio gear for people just getting into higher-end audio. They have some great stuff for <$100 that can be a huge upgrade over smartphone / laptop / desktop output. https://www.fiio.com/amp
You sure it isn't a problem with the speakers? I've had a couple different sets of similar monitors and several decent sets of headphones and have never had a problem with any of my external DACs and hissing. I had hissing whenever I used internal cards of any kind, but once I switch to external DACs all hissing went away.
Sure but that doesn't mean the default Apple audio jack is high quality.
I have a cheap USB DAC (bought from monoprice) to power a set of Beyerdynamic headphones. The DAC beat a macbook I was using for work hands down on quality of sound.
Specifically, I noted the DAC had better definition of sound meaning that I could pick out details better. It also had better spatial attributes as well, meaning that I could pick out instruments in 3d space.
To be fair, doing a D to A conversion in a laptop is hard, and while Apple does it relatively better than average, it's still probably better off done outside of the macbook itself.
My experience has been similar. The output on my MacBook was fine, until I hooked up an amp (coincidentally, my headphones are also Beyerdynamic; DT880s in this case). It sounded pretty bad to be honest, so then I hooked up the external DAC, and it was fascinating how big a difference it made. And I'm not an audiophile, so I usually don't really notice such differences.
> I have a pair of powered studio monitors (Mackie MR5), and I completely relate to this problem. Many PCs and phones will emit an audible hissing noise while plugged in. I've tested on a dozen different devices, with integrated and external DACs, five hundred dollar sound cards, massively shielded cables, practically every modern OS you can name, tweaking every audio setting exposed to me. The only devices that work perfectly are (1) my TV output, and (2) every single Apple product.
If almost every device has poor audio quality, maybe its not the device but the headphones that are your problem?
Have you tried using a DAC with a USB noise isolator? I don't get any hiss with my setup:
Neutron Player on Android > USB OTG cable > HiFimeDIY USB noise isolator > HiFimeDIY USB DAC > Beyerdynamic DT880
Although I don't use all that any longer, for convenience sake I just use a wireless Audiotechnica ATH-DSR9BT which supports aptX-HD and produces "good enough" quality with no hissing/noise.
I can plug them into an analog output device and they work perfectly. I'm talking about digital, and the only digital devices that work are a Vizio TV (possibly others, didn't really test against TVs), iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
> Its more than just audio. Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies, and have them taken away at any time.
This has always been the case, even when you "owned" the physical media. Owning a CD, DVD or even vinyl copy of audio/video did not mean you owned the content. It was always just a delivery mechanism. It always came with legal wording to state you didn't own the content, and were only allowed to listen/view in a private setting. You were not allowed to take the music and play it in public, you were not allowed to show the video to large groups of people (including in your own home).
Your OS is the same way. You don't own the software. You only pay for a license granting use of it on one computer.
Interesting point buried in here: since Android is open source, you could go in and fix the bug, but then because you're not running an official Android version you'd lose access to the Play Store and other services. Something's not really free if there's a penalty for doing it. Since freedom to run a modified version of software yourself is one of the four freedoms of free software, this highlights the difference between free software and open source.
I'm not saying open source is bad and everyone should prefer free software. It's just a good example of the difference between the two in practice rather than in some debate about licenses and the abstract principles behind them.
Apparently Play Store is unaffected, but some other apps - banking, streaming, even Pokemon Go - will break. And your warranty (including hardware) is voided. So I stand corrected, and thank you, but I don't think the correction affects the main point.
So if I make a proprietary application that only runs on, say, Ubuntu, does that mean GNU/Linux is no longer really free, since you can't replace your distro with Arch without losing access to my application?
> does that mean GNU/Linux is no longer really free
I'd say it's a bit of a different situation, since the two are not being designed to work together and aren't even being developed by the same people. If the Ubuntu developers made your proprietary app key to the useful running of the system, which is the more exact analogy, then I'd say yeah, they would have made it non-free.
there is open source and open source thru google's gates.
on the later you submit patches, they will be included in the next 2 to 3 versions of public release (if they dont't add any feature that impacts google's ad bottom line, for example, adding any sort of referrer control to chrome), then you have to hope that in those 2-3 version cycle your device is still supported, now you just have to wait for the convenient over the ait update provided by your telco or phone manufacturer (in most cases you actually need both entities to take part)
That's not Google's gates, that's the OEM's and the ISP's. Google can only control that for their own devices, and the Nexuses have always been some of the most modded ones.
Mobile technology moves so fast Android can't keep up with the support of all hardware out there, so you can't simply buy any smartphone and expect everything to work with the latest Android release.
Because that debate tends to get very contentious. It's an important debate to have, but I've already been in it many times and watched it even more so I'm not particularly in the mood to go through it this morning.
> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o
I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read:
> If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.
Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium. And then catches shit for being pretentious.
So, let's step through that once more:
- garbage is normal
- functional and interoperable is premium
- premium is pretentious
- also, add $1,000 for the name brand
The author simultaneously complains that nothing works, but refutes using the only thing that works because it represents training wheels that are too fashionable and ostentatious.
We can have nice things because that's for babies, and also too overtly glamorous and bougie.
I just want shit that works out of the box sometimes. I also don't need X-Files alien logos and red backlit Hunt For Red October themes everywhere. And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware. (Cough! Lenovo! [0] Cough! Intel Management Engine! [1] Cough!)
Not everything at the <£100 price point is rubbish...
I recently got a £20 Havit Bluetooth receiver and connected it to a pair of £70 Sony MDR-7506 headphones. The receiver drives the headphones louder and with less distortion than my iPhone can, and the battery lasts for a few days of intermittent listening. Whatever loss is introduced by the aptX coding is invisible to my ears.
I'm blown away by how good this setup is given the price and there shouldn't be any dependency on an expensive source device to run it.
I got my first Mac when the Mac mini came up. It was a little more expensive than same-generation PCs but besides being OSX it was a PowerPC that never made any fan noise, and was small. I've subsequently had three Macbooks and two iPhones - but I can't afford this somewhat-better-somewhat-more-expensive racket anymore. Prices have risen too much; to boot, the quality gulf between Macs and garden-variety Dells and Acers has pretty much crashed. Macbooks have had multiple problematic years now; iPhones did away with headphone jacks; and OSX peaked at 10.6.8, where it indeed was five years into the future - but Windows 10 is decent now and even has the whole Unix toolkit with WSL.
"Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium."
If the standard is garbage, then functionality is premium.
Can I blame free market dynamics ? It's been a quite obvious trend since the 2000s. Audio components became commodities to reach bottom prices, no more middle class, good functionality is high end (which is now pushed to higher prices with branding like beats or devialet)
Did you really just call apples products interoperable? maybe among their other crap, but sure as hell not among other devices. Which are all interoperable among themselves btw.
Fewer and fewer people can even recognize quality anymore. People mistake popularity for quality. They blindly trust brands. They accept things not working or falling apart. Companies have picked up on this, and don't have to invest in quality anymore. Prices get lower, then everyone has to not invest in quality. People would rather buy and throw away a $50 pair of shoes every year than buy a $200 pair and have it last 10 years.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Followed by:
> APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS
So iPhone users don’t know how their phone works, but Android is awesome because it’s open source and the freedom you get with that but it’s too complicated to learn how it works.
Yes okay, its about having the choice and the option. Its rooted in the fundamental instinct to cling to freedom and seek it out.
Even if you don't make a choice, having the option to is still empowering, because the absence of a choice tells you someone else made it for you.
For many, that could be the same choice they would have made. That doesn't give any condolence to those who would have made a different one, but weren't given the option.
Makes me wonder if the guy wants (subconsciously or not) to have more problems with technology he’s using just to have an opportunity to tinker with it to make it better. Certainly seems like the type.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, but in such case he might as well drop the complaining tone.
Probably, I have spent 100s of hours to make my iPhones better when in reality they would have worked just as well without the modifications. I frequently see people complaining and finding issues just so they can try to fix it, rinse and repeat.
This also leads into his statement. I own an iPhone and I kinda know what's going on beneath the surface. I can open up disassembled binaries and anyone can look at the headers from google within seconds.
That in turn would lead into that 99.9% of Android users have no knowledge of how Android works, so his whole statement is kind of odd.
Which, as you allude to, is not guaranteed no matter what it says on the tin. Samsung is my go-to for that point. Not that features were half-assed, or kinda worked. No, having an icon on a screen does not count when what backs that icon doesn’t even pretend to do what it says. (To be specific, their fitness stuff was literally laughable in how broken or, lets be honest, how unimplemented it was.)
I think what gets missed is that the “Apple tax” (the “M$” for the 2000s, indicating the writer is to be ignored) is actually the “not a broken POS, and does what you thought it would do” convenience fee. Oh, sure, there’s Pixel and the like if you don’t like Apple. Last I looked, you’ll still pay the “Apple tax” even if it goes to Google.
And I swear, the next neckbeard ranting about how people don’t how their tech works either better take public transit to work, be ready to rattle off the Otto cycle used by their ICE car, or STFU.
After re-reading the blog, I feel a bit bad about the negativity I and others expressed here. If you do read this xylon, don’t take it to heart! Also thanks for sharing your circuit, it certainly provoked an interesting discussion.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Android may be "open source", but it means little if you're not a company wanting to write their own clone, or a security researcher.
Would I be able to fix just the media player service, and make my smartphone use the fixed version? Without flashing it with a brand new OS, losing data, warranty, OEM drivers, and ability to receive security updates? Didn't think so. Android "open source" delivers only half of the expected value.
Is it actually open source in that you can actually submit a fix though?
Judging by the awful 'random' I would suspect not. (I havent used it I some time so it might have been fixed, but you used to get clustering of tracks from a given album)
I think it is just a matter of what one is most comfortable with.
The HW-solution is a nice challenge, but I am sure, there are simpler ways to solve it.
On a sidenote: I would be surprised if the issue he has is systemic too Android devices in general. I am sure others would have noticed it if was that widespread that it occurred on all devices.
Same thoughts except with my Android phone and Bose QC.
Wireless, noise cancellation and never any problems with explosive noise.
Also it is indeed 2018 so what's he doing with ripped CD's, there are a lot of streaming services out there right now.
It's a well documented issue. Maybe your headphones and/or ears just aren't sensitive enough to notice the issue. Plenty of people don't see the difference between flac and 240p youtube uploads, after all.
I'm not sure why Apple is receiving any sort of praise here. I was constantly assaulted by an "explosion of noise" glitch when working with Logic Pro in OS X. I could have the system volume level set to the lowest possible setting (25% of 1 notch), and yet I'd still occasionally get deafening explosions of noise as if I had the system volume set to the full 16 notches. The explosion is just short enough that there's zero chance of you having any hope of ripping your headphones off as quickly as possible to spare your hearing. No, by the time you hear the explosion, it's already too late. I did in fact start losing my hearing from this and completely gave up on making music.
That sounds like a hardware problem or drivers issue. If it was a software problem, why give up on music when there are other options both free and paid like Reaper, Ableton, etc. which run perfectly fine?
I have not had any of the issues you are complaining about in Logic Pro X, FWIW, on multiple laptops and hardware audio interfaces over ~6 years of use.
> _It turns out that all music players on Android actually play music using the Android-media-player-service._
This is inaccurate. Neutron music player bypasses Android's Media Player APIs and talks directly to your DAC and plays music without resampling (if the DAC supports it). Never had any audio popping or explosions using Neutron, and I've tried it on 6 different devices so far without any issues (LG G3, Nexus 6P, Nextbit Robin, OnePlus 3, Note 8, OnePlus 6). My headphones are a Beyerdynamic DT880.
I've never had any problems with "explosions" using standard media players, even when plugged into my HD650s - anyone else have that happen?
HN is mostly engineering types, the poster clearly has that mindset, we should be filing or looking for a proper bug report for this instead of crafting hacks or talking about alternative products altogether right off the bat.
> we should be filing or looking for a proper bug report for this instead of crafting hacks or talking about alternative products altogether right off the bat
As if Google even considers reading any bug reports ... :(
The downside of that is, of course, greater battery consumption. MediaPlayer API will offload music playing to a separate DSP (if available) and that allows the main application processor to go to sleep. There is some nuance here, but that usually significantly reduces battery consumption while playing music with the screen off.
IMHO your circuit topology looks wacky. Perhaps there's a goal to making your amplifier ground ride in the middle of the waveform, but it could just as well be unintentional. So my immediate thoughts -
You've already got a real split supply with 2x 9v batteries. If you use that instead of deriving a virtual ground, you will save 9mA of quiescent current.
How purposeful is that whole low side duplicated circuit and why? [0] It seems like since you're using batteries, hooking signal ground directly to your ground and driving the output single ended would work fine. Or if you want to work towards being able to AC-power, then a differential input op-amp topology and still drive the output single ended.
Isn't there a vibrant cottage industry of external USB DACs and headphone amplifiers and whatnot? I'm more of a receiver+speakers type of a person, but I often see newly designed stuff for headphones.
[0] Driving both sides does get you the ability to swing the output a full 36 volts. But given that your goal is to cut the signal by 11 and also that by mixing both channels you can't actually do that lest you get crosstalk in the form of clipping, I don't think this is your goal!
I think the trick here is that the resistors are much more precise than two batteries of unknown origin will be at providing a symmetric supply voltage without further stabilization. So they serve as a 50/50 voltage divider whatever the input voltage is, 7+9 or 6+8 on half full (or half empty, depending on your mental make-up) batteries, it would still work just fine.
Binding the central line between the two 9V batteries to GND would give you the situation you describe, indeed you could then drop the resistors but now you have a fairly high risk of ending up with an asymmetric supply voltage, which means one side will clip earlier than the other.
Is this really a common thing? I don't really have experience with battery powered audio processing circuits. In my experience you usually create a virtual ground when you've got no other choice, like say signal conditioning with a single ended supply.
You do not need an absolutely precise dead-centre reference voltage for this application! It just has to be far enough from the either rail to avoid clipping.
If the batteries have gone that far south, they need replacing.
What I'm wondering is why the 1k resistors in the power supply. Wouldn't 100k, 1M or 10M resistors drastically cut the idle current consumption? Or would that compromise the performance of the opamps by choking them off from the current they need?
This way you don't increase the BOM complexity, just a second of the same chip and the same resistors.
Technically, also your THD+N adds in parallel instead of being chained, although I'm not sure there will be a discernable difference unless you uave some kind of phase delay issue (in which case you should fix that first...)
I’ll happily pay the “apple tax” so I can live my life and not have to deal with all the bullshit you did just to listen to some music. Good lord. I’d rather experience the world then mess around with the tech that’s supposed to be helping me live better.
> I’ll happily pay the “apple tax” so I can live my life and not have to deal with all the bullshit you did just to listen to some music.
This. All of this. The author calls apples products pretentious and berates anyone who owns one for not knowing how their phone works. You know what? I don't give a flying fk about knowing how my phone works. I have a million other things to worry about in this world. It doesn't make me pretentious to spend extra to have an experience I don't have to think about.
That's such a straw-man it hurts. You're concluding, from the fact that a user has found one obscure bug, that android is a broken mess that only Arch Linux types should dare mess with, while Apple products are bastions of stability. The reality is that Apple products are (it appears) no more bug-free than the rest.
Have you tried testing this very same thing on an iPhone? Maybe it even has the same bug!
The above comment is reacting directly to a quote in the article, not jumping to any new conclusions.
“If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.”
Is it really "such a straw man"? Serious question, I'm trying to figure it out. The part about "just to listen to some music" is definitely exaggerating, since OP wants to listen to music and relax. Also, GP doesn't recognize that the tech that's supposed to be helping them live better may not be doing that by OPs standards. Is that what you're talking about? I did think what OP went through could be considered a lot of bullshit though.
Also, by the way, aren't you doing something similar? Exaggerating about GP's regard for android/apple; GP simply said they would rather pay a tax than go through what OP did. Am I mistaken? Though yes, in this case the apple tax may not even have helped.
Hey now! I had been using Arch and Debian om different machines. All non-prod machines have since been moved to Arch because I was having more issues with Debian. Granted I require running the newest stable software, but the act of getting that software onto my Debian machines was breaking other things. Arch? Never had to mess with anything I didn't want to mess with (I use i3 and write most of my own utilities)!
It’s amusing to still hear “Apple tax” in 2018, as if there is no additional value in better hardware, software and support for many people’s use cases.
If anything, the 'Apple tax' is greater in 2018 than it has ever been.
I say this as having owned 3 Macs for the last 10 years. 4-8 years ago, the gap between Apple and the rest was so stark, it seemed paying for a premium Apple product was a no-brainer.
Even Linus got a Macbook air because the hardware was such a leap ahead.
Not only has the gap closed, Apple have been left behind, with inferior build quality in key areas (keyboards). This has coincided with raising prices further.
The 'Apple tax' is now a real phenomenon, not just the price of premium.
I know. The choice of Apple vs. Android is a trade-off, as is the choice of Apple vs. Microsoft/Windows 10. It all depends on what's most important to you and what makes most sense.
For me, at the moment, in my personal life Apple makes more sense. I wish it made more sense at work because Windows 10 drives me nearly crazy, but it doesn't, so I stick with Microsoft's offering for now.
> It’s amusing to still hear “Apple tax” in 2018, as if there is no additional value in better hardware, software and support for many people’s use cases.
Being a golden cage, I would not argue that it is better software.
Is another 8gb of RAM or 128gb of storage worth $200 each? I guess it is when you have no option to upgrade it after purchase. Apple doesn't do the decency to give you proper hardware either, opting for previous generation processors and a keyboard who's reliability is still up in the air even after their third attempt. Apple is further undermining their lofty pricepoint each product release.
I always thought of the apple-tax not as the cost of the product but the additional costs, like fifty dollar dongles because the new version doesn't use the same connectors as the old, or being forced to use iTunes, itself a montrosity of painful design, to put some mp3s on your mp3 player. As far as I can tell, Apple still charges $50 for a $2 wire dongle.
Seriously, people, do you get paid for this marketing in every topic that doesn't directly concern Apple? You didn't even seem to read the article to understand it.
Would I prefer to have a more open phone and computer? Sure. At the cost of having to ever tinker with it? No.
I just switched my home built raspberry + HiFiBerry with expensive speakers to a simple closed Sonos system for the exact same problem the author had with linux, audio hardware, noise. Having something that just works and I don’t have to care how is a blessing and in the future that is where I’ll put my money. Ignorance is bliss.
Everyone seems to be seeing this as an Android vs. iOS debate, but I see it as a smartphone vs. dedicated device debate. If you're serious enough about photography, you don't complain about your smartphone camera's limitations, you get yourself a DSLR and multiple lenses. So if you're this serious about music, why not get a dedicated device? Look at what companies like HiBy and Hidizs are doing. I have, and my ears haven't been this happy since the early aughts.
For the same reason I don't want to carry a big heavy DSLR around with me, because there's a limited number of devices I want to lug around.
I ditched the DSLR years ago (yes, it took great photos, but not enough to make it worth the hassle). Though I still bring a pocket sized camera with me when I travel because my smartphone still can't compete with a big sensor and an optical zoom.
While a dedicated MP3 player is small (to be honest, I didn't even know they were still made), it's just one more thing to keep track of and keep charged up.
It doesn't have to be a whole separate device. The Audioquest Dragonfly is the size of a USB stick, runs off your phone's power, and provides excellent DAC/amp capabilities. Fiio also makes some similar mobile DAC/amps.
No, it's an issue with the hardware manufacturers making things hard to hack on in the name of security. It's lazy and not well thought out... though I guess it beats having your CC numbers stolen all the time for now?
Seriously, you don't even need to spend a lot of money. If you search your local goodwill or garage sale circuit you can find some really nice old audio equipment. Pick up a CD player and a nice reciever for cheap.
Readit News
I'm wholly convinced that the computing world is, in general, regressing. Audio has been a huge loser in this fight. Today, many modern phones don't ship with 3.5mm jacks. If you want lossless audio, you literally can't find it, even though there's zero reason companies like Spotify couldn't stream it when available (even if it costs extra) (Spotify literally asks artists to upload the masters when they publish, they have that data and then throw it away). Many artists don't even publish physical CDs anymore, so its a game of luck if they have a website where I can buy the FLACs/ALACs. And if you want the actual files to, you know, live your life in a completely legal way, those are gone.
Its more than just audio. Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies, and have them taken away at any time. eBooks are the same and always have been; the world's oldest technology has been coopted by companies like Amazon to increase revenue, and there's practically zero competition. Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere, eating up every conceivable megabyte of memory available literally only because developers are lazy, and now you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy. Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
Somehow we took systems and workflows that were amazing throughout the 90s-00s and, in the course of a decade, completely ruined them.
Sure, Google can revoke my access to a movie at any time but I can watch on any of my devices and I dont have to worry about finding it in stock at the local store.
I can carry literally thousands of books with me in a device smaller than a paperback.
I can’t stream lossless music from Spotify but I can stream high enough quality that most people can’t tell the difference. Not to mention you get access to pretty much every song you want for 10$ a month.
Electron apps and the web are replacing desktop apps but they are also making it easier than ever to make a cross platform app, meaning we will get apps that we otherwise wouldn’t. This is especially good for Linux, which would be much further behind macOS and windows without popular electron/web apps available like slack, Spotify, etc.
It does nobody any good to have 1000 books on a single device if the whole thing is subject to revocation, especially when you paid full retail price for the privilege of being allowed to read it. This is regression.
Previously you paid your $10 and received a paper book. You could read it, re-read it, lend it, sell it, or burn it for warmth. You owned it for as long as you kept it dehydrated. The $15 you now pay per book gets you one of these rights, temporarily.
Whether most people can tell the difference between 320k and lossless is irrelevant-- the retail price is the same for a technically inferior product. This is a regression. And again, for your money, you own nothing.
And for apps, the cross-platform compatibility comes at the expense of consumers, who have to continuously purchase and maintain newer computer equipment to do the same damn word processing, email and shopping tasks that used to be possible on a 486. And of course, since everything is a subscription, it's a double punishment for the consumer-- they have to maintain hardware to run software they don't own.
The entire premise of modern technology has become a new vector to extract the most money from the consumer while delivering the least amount of value, power or control.
I'm not going full RMS here and saying DRM is evil. I'm just saying that: I should be able to loan digital content to other people. I shouldn't be afraid that Apple will, one day, just say "I know you really enjoyed spending $200 on all that media, but its all gone. See ya." Maybe that means they need to offer downloads of the content, or maybe it means we need legislation which says we can sue the hell out of them when they try it. I have no preference. But consumers need more protection.
Also its worth clarifying: I don't hold subscription services to the same standards. That's a different business model.
This isn’t some “normies”/“audiophiles” thing. 256kbps mp3 is acoustically transparent to human beings in ideal listening situations.
The bad rap mp3 got was from 128kbps that was more common pre-broadband.
Also, using lossy compressed sources (even 256-320kbps) in derivative works (eg dj mixes, samples, et c) that will be later lossy recompressed (podcast, satellite radio, spotify, et c) is a good way to make your production sound crappy, which is why lossless is important. Any audiophile who tells you they need lossless for final listening simply hasn’t tested it. It is religion, not engineering.
If you listen to mainstream shit where the artist does not have enough control of their work to opt out of the scam that is the pay scale for streaming music.
I have had to resort to ripping vinyl and CDs from my collection to get digital versions of tracks that Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music do not have. If I had to do it all over again, I'd keep the vinyl and CDs in the box and just grab the music from somewhere like REDacted instead.
Deleted Comment
The option is not well advertised. After you purchase a digital download, there's a tiny arrow next to the 'download' link that allows you to switch the download to flac.
I always download flac and consequently spend a lot of money at Bandcamp!
I love Bandcamp.
They also have an app that offers streaming and a bunch of social features so you can make a page for yourself where you show off the music you like and make playlists and interact with others. It's probably a great feature, but the thing that really sets Bandcamp apart is that you can just ignore the fuck out of it and pay money for some files that you can download using a browser and put on your own drives and devices.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18569013
This is a separate issue though from the usually high output noise floor and poor isolation from other components, e.g. many complaints about many makes and models where CPU/GPU or even disk activity will induce audible pulse noises in the heaphone outputs or speakers.
Those External Audio Cards receive the signal in digital form, thus free of any noise they could pick up in the process. These are decoded inside the external DAC which then feeds audio to the speakers. since this part of the signal path is analog, any interference picked up by these cables is gonna appear on the speakers, which is why the good gear usually supports BALANCED SIGNALS so that the speaker can reference the signal and weed out noises added while in-transit.
My gear is a pair of YAMAHA HS8 speakers and a YAMAHA AG06 external audio card. Both support Balanced audio so that's what I'm using regarding cables between the audio card and the speakers.
At least with 320mp3s I could only get it right with certain songs and not too consistently. I'd say my room treatment has a far bigger impact.
(but regarding hardware I'm totally with you and haven't found the source of my rather high noise floor either)
That said, switching between Spotify and Tidal on the same track, I hear a pretty big difference. The lossless music has a depth that just isn't there on the compressed streams
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...
The difference is usually very, very subtle (my description for it is "soundstage differences", like slight differences in audio imaging) and if you are in the situation you are 99% of the time where you are not in a critical listening environment, you probably won't be able to even hear this. But if you are absolutely gung-ho about preserving the full spectrum of the recording, MP3 won't work. It's not an archival format by design.
> we're puking web and electron everywhere ... literally only because developers are lazy
No. This is done because developers are slow and expensive. Reusing most of your web app as a desktop app, same for every platform, saves a lot of money to companies.
> you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy
No. This is because companies want recurring revenue, not one-time sale. It's vastly easier to get you into ("only $3.99/mo" vs "only $199.95 for lifetime of use"), and it keeps dripping every month.
There's not a bit of laziness here, only business shrewdness.
Let's say Dow Chemical wants to start dumping chemical by-products into the Mississippi River. Thankfully, we have the EPA and strict laws which make this impossible. The only other force which would stop them from doing this is consumer outrage, which only works in some situations and even then tends to be very fleeting.
Now, let's say Slack wants to build their app in Electron. By doing so, they are collectively forcing their 8M users to burn more CPU cycles and purchase machines with larger memory footprints, all of which literally waste resources and cause pollution. Not to the same degree as the previous example, but the comparison is very valid.
What audio could you get lossless before that you now can't that you're claiming there has been a regression?
> Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies
You can buy most movies on physical disks. The old physical copy ownership option still exists. There has been no regression, just new options you personally don't like.
> Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere
Clearly the market has decided that the heavier versions are just as fine. Also, in pretty much every case there's also lightweight non-electron alternative. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
> Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
That is absolutely your own fault if your OS restricts FS access. Applications are just as unportable as they have been. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
You're just looking at the past like it was some gold standard and a wonderland of software, development and user freedom (of choice or of software), it's ridiculous.
Compact discs. You should look them up. :-) Lots of music out these days that you can't find on a CD.
[1] https://www.hhb.co.uk/files/product/file/user_manual_2013112...
The quality of streaming services is also a far cry from BDs.
https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/203055911-High-F...
While I agree with your general thoughts, I have to disagree with this particular point. In my opinion there's never been a better time for lossless audio. My collection is made of digital, lossless material only. I buy a lot of music - about 5-10 releases a week - and I have no problem at all finding everthing I want in a lossless format. I understand that this may differ depending on what you listen to and ironically obscure, niche music might be better served by lossles music stores, but I just wanted to provid a different perspective.
If I don't what I'm looking for at Bandcamp, Boomkat, Bleep, Qobuz or various label stores chances are that it's a physical-only release, in which case ripping it myself is always an option.
If you like electronic music, Bandcamp and Beatport (thankfully) sell stuff in lossless. Bandcamp is arguably the best: largest cut for the artist; large range of format wth no extra cost for lossless.
> literally only because developers are lazy
I think management has a lot to do with this, or priorities in general because at the end of the day working with electron and web everywhere is on a superficial level just as difficult as working with other languages-- it's a matter of training and hiring the right people for the right jobs.
These ports pick up some lint and dust after a few months and it packs in pretty hard. Eventually it will give you connection issues.
I don't think there's anything modern about this.
There's POSIX which is pretty great because it at least allows to write somewhat portable networking & io code. But for pretty much anything else, you'll have to write separate code for every OS, and it's always been the case.
Motherboard audio and soundcards are just terrible.
Sure but that doesn't mean the default Apple audio jack is high quality.
I have a cheap USB DAC (bought from monoprice) to power a set of Beyerdynamic headphones. The DAC beat a macbook I was using for work hands down on quality of sound.
Specifically, I noted the DAC had better definition of sound meaning that I could pick out details better. It also had better spatial attributes as well, meaning that I could pick out instruments in 3d space.
To be fair, doing a D to A conversion in a laptop is hard, and while Apple does it relatively better than average, it's still probably better off done outside of the macbook itself.
* the DAC and AMP were Schiit Magni/Modi
If almost every device has poor audio quality, maybe its not the device but the headphones that are your problem?
Neutron Player on Android > USB OTG cable > HiFimeDIY USB noise isolator > HiFimeDIY USB DAC > Beyerdynamic DT880
Although I don't use all that any longer, for convenience sake I just use a wireless Audiotechnica ATH-DSR9BT which supports aptX-HD and produces "good enough" quality with no hissing/noise.
I can plug them into an analog output device and they work perfectly. I'm talking about digital, and the only digital devices that work are a Vizio TV (possibly others, didn't really test against TVs), iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
This has always been the case, even when you "owned" the physical media. Owning a CD, DVD or even vinyl copy of audio/video did not mean you owned the content. It was always just a delivery mechanism. It always came with legal wording to state you didn't own the content, and were only allowed to listen/view in a private setting. You were not allowed to take the music and play it in public, you were not allowed to show the video to large groups of people (including in your own home).
Your OS is the same way. You don't own the software. You only pay for a license granting use of it on one computer.
The last few decades have shown a preference for accessibility over "quality":
- concord high speed luxury air travel >> cheap but slow mass air travel
- pentium >> netbooks >> raspberry pi
- professional international newsrooms >> amateur blogs
- CDs >> MP3s >> streaming
- steel cars >> plastic and aluminum
- handcrafted oak furniture >> ikea
- durable hand-me-downs >> dispensable chinese products
- etc.
The trade-off is generally positive in my opinion.
I'm not saying open source is bad and everyone should prefer free software. It's just a good example of the difference between the two in practice rather than in some debate about licenses and the abstract principles behind them.
https://www.google.com/android/uncertified/ just need to register here as of earlier this year apparently
It's not GNU/Linux that's not free, but it makes it hard to use a GNU/Linux system that is free.
I'd say it's a bit of a different situation, since the two are not being designed to work together and aren't even being developed by the same people. If the Ubuntu developers made your proprietary app key to the useful running of the system, which is the more exact analogy, then I'd say yeah, they would have made it non-free.
on the later you submit patches, they will be included in the next 2 to 3 versions of public release (if they dont't add any feature that impacts google's ad bottom line, for example, adding any sort of referrer control to chrome), then you have to hope that in those 2-3 version cycle your device is still supported, now you just have to wait for the convenient over the ait update provided by your telco or phone manufacturer (in most cases you actually need both entities to take part)
Why not?
I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read:
> If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.
Well, at least it usually simply works.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium. And then catches shit for being pretentious.
So, let's step through that once more:
The author simultaneously complains that nothing works, but refutes using the only thing that works because it represents training wheels that are too fashionable and ostentatious.We can have nice things because that's for babies, and also too overtly glamorous and bougie.
I just want shit that works out of the box sometimes. I also don't need X-Files alien logos and red backlit Hunt For Red October themes everywhere. And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware. (Cough! Lenovo! [0] Cough! Intel Management Engine! [1] Cough!)
[0] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Security-Malware/Malware-preloa...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Securi...
Will someone other than Apple please step up to the fucking plate and not just dump trash onto the shelves at Best Buy?
I recently got a £20 Havit Bluetooth receiver and connected it to a pair of £70 Sony MDR-7506 headphones. The receiver drives the headphones louder and with less distortion than my iPhone can, and the battery lasts for a few days of intermittent listening. Whatever loss is introduced by the aptX coding is invisible to my ears.
I'm blown away by how good this setup is given the price and there shouldn't be any dependency on an expensive source device to run it.
I got my first Mac when the Mac mini came up. It was a little more expensive than same-generation PCs but besides being OSX it was a PowerPC that never made any fan noise, and was small. I've subsequently had three Macbooks and two iPhones - but I can't afford this somewhat-better-somewhat-more-expensive racket anymore. Prices have risen too much; to boot, the quality gulf between Macs and garden-variety Dells and Acers has pretty much crashed. Macbooks have had multiple problematic years now; iPhones did away with headphone jacks; and OSX peaked at 10.6.8, where it indeed was five years into the future - but Windows 10 is decent now and even has the whole Unix toolkit with WSL.
If the standard is garbage, then functionality is premium.
You act like Apple devices do not contain IME?
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Followed by:
> APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS
So iPhone users don’t know how their phone works, but Android is awesome because it’s open source and the freedom you get with that but it’s too complicated to learn how it works.
Okay.
Even if you don't make a choice, having the option to is still empowering, because the absence of a choice tells you someone else made it for you.
For many, that could be the same choice they would have made. That doesn't give any condolence to those who would have made a different one, but weren't given the option.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, but in such case he might as well drop the complaining tone.
This also leads into his statement. I own an iPhone and I kinda know what's going on beneath the surface. I can open up disassembled binaries and anyone can look at the headers from google within seconds.
That in turn would lead into that 99.9% of Android users have no knowledge of how Android works, so his whole statement is kind of odd.
Is this guy for real? I don’t know the nitty gritty of how most of the things I use work, I’m only concerned that they work. Sounds like sour grapes.
Which, as you allude to, is not guaranteed no matter what it says on the tin. Samsung is my go-to for that point. Not that features were half-assed, or kinda worked. No, having an icon on a screen does not count when what backs that icon doesn’t even pretend to do what it says. (To be specific, their fitness stuff was literally laughable in how broken or, lets be honest, how unimplemented it was.)
I think what gets missed is that the “Apple tax” (the “M$” for the 2000s, indicating the writer is to be ignored) is actually the “not a broken POS, and does what you thought it would do” convenience fee. Oh, sure, there’s Pixel and the like if you don’t like Apple. Last I looked, you’ll still pay the “Apple tax” even if it goes to Google.
And I swear, the next neckbeard ranting about how people don’t how their tech works either better take public transit to work, be ready to rattle off the Otto cycle used by their ICE car, or STFU.
At least, it sounds like he just likes being contrarian.
Android or Linux is not helping him much in this case, that's for sure.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Would I be able to fix just the media player service, and make my smartphone use the fixed version? Without flashing it with a brand new OS, losing data, warranty, OEM drivers, and ability to receive security updates? Didn't think so. Android "open source" delivers only half of the expected value.
Judging by the awful 'random' I would suspect not. (I havent used it I some time so it might have been fixed, but you used to get clustering of tracks from a given album)
The HW-solution is a nice challenge, but I am sure, there are simpler ways to solve it.
On a sidenote: I would be surprised if the issue he has is systemic too Android devices in general. I am sure others would have noticed it if was that widespread that it occurred on all devices.
Except newer iPhones requiring a dongle to use headphones.
I have not had any of the issues you are complaining about in Logic Pro X, FWIW, on multiple laptops and hardware audio interfaces over ~6 years of use.
This is inaccurate. Neutron music player bypasses Android's Media Player APIs and talks directly to your DAC and plays music without resampling (if the DAC supports it). Never had any audio popping or explosions using Neutron, and I've tried it on 6 different devices so far without any issues (LG G3, Nexus 6P, Nextbit Robin, OnePlus 3, Note 8, OnePlus 6). My headphones are a Beyerdynamic DT880.
HN is mostly engineering types, the poster clearly has that mindset, we should be filing or looking for a proper bug report for this instead of crafting hacks or talking about alternative products altogether right off the bat.
As if Google even considers reading any bug reports ... :(
https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-black
Edit: would work out of the box with the Eee PC he has as well.
You've already got a real split supply with 2x 9v batteries. If you use that instead of deriving a virtual ground, you will save 9mA of quiescent current.
How purposeful is that whole low side duplicated circuit and why? [0] It seems like since you're using batteries, hooking signal ground directly to your ground and driving the output single ended would work fine. Or if you want to work towards being able to AC-power, then a differential input op-amp topology and still drive the output single ended.
Isn't there a vibrant cottage industry of external USB DACs and headphone amplifiers and whatnot? I'm more of a receiver+speakers type of a person, but I often see newly designed stuff for headphones.
[0] Driving both sides does get you the ability to swing the output a full 36 volts. But given that your goal is to cut the signal by 11 and also that by mixing both channels you can't actually do that lest you get crosstalk in the form of clipping, I don't think this is your goal!
Binding the central line between the two 9V batteries to GND would give you the situation you describe, indeed you could then drop the resistors but now you have a fairly high risk of ending up with an asymmetric supply voltage, which means one side will clip earlier than the other.
If the batteries have gone that far south, they need replacing.
The liberated op-amp could be used to provide a stiff voltage reference from a 100K:100K voltage divider!
Of course, all that is unnecessary.
The virtual ground has a further flaw: It's a DC ground only. This designer forgot to AC-bypass those 1K resistors, or at least one of them.
Technically, also your THD+N adds in parallel instead of being chained, although I'm not sure there will be a discernable difference unless you uave some kind of phase delay issue (in which case you should fix that first...)
This. All of this. The author calls apples products pretentious and berates anyone who owns one for not knowing how their phone works. You know what? I don't give a flying fk about knowing how my phone works. I have a million other things to worry about in this world. It doesn't make me pretentious to spend extra to have an experience I don't have to think about.
Have you tried testing this very same thing on an iPhone? Maybe it even has the same bug!
“If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.”
Also, by the way, aren't you doing something similar? Exaggerating about GP's regard for android/apple; GP simply said they would rather pay a tax than go through what OP did. Am I mistaken? Though yes, in this case the apple tax may not even have helped.
I say this as having owned 3 Macs for the last 10 years. 4-8 years ago, the gap between Apple and the rest was so stark, it seemed paying for a premium Apple product was a no-brainer.
Even Linus got a Macbook air because the hardware was such a leap ahead.
Not only has the gap closed, Apple have been left behind, with inferior build quality in key areas (keyboards). This has coincided with raising prices further.
The 'Apple tax' is now a real phenomenon, not just the price of premium.
For me, at the moment, in my personal life Apple makes more sense. I wish it made more sense at work because Windows 10 drives me nearly crazy, but it doesn't, so I stick with Microsoft's offering for now.
Being a golden cage, I would not argue that it is better software.
I know it does work.
Would I prefer to have a more open phone and computer? Sure. At the cost of having to ever tinker with it? No.
I just switched my home built raspberry + HiFiBerry with expensive speakers to a simple closed Sonos system for the exact same problem the author had with linux, audio hardware, noise. Having something that just works and I don’t have to care how is a blessing and in the future that is where I’ll put my money. Ignorance is bliss.
For the same reason I don't want to carry a big heavy DSLR around with me, because there's a limited number of devices I want to lug around.
I ditched the DSLR years ago (yes, it took great photos, but not enough to make it worth the hassle). Though I still bring a pocket sized camera with me when I travel because my smartphone still can't compete with a big sensor and an optical zoom.
While a dedicated MP3 player is small (to be honest, I didn't even know they were still made), it's just one more thing to keep track of and keep charged up.
Here's a nice long article on the details: https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/bits-and-bytes/an-audi...
The fact of the matter is that most small devices have audio packages that simply are not up to the task, and that includes dedicated music players.