17 ms·

Nitpick: “audiophile-quality sound” it seems, is becoming the new “military-grade encryption.” I don’t have many other comments to make other than I am surpris

by jchw 6y ago

Nitpick: “audiophile-quality sound” it seems, is becoming the new “military-grade encryption.” I don’t have many other comments to make other than I am surprised rust-analyzer was only mentioned in passing.

youeseh 6y ago
Whose ears and which military? :D
dijit 6y ago
The issue with 'military-grade' is that anyone in the military will attest it translates to: Cheapest possible thing that gets the job done. Audiophile grade at least has roots in high fidelity.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  3DES is still military grade.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    No it's not. It stopped being approved for usage by NIST a few years ago.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      112-bit keys are still allowed precisely because of 3DES.
    - Twirrim 6y ago
      Really? 3DES still appears here, https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/block-cipher-techniques https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/block-cipher-techniques, with DES and Skipjack being called out as deprecated.
      - user5994461 6y ago
        That page says that 3DES is prohibited from usage in new applications and is prohibited for encrypting more than 1 GB of data, since 2017. The attached documents have additional information on implementation and (non) usage, including deadline to migrate legacy military systems. It's sadly quite cumbersome to go through the tens of PDF to find the relevant information.
- Joeboy 6y ago
  > Audiophile grade at least has roots in high fidelity. Does it though? Audiophiles generally seem to eschew fidelity in favour of something that sounds subjectively nice, including the psychoacoustic effects of spending a lot of money. Eg. they seem very fond of "warmth". If you asked me to make something sound "warm", I'd be applying some soft clipping and dampening the top end, not eliminating sources of distortion. Edit: If you actually wanted high fidelity, you'd use studio headphones / monitors, which are designed to be "unflattering", so you can be confident you'll hear any issues when mixing / mastering. People don't normally listen for pleasure with those, because they become fatiguing after a few hours. Choosing equipment because you like the sound is a very reasonable thing to do, but it's not the same as pursuing fidelity.
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    You've never listened to audiophile equipment have you? If apply "some soft clipping" it will sound bad, I guarantee you, no audiophile would like it.
    - Joeboy 6y ago
      > You've never listened to audiophile equipment have you? You're saying that I ought to judge the merits of audiophile equipment by the subjective measure of whether I like the sound of it. Which is the metric I said audiophiles would favour. > If apply "some soft clipping" it will sound bad Soft clipping often sounds nice, which is why it's very commonly applied to music. You're saying that eg. the sound of a classic Vox amp is bad, which I guess you're free to believe if that's what your ears tell you, but it's certainly not an objective truth.
      - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
        Because what you are describing is a simplistic picture, describing whole class of people as stupid simpletons who cannot tell low THD and low IMD audio from "soft clipping which sounds nice". If you are referring to vacuum tube amps, soft clipping is only partially the reason why they sound the way they do; in fact most of the time amps are not clipping and are outputting close to 1% of their their total power. Reasons why tube equipment sounds better/different from the solid state amps are a lot more complex than the "common wisdom" of soft clipping.
- Macha 6y ago
  Similarly "medical grade" = "single use" in many actual medical contexts.
simias 6y ago
As far as I'm concerned "audiophile" has been synonymous with "overpriced placebo" basically forever. Beyond that I wish the article had explain a bit better why it chose these "better-than-std" crates. I'm actually using all the std variants in my projects, I'm curious to know if I'm missing out or if I just happen not to hit on their limitations.
- cesarb 6y ago
  > Beyond that I wish the article had explain a bit better why it chose these "better-than-std" crates. At least for parking_lot, its README has a long list with its advantages over std: https://github.com/Amanieu/parking_lot/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/Amanieu/parking_lot/blob/master/README.md
  - simias 6y ago
    I saw that but I was interested to know if TFA had decided to go with it because it looks better on paper or if it's because they hit a roadblock using the std counterparts and migrated to using those. That being said since they're drop-in replacements for the most part I suppose I could just try to rebuild my project with this crate and see if I notice a difference performance-wise.
    - clpwn 6y ago
      In our case, it wasn't a matter of hitting a specific roadblock as much as it was past experience in performance-sensitive projects, and knowing that if we start with those crates we'll probably be fine, and if we don't, we'll probably switch to them eventually for some reason. With crossbeam for example, you can hit roadblocks with std since their channels are MPSC, whereas crossbeam supports MPMC channels (and is faster than std in every meaningful measurement last I checked).
      - simias 6y ago
        That's great to know, thanks! Reading the description it almost seemed too good to be true but if it's indeed objectively better in basically every situation I should probably give it a try.
simlevesque 6y ago
yeah audiophile can be so may things. To me it means 24bits or more.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  More than 21-bits is meaningless. It's all hype beyond 24-bits.
  - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
    You might be right, however 16-bit sounds really harsh to my ears, and 24-bits is the only widely used standard, better than 16-bit.
    - nseggs 6y ago
      I think the bigger issue is likely to be a trash computer mic, a trash preamp/adc, trash dac, trash speakers, trash room. I don't care if at some point you're sampling and sending that signal at 1000-bit or whatever, it's still trash, just very accurately sampled trash.
      - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
        I disagree, I do not own trash equipment. Every time I install Linux, i switch Pulseaudio settings from 16-bit to 24-bit; the difference is immediate, although subtle. Everyone I know who tried to do this, noted that listening fatigue is a lot lower with the new settings.
        sneak 6y ago
        In my direct experience, everyone who claims this to me, so far, is unable to distinguish 16 bit and 24 bit recordings in an ABX. The audiophile world would do well to adopt the concept of double-blind study.
        6y ago
qppo 6y ago
especially because all VoIP codecs sound like shit. It's intelligible, but the bar isn't high for fidelity.
clpwn 6y ago
You're right, that sounds way too fluffy. To clarify, we're targeting "transparent" sounding audio, not "FLACs or bust" audio. Right now we send stereo 48kHz 96kb/s Opus (CELT, not SILK) that we found hit the voice transparency sweet-spot compared to the lossless audio source. We had used higher bitrates in the past, and could easily go back to them, but quality plateaued at around 96k in our experimentation. More than choosing sane transparent-sounding encoding parameters, the biggest difference in fidelity by far was choosing the correct microphones and speakers for accurate reproduction of voices.
- sneak 6y ago
  Voice does not extend above 22.05khz, so using sampling rates above 44.1khz is entirely objectively wasteful and useless, unless your codec only works at 48khz input or something. Are you using 48khz for a specific reason?
  - namibj 6y ago
    Please read the official Opus FAQ to sampling rates: https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#But_won.27t_the_resampler_hurt_the_quality.3F_Isn.27t_it_better_to_use_44.1_kHz_directly.3F https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#But_won.27t_the_resampler_hurt...
  - eqvinox 6y ago
    44.1 kHz is essentially deprecated on the hardware level since it's annoying to deal with the extra clock. It's a few cents for an extra crystal, way too expensive ;). 44100 also makes for very poor multipliers/dividers to other clocks since it includes 3²×5²×7² as factors. 48000 is much nicer with 3×5³.
masklinn 6y ago
> Nitpick: “audiophile-quality sound” it seems, is becoming the new “military-grade encryption.” It's too bad they didn't explain it. I expected they meant allowance for "full bandwidth" audio (possibly including music you can listen to). Video conferencing systems generally use voice-only codecs compressed to shit, full of artifacts in the voice range and utterly dead outside of it.
duskwuff 6y ago
It can join the ranks of meaningless phrases like "aircraft-grade aluminum", "chef-grade cookware", and "contractor-grade tools".
efreak 6y ago
To me, "military grade encryption" means following industry standard. "Audiophile quality" means higher quality than you need, care about, or can even tell apart from lower quality.
- Skunkleton 6y ago
  No, "military grade encryption" means nothing. If it referenced a standard, than that might mean something. I've worked on products for the military that still used single pass DES encryption. So that was military grade. It might as well have been ROT13.

by jchw 6y ago

youeseh 6y ago

Whose ears and which military? :D

dijit 6y ago

The issue with 'military-grade' is that anyone in the military will attest it translates to: Cheapest possible thing that gets the job done. Audiophile grade at least has roots in high fidelity.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
3DES is still military grade.
- user5994461 6y ago
  No it's not. It stopped being approved for usage by NIST a few years ago.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    112-bit keys are still allowed precisely because of 3DES.
  - Twirrim 6y ago
    Really? 3DES still appears here, https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/block-cipher-techniques https://csrc.nist.gov/projects/block-cipher-techniques, with DES and Skipjack being called out as deprecated.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      That page says that 3DES is prohibited from usage in new applications and is prohibited for encrypting more than 1 GB of data, since 2017. The attached documents have additional information on implementation and (non) usage, including deadline to migrate legacy military systems. It's sadly quite cumbersome to go through the tens of PDF to find the relevant information.
Joeboy 6y ago
> Audiophile grade at least has roots in high fidelity. Does it though? Audiophiles generally seem to eschew fidelity in favour of something that sounds subjectively nice, including the psychoacoustic effects of spending a lot of money. Eg. they seem very fond of "warmth". If you asked me to make something sound "warm", I'd be applying some soft clipping and dampening the top end, not eliminating sources of distortion. Edit: If you actually wanted high fidelity, you'd use studio headphones / monitors, which are designed to be "unflattering", so you can be confident you'll hear any issues when mixing / mastering. People don't normally listen for pleasure with those, because they become fatiguing after a few hours. Choosing equipment because you like the sound is a very reasonable thing to do, but it's not the same as pursuing fidelity.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  You've never listened to audiophile equipment have you? If apply "some soft clipping" it will sound bad, I guarantee you, no audiophile would like it.
  - Joeboy 6y ago
    > You've never listened to audiophile equipment have you? You're saying that I ought to judge the merits of audiophile equipment by the subjective measure of whether I like the sound of it. Which is the metric I said audiophiles would favour. > If apply "some soft clipping" it will sound bad Soft clipping often sounds nice, which is why it's very commonly applied to music. You're saying that eg. the sound of a classic Vox amp is bad, which I guess you're free to believe if that's what your ears tell you, but it's certainly not an objective truth.
    - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
      Because what you are describing is a simplistic picture, describing whole class of people as stupid simpletons who cannot tell low THD and low IMD audio from "soft clipping which sounds nice". If you are referring to vacuum tube amps, soft clipping is only partially the reason why they sound the way they do; in fact most of the time amps are not clipping and are outputting close to 1% of their their total power. Reasons why tube equipment sounds better/different from the solid state amps are a lot more complex than the "common wisdom" of soft clipping.
Macha 6y ago
Similarly "medical grade" = "single use" in many actual medical contexts.

simias 6y ago

As far as I'm concerned "audiophile" has been synonymous with "overpriced placebo" basically forever. Beyond that I wish the article had explain a bit better why it chose these "better-than-std" crates. I'm actually using all the std variants in my projects, I'm curious to know if I'm missing out or if I just happen not to hit on their limitations.

cesarb 6y ago
> Beyond that I wish the article had explain a bit better why it chose these "better-than-std" crates. At least for parking_lot, its README has a long list with its advantages over std: https://github.com/Amanieu/parking_lot/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/Amanieu/parking_lot/blob/master/README.md
- simias 6y ago
  I saw that but I was interested to know if TFA had decided to go with it because it looks better on paper or if it's because they hit a roadblock using the std counterparts and migrated to using those. That being said since they're drop-in replacements for the most part I suppose I could just try to rebuild my project with this crate and see if I notice a difference performance-wise.
  - clpwn 6y ago
    In our case, it wasn't a matter of hitting a specific roadblock as much as it was past experience in performance-sensitive projects, and knowing that if we start with those crates we'll probably be fine, and if we don't, we'll probably switch to them eventually for some reason. With crossbeam for example, you can hit roadblocks with std since their channels are MPSC, whereas crossbeam supports MPMC channels (and is faster than std in every meaningful measurement last I checked).
    - simias 6y ago
      That's great to know, thanks! Reading the description it almost seemed too good to be true but if it's indeed objectively better in basically every situation I should probably give it a try.

simlevesque 6y ago

yeah audiophile can be so may things. To me it means 24bits or more.

kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
More than 21-bits is meaningless. It's all hype beyond 24-bits.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  You might be right, however 16-bit sounds really harsh to my ears, and 24-bits is the only widely used standard, better than 16-bit.
  - nseggs 6y ago
    I think the bigger issue is likely to be a trash computer mic, a trash preamp/adc, trash dac, trash speakers, trash room. I don't care if at some point you're sampling and sending that signal at 1000-bit or whatever, it's still trash, just very accurately sampled trash.
    - SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
      I disagree, I do not own trash equipment. Every time I install Linux, i switch Pulseaudio settings from 16-bit to 24-bit; the difference is immediate, although subtle. Everyone I know who tried to do this, noted that listening fatigue is a lot lower with the new settings.
      - sneak 6y ago
        In my direct experience, everyone who claims this to me, so far, is unable to distinguish 16 bit and 24 bit recordings in an ABX. The audiophile world would do well to adopt the concept of double-blind study.
        6y ago

qppo 6y ago

especially because all VoIP codecs sound like shit. It's intelligible, but the bar isn't high for fidelity.

clpwn 6y ago

You're right, that sounds way too fluffy. To clarify, we're targeting "transparent" sounding audio, not "FLACs or bust" audio. Right now we send stereo 48kHz 96kb/s Opus (CELT, not SILK) that we found hit the voice transparency sweet-spot compared to the lossless audio source. We had used higher bitrates in the past, and could easily go back to them, but quality plateaued at around 96k in our experimentation. More than choosing sane transparent-sounding encoding parameters, the biggest difference in fidelity by far was choosing the correct microphones and speakers for accurate reproduction of voices.

sneak 6y ago
Voice does not extend above 22.05khz, so using sampling rates above 44.1khz is entirely objectively wasteful and useless, unless your codec only works at 48khz input or something. Are you using 48khz for a specific reason?
- namibj 6y ago
  Please read the official Opus FAQ to sampling rates: https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#But_won.27t_the_resampler_hurt_the_quality.3F_Isn.27t_it_better_to_use_44.1_kHz_directly.3F https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#But_won.27t_the_resampler_hurt...
- eqvinox 6y ago
  44.1 kHz is essentially deprecated on the hardware level since it's annoying to deal with the extra clock. It's a few cents for an extra crystal, way too expensive ;). 44100 also makes for very poor multipliers/dividers to other clocks since it includes 3²×5²×7² as factors. 48000 is much nicer with 3×5³.

masklinn 6y ago

> Nitpick: “audiophile-quality sound” it seems, is becoming the new “military-grade encryption.” It's too bad they didn't explain it. I expected they meant allowance for "full bandwidth" audio (possibly including music you can listen to). Video conferencing systems generally use voice-only codecs compressed to shit, full of artifacts in the voice range and utterly dead outside of it.

duskwuff 6y ago

It can join the ranks of meaningless phrases like "aircraft-grade aluminum", "chef-grade cookware", and "contractor-grade tools".

efreak 6y ago

To me, "military grade encryption" means following industry standard. "Audiophile quality" means higher quality than you need, care about, or can even tell apart from lower quality.

Skunkleton 6y ago
No, "military grade encryption" means nothing. If it referenced a standard, than that might mean something. I've worked on products for the military that still used single pass DES encryption. So that was military grade. It might as well have been ROT13.