38 ms·

Improved audio rendering with an optimised version of memcpy (2013)

• tinus_hn 4y ago
  Why not link to the audiophile forum instead of a Twitter reminder? https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/ https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/
• MDGeist 4y ago
  Meanwhile I play all my vinyl through a pair of cranked computer speakers from the early 2000s lol. The pursuit of "highest quality" seems like a good way to take the fun out of music listening.
  • bgribble 4y ago
    It's just a different kind of fun. I have an audiophile friend (I generally change the subject when it comes up) and there's this huge tell: he says he is "listening to his system", not "listening to music". I vastly prefer to listen to music!
    • Tor3 4y ago
      Someone told a story about how he (or she, I can't remember) brought an audiophile friend to a classical music concert. The guy had never actually been at a concert, but had a huge classical collection at home. He didn't like the concert. "The bass response was not good".
• croes 4y ago
  Every true audiophile knows it's the diet, which can change how the ears perceive sound.
• prpl 4y ago
  Fundamentally this all boils down to precision measurement/observability (for both analog and digital). Occasionally, small changes are observed in high end equipment with high precision instrumentation - but a subjective interpretation to a psychometric observation is applied as cause and effect. Arguably, the cost alone is enough of a placebo to sell anything for a desired effect.
  • Tor3 4y ago
    The difference between analog and digital is that with analog you get precision problems if the quality isn't good - typically you don't get the high frequencies through (i.e. you have an unintentional low-pass filter. Maybe you'll need precision instruments to actually notice.) But with digital it's not about reduced precision. The errors will be all over the place (the bit error is as likely to be in the most significant bit as in the least significant bit). In other words, it's not a precision problem when it comes to digital. The problem, too, is digital - either it works, or it doesn't.
• frankreyes 4y ago
  Is this about power consumption at the instruction level, affecting electricity paths on the audio chip? It's the only thing that makes sense without reading the original discussion
• screye 4y ago
  Speaking of Audiophile superstitions, I do wonder what the point of fully-diminished returns is. I don't mean the flat-earth level stuff. I mean standard audiophile discourse. Can humans tell the difference between a laptop DAC & an external DAC. Do expensive amplifiers have noticeably lower white-noise than the standard amp? Do high-impedance headphones actually achieve anything ? Do frequency response graphs mean anything if you can digitally EQ & is digital-EQ fully lossless ? Are planar magnetic headphones a scam ? Is FLAC practically overkill for a human ? I think I can tell the difference between a 100$ and $400 audiophile headphones. Amplifiers are more straight forward, because it is simply a loudness thing. And at high-enough volumes, I can still hear some white-noise on high-gain settings. But I am less sure about the other questions.
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • bakugo 4y ago
    Better DACs/amps have noticeably lower noise floors than bad ones, yes. The 3.5mm jacks on my laptop and Nintendo Switch emit very audible white noise if I plug sensitive earphones into them. It's important to distinguish price from quality here, though. For example, the $10 apple USB-C to 3.5mm adapter is known in the (non snake oil obsessed part of the) audiophile community for having very good characteristics for its price, including an extremely low noise floor. I use one on my laptop instead of the built-in 3.5mm.
  • npteljes 4y ago
    I think this point would be highly personal, and also dependent on usage. For example, if I were a streaming site, I wouldn't go for FLAC as that would eat a lot of bandwidth, and there are already successful streaming sites with as low as 96kbps AAC audio (Mixcloud). What I really liked is when claims are backed up with ABX tests. What these determined regarding codec settings is really useful I think, and I also liked that they determined "transparent" encoding settings this way. Very useful when looking to encode your library yourself.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    HIFIMAN Sundara’s (planar magnetic) are only like $299 on Amazon. So if it is a scam it isn’t a particularly effective one, I mean the audiophile sector has people selling magic speaker stands for thousands of dollars; if HIFIMAN wanted to rip people off they surely could do a better job. I’ve got some HE400i’s from them. Unfortunately I can only compare against some closed back Sennheisers (HD 380 pro) so it is not really an apples-to-apples thing. But the difference is pretty obvious, there’s more diaphragm and more power behind it. Bass ends up sounding a bit more crisp.
• ynniv 4y ago
  Audio and Game devs: Need to port my custom malloc and ring buffer code to get rid of those malloc pauses JavaScript devs: Foolish audiophiles think they can hear when someone calls malloc! Mis-diagnosing a problem doesn't mean there isn't a problem. If you call memcp in a way that calls malloc, and your app has been running a while or your system doesn't have a lot of free memory, you're going to get pauses while malloc looks for a free address block. If that pause takes too long, your audio buffer will stall and cause a harsh crackle. People will hear that differently, and explain the problem in different ways. TL;DR: audio and game programming sucks, and if you allocate heap memory people will actually notice. In the extreme: Imagine my surprise when the customers chief software engineer said "Of course it leaks". He went on to point out that they had calculated the amount of memory the application would leak in the total possible flight time for the missile and then doubled that number. They added this much additional memory to the hardware to "support" the leaks. https://web.archive.org/web/20170504104857/https://groups.google.com/forum/message/raw?msg=comp.lang.ada/E9bNCvDQ12k/1tezW24ZxdAJ https://web.archive.org/web/20170504104857/https://groups.go...
  • mort96 4y ago
    > If you call memcpy in a way that calls malloc uh... How exactly? memcpy copies memory from one place in memory to another. That's all it does. There is no "calling memcpy in a way that calls malloc".
    • newobj 4y ago
      if dst and src in memcpy overlap, the result is UB. so there's your window of opportunity. well, you asked...
      • mort96 4y ago
        Haha, you're right, it's technically allowed for memcpy to call malloc in that circumstance.
        • Tor3 4y ago
• karmakaze 4y ago
  Presumably the CPU performing memcpy is sharing power with the DAC and amplifier, assuming a device that does all these things. It's not hard to imagine there being an influence, like an analog version of timing-based bit-snooping. At the same time, I venture to say none of these folk could pass a double-blind test with much better than random chance. There's not much else to say. Demo that and color me surprised.
• leecarraher 4y ago
  2013, so computers >> faster than human hearing so the following probably doesn't matter but devils advocate : memcpy puts stuff in the heap instead of the stack, which requires a malloc, a system call, which could introduce some latency. Then layer on that our audiophiles are probably listening to ridiculously high bit rate audio which results in large files, such that without swap buffering there may be some periodic buffer-play-buffer artifacts introduced. This is why you buffer but [new] is also a heap allocation, so same syscall, shouldn't be any different. Is it calloc? calloc in theory should be worse.
  • mort96 4y ago
    Memcpy doesn't allocate stuff on the heap. Memcpy also doesn't care about whether you're copying to/from heap or stack memory (or a memory mapped file, or a memory mapped camera buffer); memory is memory. If the computer isn't able to keep up with the playback, you would probably get extremely obvious sharp clicks, very far from "the sound has a slightly 'hard edge'". New and malloc are identical. Neither one will initialize any of the data. You also wouldn't call either in a loop; you would allocate a buffer once and then copy data into that buffer. You can see this in the code they posted: BYTE *sound_buffer = new BYTE [sizeof(BYTE) * nBytesInFile]; hr = mmioRead(hFile, (HPSTR)sound_buffer, nBytesInFile); That's the only memory allocation in the whole piece of code they posted. They're talking about the audio quality difference between playing audio from a single big buffer allocated by new vs playing from a single big buffer allocated by malloc.
• munificent 4y ago
  Whenever I think of audiophiles, I imagine a couple of wealthy successful older men hanging out on a weekend. While the wives are elsewhere talking about the latest vacation or whatever, they need something to talk about. Because they're the kind of men who love maximizing making numbers go up, it needs to have something to do with optimizing performance. Because they're wealthy and their success is a big part of their identity, it needs to be something expensive. Then, because they're friends who want to feel useful to each other, it needs to be riddled with inscrutable lore. That way there's always some handy bit of research, some nuggets of wisdom that they can share with each other. That's what this is really about: feeling like they can bond by sharing expertise about some complex hard to optimize problem. The actual problem is self is essentially arbitrary and subjective. In fact, it's better if it is arbitrary. Because any problem that can actually be solved means reaching an end to the ability to kibbitz and geek out. That's why bringing up objective metrics is such a faux pas in the audiophile world: it kills the game. And the whole point is to play the game together, forever. See also: * Car tuning * JavaScript front-end frameworks * Barbeque * Linux distros * Cycling * Optimizing passenger flying experience
  • twinkletwinkle_ 4y ago
    I think your summary is spot on, but how could you miss listing the premier (in my opinion) example, Wine?
    • munificent 4y ago
      Oh, good one. I did miss that one. Whiskey is another one, but... I like nerding out about whiskey so maybe that hit too close to home. :)
  • alexchantavy 4y ago
    Ugh car tuning. I'm hoping someone on here can help my understanding because I feel like this situation makes me raise eyebrows similar to the audiophile community. In the Subaru tuning community, there's a company called Cobb that sells a product called AccessPort that you plug into your car and change its performance using a map file. Cobb themselves include off-the-shelf maps designed to fit vehicles with varying parts and varying conditions, and you can also pay a professional tuner to build a custom map for your car, which you would want to do if you have custom parts that an off-the-shelf map would not account for or if you have a very specific tuning goal. Here's the issue that I've been confused with: the community tends to advocate for using a pro-tuner over an off-the-shelf map whenever possible - even if your car has the same exact parts specified in the map notes, and even if your climate and elevation are the same as specified in the map notes - because "every car is different". If I don't have exotic performance goals + I have the parts supported by a given OTS map + I drive in the supported climate, why should I trust some rando in his garage to make a map for me, over Cobb who sees way more vehicles and configurations than any single shop ever could? A lot of the time reading these forum post endorsements sound like "the tune is so good this guy is totally a scientist yo". Anyway, partially a rant but since we're talking about enthusiast communities thought I'd share and I really am interested to learn!
• CapstanRoller 4y ago
  Hearing the difference now isn't the reason to choose an optimal memcpy. Some implementations use lossless copying, while other methods are 'lossy'. The differences between GNU libc and Boost are subtle, but important. What this means is that for each year your audio sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have NVMe - it's about 15kbps on M.2, but only 7kbps on eSATA, due to linear velocidensity. You don't want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media. I started collecting MP3s in about 2001 (on Windows 98 using an ancient version of malloc and memcpy), and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange...well don't get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. If you ever used uClibc, I hope you kept your original vinyls! Proper memcpy rips (or better yet, ripping directly to factory-fresh RAM) from the same period still sound great, even if they weren't stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to audiophile-grade library functions: you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you'll be glad you did.
  • plra 4y ago
    Few understand this.
  • andybak 4y ago
    You had me there for a moment.
  • isoprophlex 4y ago
    How do SSDs compare for storing lossy media? And how does temperature factor in? Out of a gut feeling I've been taking out my music SSD and storing it in the freezer when I'm gone for the weekend, or on holidays etc, as to retard the lossy decay process. But I've never actually measured, maybe you can throw in some expertise here?
    • a4isms 4y ago
      Be careful. If your freezer is really cold, you can turn your CDs into superconductors, which may not lose bits, but they do introduce quantum shuffling of bits, where the same bits physically exchange position with other bits.
• johnklos 4y ago
  These kinds of things make me wonder what might be the ways to distinguish between the ignorant and the trolls / the people who take advantage of the ignorant to make money. Even though that level of (sometimes willful) ignorance is scary, the whole thing is fascinating, in a train wreck way.
• starkparker 4y ago
  To fully grok things, the context of the thread is a person so unhappy with a JPLAY[1] beta that they roll their own command-line audio player with the single-minded goal of eliminating all possible forms of latency. (Upthread they talk about dropping to assembly; further down the thread someone suggests avoiding using the CPU altogether.) JPLAY is the kind of thing that offers, among its features, the ability to use a dedicated PC (ideally running Windows Server) for playback.[2] This includes selling their own SSDs "selected for their sound properties" and "Reference SATA cables to ensure absolute best sound quality", and playback-optimized USB cards and denoisers, network adapters and power supplies.[3] The best examples are the 375€ "USB Isolator", which "blocks all noise coming from a PC and re-generates clean USB signal from a (sic) scratch resulting in vast sound quality improvements"[4] and their 12,000€ 4TB server featuring "the only...motherboard designed exclusively for high-end audio playback" that avoids the common pitfalls of worse "office work and gaming" motherboards that "pollute other hi-fi components and contribute to irritating 'digital' sound". Its signature review, pulled out in the product page, says it's indistinguishable from an analog recording - the highest of high praise.[5] The poster in the linked thread was like, nah, they suck, this sounds awful, but THIS is obviously better. And look how easy it was to do! These C++ developers are all idiots. 1: http://jplay.eu http://jplay.eu 2: http://jplay.eu/ml_post_slider/jplay-dual-pc-mode-how-it-works-why-you-need-it/ http://jplay.eu/ml_post_slider/jplay-dual-pc-mode-how-it-wor... 3: https://jcat.eu/ https://jcat.eu/; doesn't work in Firefox 4: https://jcat.eu/product/usb-isolator-usb-audio-galvanic-isolator/ https://jcat.eu/product/usb-isolator-usb-audio-galvanic-isol... 5: https://jcat.eu/featured/xact-s1/ https://jcat.eu/featured/xact-s1/
• physPop 4y ago
  Things like this hilight why the scientific method is so important and why double blind trials are so important in medicine!
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    Placebo effect is known to cure some people though.
• djent 4y ago
  The original memcpy sounds good after some burn-in
• masswerk 4y ago
  Hum, they missed the obvious issue: `+=` requires shielding by `void()` for optimal sound. (It should be obvious how `=` acts as an antenna here, if not properly shielded. In Algol, assignments were still properly grounded by `:=`, which gave you that warm sound.) ;-)
• a4isms 4y ago
  Forgive me for repeating an old joke, but it does say so much about audiophile culture: Q: What's the difference between an audiophile and a musicologist? A: A musicologist uses a stereo to listen to music, but an audiophile uses music to listen to a stereo.
• snickerbockers 4y ago
  part of me wants to give him the benefit of the doubt; he's talking about latency and I know from experience there's an undesirable "clicking" artifact produced when the sample buffer is empty (ie, the application isn't producing samples fast enough); this is caused by the frequency abruptly dropping to 0Hz. It could arguably be described as a "hard edge". So maybe he's in a situation where libc's memcpy was a bottleneck and was preventing new samples from being sent to the audio hardware fast enough. But the part where he says that the c++ new[] operator sounds better than malloc is just ridiculous. I'm not good enough at mental gymnastics to make that one seem remotely plausible.
• jl6 4y ago
  Feels like we are laughing at mental illness here.
• 1970-01-01 4y ago
  So this is about sounding 'less digital' after the fact it was copied? I could understand if a very bad/buggy memcpy build was used while streaming audio and causing interference with the DAC. But no, it's just idiots discussing something they don't understand.
• rongenre 4y ago
  Best comment: "Think of it as a guerrilla progressive tax system."
• nmz 4y ago
  Weren't we amazed a couple of months back when menuetos managed to get audio latency down to 1ms? Yes this is ridiculous but latency does exist and is quite perceivable.
  • brokenmachine 4y ago
    Latency only matters if you're trying to sync to video. If it's just music then who cares if it's playing 40ms later?
    • swatcoder 4y ago
      Well that, or if you’re trying to sync to your own hands or any other things in the real world, like other people’s instruments. It matters quite a lot for effects processing and synthesized instruments.
      • brokenmachine 4y ago
        But we're talking about audiophiles, not musicians. Sync doesn't matter for listening to music.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• Redoubts 4y ago
  This is why I liked Hydrogen Audio the best. If you ever made a claim about sound quality that didn’t include evidence of double-blind testing, you got banned from the site.
• nuancebydefault 4y ago
  I used to work for Lear corp, they had a fat deal with JLR to develop / mass produce an amplifier with 1000+ electric components (5xdual-core Sharc included). MQA software with 192kHz samplerate & audio software processors was included. People of MQA surely have pointy ears like mr Spock. One of our sw architects invited people of MQA in front of a fancy listening setup for speaker quality. Hearing tests with the same speaker set, one with crappy thin copper cables, the other with heavy 6mm2 cables. The people from MQA found the former setup sounding the best. The thing with audio perception is, its like wine tasting, the quality depends on the setting, the people around you and your current mood. I like video algo's much better, at least you can see the difference.
  • chuchana 4y ago
    > People of MQA surely have pointy ears like mr Spock. I don't know about their ears but their marketing sure smells like it's been through a herd of bulls: > Q. Is MQA lossless? > A. It's better than lossless! [https://www.mqa.co.uk/newsroom/faqs/is-mqa-lossless https://www.mqa.co.uk/newsroom/faqs/is-mqa-lossless] I'm pretty sure they used to claim the format was lossless instead of just implying something around those lines by using what they call a "lossless file" as a "digital container".
• EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 4y ago
  Well, there is a heap, and to add or remove things from the heap takes time, and that time depends on the memory allocator algorithm used. I can totally see how it could affect audio streaming on really really slow hardware.
  • Tor3 4y ago
    Ignoring everything else (as in - that wouldn't make a difference in practice due to the rate etc) - in this particular case, if you look at the posted code, the memory allocation was done a single time, so the issue as about sound quality when reading data from a buffer allocated (once) by malloc(), or by new().
• andreskytt 4y ago
  And then there’s guys like mr. Rainger (https://www.raingerfx.com/shop/p/minibar https://www.raingerfx.com/shop/p/minibar) just casually inserting an actual pod of liquid into the signal chain to replace a resistor and drive an eq (via its transparency). Coke sounds different from single malt and a protein shake is different again…
• Pent 4y ago
  People just don’t take care of their bodies nor have “good” senses to even tell, I mean half these comments are admitting to no taste, don’t be surprised when they mean that literally
• kozak 4y ago
  Fun fact: vinyl has constant angular velocity, not constant linear velocity. It means that sound fidelity gets progressively worse while going from outer tracks to inner tracks.
  • buro9 4y ago
    Also fun fact, stylus are usually rated only for 150-250h of play before needing replacing. If you're avidly listening to music this is less than a year. The vast majority of vinyl junkie audiophiles are not replacing their stylus anywhere near that frequently.
    • hakanderyal 4y ago
      Another fun fact, there are obsessive people out there that they use a new stylus for _each_ song. (I came across one)
      • abliefern 4y ago
        I hope they put on new shoes every time they leave their daily new house
      • deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      • djkoolaide 4y ago
        I think there may have been a misunderstanding. There are many of us who regularly switch to a different stylus depending on the record or genre we're playing. I haven't heard of anyone treating a stylus as single-use.
        • hakanderyal 4y ago
          Nope, the vinlys were very old (antique?) and he said he was doing it to preserve them.
  • InCityDreams 4y ago
• Shorel 4y ago
  As a Linux DJ, I just wish the waveform scroll was jerkless. I run MiXXX waveforms at 60hz, it takes about 5% CPU, so it has lots of CPU time to spare, and even then, there are graphic imperfections. Every couple of seconds or so, there's a frame skipped, and it is impossible not to perceive it. This has nothing to do with sound, but I think it is relevant to this discussion :)
• alkonaut 4y ago
  What happened to these people, why is this no longer a thing to the same extent it was in the 90's and early 00's? Was it the internet happening? Did they discover double blind testing?
• WiSaGaN 4y ago
  There is a saying that hifi using electricity coming from nuclear sounds a big warmer than that from a hydrapower plant...
• groestl 4y ago
  Hah, good times. In one of my earliest posts on the internet (I was green behind the ears and didn't actually know what Usenet groups were, but still hung around those) I mocked some audiophiles because of their debate about whether black disks sounded better than off the shelve CDs (black sounds better, obviously).
• dusted 4y ago
  Okay, I don't have enough context to really know, but while it's (always) good fun to laugh at audiophiles.. Could it be that the guy is actually experiencing an improvement due to actual real reasons? Imagine: They're on a super low-end chip, feeding a bufferless DAC, and they're experiencing buffer under-runs, which cause really noticeable degradation ? Imagine: They're using some API so wrong that it "works by accident" but only really when timings are "just so" ?
  • pengaru 4y ago
    If I'm feeling charitable I could imagine they're perceiving interference differences because the DAC is internal integrated junk. I've had thinkpads in the past that would output varying degrees of noise on the analog line+headphone outputs. It was highly dependent on what the CPU was doing, how much data it was moving around. It was kind of fun as a sort of audible system instrumentation while developing/testing software. The more optimal I'd get things, the higher pitched the noise became. But no "audiophile" should be using such cheesy analog output from a computer... At least get some S/PDIF off to the fancy preamp.
    • IYasha 4y ago
      I get different noises while moving mouse on my PC, with an external DAC.
      • pengaru 4y ago
        If your external DAC is on USB powered by the PC's USB port, your external DAC is external in name only...
    • reportgunner 4y ago
      I don't know about other laptops but I personally experienced a latent issue with all lenovo laptops (thinkpad & ideapad) where there is a short between the keyboard and the audio card - you could hear very faint static with headphones plugged in when there was no audio playing and I could even hear the static change when I scrolled my mouse - possibly because of how closely packed everything is.
• Kiro 4y ago
  Funny how everyone laughs about this but gets really offended in the subthread about coffee. Instead of claiming it's different and that coffee grinding actually matters you should use your interest to try to understand the audiophile's perspective. How you feel about coffee they feel about audio.
• locallost 4y ago
  My favorite is something I read some 15 years ago or so, although I don't remember really where, that early CDs had terrible sound because people early on failed to realize the big difference between vinyl records and CDs. Namely that records are read outside in and CDs inside out, and this somehow required adjustments that made everything better, although I again don't remember how it was "fixed" :-). Anyway, I don't know much about this stuff, but the biggest problem is always lack of education, not that people are stupid. There's a lot to know and people usually don't and can't know everything. I'd say in certain cases intelligent people are more problematic because they're capable of constructing a plausible explanation that makes sense only because they lack the complete picture.
  • SomeoneOnTheWeb 4y ago
    Actually, there two big reasons why people disliked CDs in the early days. First, the analog-to-digital converters (ADC) of the time were absolutely terrible. Which resulted in CDs being actually worse than their vinyl counterpart. Then there was also the people that liked the "warmth" of the vinyl, which is something real that can be measured (at least for old vinyls, don't know for the modern ones). Funny enough, this was due to the vinyl being less 'precise' than the CD, but it had a sound signature that many people preferred, and still prefer today (most modern headphones and speakers aren't neutral-sounding by choice).
• fooker 4y ago
  Did anyone actually read or skim the thread? It seems to be about reducing latency, which definitely varies with memcpy implementations.
  • stagas 4y ago
    And also varying the latency from one system to another can alter the timing behavior of dsp code which will definitely change the sound.
• empiricus 4y ago
  This memcpy debate on one side, and on the other side try getting rid of a ground loop :(
• gpjanik 4y ago
  Was it not just a trolling thread?
• beloch 4y ago
  It's important to appreciate that there are several different breeds of audiophile out there... There are those that are obsessed with objectively measurable sound quality. They want to reproduce the recorded waveform as accurately as possible, and they want products that can be measured doing that, but they often pursue accuracy beyond the limits of any human to hear. There are those that like a little distortion or degradation if it sounds nice to them. These are the people who collect tube amps and will openly admit they're not as accurate, but accuracy is not what they're after. There are those who embrace voodoo. I knew a physics professor who was one of these. He had hideously expensive isolation platforms, resonator weights, unobtanium cables, "ambient field conditioners"... You name it. He knew there was no scientific basis for any them to work, but he had very deliberately deluded himself. If asked, he'd explain that the ultimate goal of the audiophile's pursuit was pleasure. If he could shut down his reasoning and spend hours moving resonator stones around on top of his CD transport until he thought he had improved the sound, and this gave him pleasure, was that pleasure not real even if the sound was exactly the same? Then there are those who combine contradictory aspects of all of the above without any self-awareness or critical thinking skills. That's the sort that will torment themselves, and others, arguing on internet forums about why their own snake oil of choice is legitimate, real, and how anyone who isn't using it is a cretin.
  • karamanolev 4y ago
    I echo the above, but wanted to an important (to me) nuance for those who pursue accuracy beyond the limits of human hearing. Usually, errors and distortions stack across multiple system components. While really bad components can be A/B/X tested accurately, good ones rarely can be. Still, imperceptible errors that accumulate/amplify can result in actual, audible differences. One can liken it to floating point computations where the error ranges grow each time and can reach unacceptable levels.
  • willis936 4y ago
    I'm an instrumentation junkie at heart, but I'm a pragmatist first. I have a cheap receiver and cheap speakers. What I want so badly is for software solutions to be properly cheap. Rooms are relatively static conditions, meaning a simple FIR filter can be tuned once and give consistent results. Calibrating speakers and room multipath should not be gatekept with $1000+ hardware. Freedsp is the only name I know that offers a cheap option. They are a modest operation that only supply designs and bare boards. Integrating freedsp into a modern home theatre setup requires inelegant solutions (Source -> TV -> Receiver -> freedsp -> amplifier). I just wish there was any competition left in the big players to push measurable home audio performance higher.
• bozertron 4y ago
  I've been in premium audio my entire career. There are many in the industry who fight the good fight. The issue is that most of the snake-oil comes from some truth. Here we are at the how much profit is fair debate. Contextualize for your own industry and/or product and you'll find it tricky to justify a 'fair' value for anything. Whatever the market will bear, right? Audio hardware is one of the oldest electronic tech segments. 'good enough' for even the most persnickety audiophiles happened late in the 1960's. Since then it's been about repackaging and doodads. There are a few technologies that haven't found fit yet for market or manufacturing reasons. Some of those will enable big leaps, but require scale and cooperation from content producers.
  • IYasha 4y ago
    > Since then it's been about repackaging and doodads. I strongly disagree. Since 1960's we were getting better component base, better schematics, better measurements. Even analog amplifiers were evolving not only in audio quality, but also in efficiency. But I still hate the PWM (class D) amps. )
    • bozertron 4y ago
      Sure. I see your perspective. Let me unpack a bit. As I mentioned, IMO 'good enough' occurred late 1960's; Audio quality is the context surrounding that statement. I have multiple systems. Generally speaking I have them matched by generation. I have a pair of Dynaco A25s being run by a Quad 33 & 303. All of them made in 1969. To your point, I have upgraded the passive in the A25s with more modern components. They now sound better. But before the upgrade, to an average person, they were already way good enough. This old system gets the most unprompted compliments of any of the systems in my home. Can I make a GaN based integrated amplifier with a state-of-the-art DAC and wireless inputs? The size of a deck of cards!? Sure! Smaller? We do that! But the real-world in-room 'normal' user/use case will have about the same experience as the system from 1969. An end-to-end analog system when done 'properly' will generally sound better. You sacrifice cost, space, and energy consumption for that privilege. You can get 95%+ of the performance for 10% of the sacrifice if you choose components carefully. We're currently way past the point where the devices or efficiencies are having a big impact on the intended experience. Unless you're in the 0.001% of people who have a dedicated listening room, the hum from the compressor in your refrigerator in the next room is louder than any distortion on a properly implemented system. Yes, room treatments are very important, but with all the cheap signal processing tools - a lot of which was indirectly funded by the voice assistant boom - we have gotten very good at compensating for that as well. Now we have neural network ICs that are insane at environmental noise cancellation and can run years on a small battery. But you still want to listen to your stereo music, probably from a streaming service, or maybe your surround sound movie. The content side is the bottleneck on any big innovation in the space. As long as the focus remains on the sonic nuances of Hotel California, we will be repackaging as opposed to innovating on a sonic experience.
• ipython 4y ago
  Maybe they were just early to discover a long standing Linux bug in memcpy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34095609 :p
• john61 4y ago
  What is often unknown is that the ear <-> brain interface is not one way but two ways. That means that the brain actively changes physically the mechanics of the ear for better hearing in a feedback loop. Therefore all sorts of "freakiness" can influence our hearing.
  • lukas099 4y ago
    Interesting. Do you have a source for further reading?
    • john61 4y ago
      not sure if there is an English translation: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-8274-2186-9 https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-8274-2186-9
• pelorat 4y ago
  I mean in theory different versions of memcpy could result in different EMI emissions which could get picked up by various analog paths. It's not as crazy as gold plated optical cables. Not really a problem today, but back when everyone had soundcards, EMI could definately screw with your audio if your PC wasn't built correctly. Probably a worse problem for those who didn't plug in their computer into a grounded outlet as well. I've definately heard hums in computer audio stemming from EMI when the computer is doing something heavy. Granted that was back when having your cellphone near your PC screwed with the sound when someone was calling.
• Sunspark 4y ago
  I've been using the same system for decades. Is there a way I can measure how well it does at sound quality other than the "listen to it and see if it seems ok" method? Because as with glasses, you get used to a prescription that is slowly degrading over time, same with hearing. How are people measuring fidelity in a home environment?
• dekhn 4y ago
  I realized I wasn't a serious audiophile a long time ago, but still went through a quest to improve sound. My first receiver was a cheap plastic thing that produced an enormous amount of white noise floor- a loud hiss not much quieter than the music itself. I went through several receivers until I found one that didn't hiss so badly, but I found that the volume wasn't very impressive (turning the knob mainly just increased hiss and distortion). I learned later that most people address this using a preamp, although at the time I was poor and couldn't buy one. I mostly listen to soundboard recordings of live music (Grateful Dead and Phish) where some recordings are fantastic and others aren't. My personal favorite reference to listen to is Dave Brubeck's Take Five- although it has a high noise floor, the recording is still excellent (I like to listen to the creaking of the bass during the drum solo because it's quiet and in the background). Over time I moved away from speakers because I'm rarely in a situation where I can listen at the volume I like without people either asking me to turn it down or leave. I got a pair of Sennhauser headphones- nothing fancy- and am quite happy listening to my desktop computer through that. Switching to another set of headphones- it immediately sounded terrible and I had to play with various settings (turns out the audio driver was trying to send through lots of very low frequency and the headphones made a shambles of that). There was a period where mp3 encoding was terrible and generated obnoxious artifacts. Nowadays many mp3 128k recordings are fine for me. So for me, while not an audiophile, these things matter: reduce hiss to an acceptable level, get headphones or speakers you like, and use EQ to tune it to a sound that works for you.
• Paul_S 4y ago
  How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? And how can someone be clever enough to be a software engineer and not clever enough to figure out crystals in bags taped to cables do not affect music quality. Just some nuggets from that thread: "Sounds awesome, the previous version had a slight tendency to defuse the treble, but with VS2012 compile it is a much more complete sound with absolutely no digital harshness, some 16/44 albums I could hardly play before without getting a headache are now rendered in their full glory." "It's just lazyness on the part of the player developers that they rely on the old methods, I guess they think bits are bits." "Goto also sounds better than anything else I have tried." - the "Goto" in the quote means a goto in C used to replace a loop. "also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."
  • tmnvix 4y ago
    > How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? Because not all audiophiles are gullible
  • unmole 4y ago
    This has to be an elaborate joke.
  • ryanmcbride 4y ago
    Knowledge is easily available and so is a whole lot of misinformation.
  • swatcoder 4y ago
    Like kernel or compiler development, audio and DSP development is seen by some as a black art that’s subject to mysterious incantations and arcane rituals. 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.
• mytailorisrich 4y ago
  Actual link to forum: https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/ https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/ "found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/ http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy."
  • wuntimer 4y ago
    I don't know why people are mocking this discussion. It's well documented that tight loops on CPUs can cause electromagnetic interference. Old timers with C64s will recall how it could affect the TV monitor output "fuzziness" and nearby AM radios - heck, I could even tell how a program hung by the sound it made. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16167594 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16167594 https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/25435/commodore-64-noises-during-loops-flash-load-and-others https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/25435/com...
    • YoshiRulz 4y ago
      Modern CPUs can produce an AM radio signal too https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio https://github.com/fulldecent/system-bus-radio
  • vaidhy 4y ago
    Is the website a play on insane asylum for audiophiles?
    • 77pt77 4y ago
      No. They really are like that!
      • JohnBooty 4y ago
        I mean, it depends on our definition of "they." Lots of audiophile communities (ones based around actual engineering) who laugh their asses off at this insane lunatic fringe stuff just like HN does.
• elzbardico 4y ago
  I see a business opportunity here in providing very expensive repackagings of compilers and libraries of "audiophile" quality. It just needs to be really, really expensive.
  • bee_rider 4y ago
    Here’s the pitch: Sure, mainstream compilers give you the best performance. But doing all the computations at once will result in spiky performance and power draw, which of course will propagate through to your ears as noise. Our compiler rearranges the instructions to present constant load level, resulting in more constant sound flows. In fact modern computers are too fast to play music properly, back when you were young and the computers were slower, programmers tuned their programs to maximize throughput which naturally resulted in this smooth flow of instructions. It is only recently, conveniently right outside your nostalgia window, that computers became fast enough that they could fly through the code and then stop, resulting in this digital noise. Plus, modern CPUs change their frequencies all the time, to save power. By keeping a steady flow of instructions, we keep the CPU from going to low frequency mode. If it has ever felt like you are having trouble hearing high frequencies, it is probably because they are missing on a computational level. As a test, we have set up this laptop. Put on these headphones—we assure you, they are high quality open back headphones. When we unplug the laptop from the wall, it will naturally go into low power mode and naturally smooth out the instruction flow. Listen, no hum. But when we plug it in, you can hear some high pitch whine in the background. That’s the peaky instruction flow. This is actually kinda fun.
    • hnbear 4y ago
      Better add a consultancy arm to "tune" the computers to remove the CPU scheduling issues, sort out the P states and C states to remove those pesky optimizations. Maybe you can create an audiophile BIOS, as well that automatically tweaks the CPU to optimize enabled core count, turbo and voltages, etc. Of course, it's a chargeable add-on for the custom PC service, and only available on supplied hardware. Oh, do you think you could get the audiophiles into RISC CPUs too? Find a reference board, custom brand it, and charge 10x for a purer CPU. It's reduced instructions, so there's fewer of them to disrupt the pure audio quality. You've hand tweaked the RISC instruction set to remove any that might impede the logic flow of audio processing for a purer, clearer sound.
• dylan604 4y ago
  is this version of memcpy gold plated and developed by Monster?
  • jabl 4y ago
    It's very important that memcpy() copies from higher addresses to lower, as that cancels the harmonic caused by SIMD instructions copying the other way. The opposite if you happen to use a big endian system.
  • disintegore 4y ago
    with built-in antivirus protection for untarnished signal quality source : https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-xbox-hdmi-cable-has-anti-virus-protection/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/this-xbox-hdmi-cable-has-anti-...
    • dylan604 4y ago
      you got to hand it to them for the creative ways of the con. i for one would never imagined to have included an anti-virus scanner in a cable meant for audio/video data...wait, AV, hmmm...
• deleted 4y ago
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• pixelpoet 4y ago
  Bet you they are all rocking Shakti stones: https://www.shakti-innovations.com/product/shakti-stone/ https://www.shakti-innovations.com/product/shakti-stone/ > Music reproduction is clearer, with more liquidity, dynamics and focus. The improved inter-transient silence allows the listener to hear ambient cue information essential for accurate perception of stage depth, width and unwavering imaging. High quality video systems will benefit from SHAKTI devices near power supplies, projection guns and laser disc/DVD players. Reduced color noise and improved convergence alignment are some of the improvements that can occur.
  • fatnoah 4y ago
    Those will also increase the horsepower of your car, so it's really like getting two products in one.
  • Ekaros 4y ago
    > Placement on automotive CPUs has measurably increased engine horsepower. Even more amazing promise... So it is snake oil for both cars and hifi...
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • dylan604 4y ago
    is this a Temple of Doom reference? If you place more than one of these shakti stones next to each other, do they start to glow?
• jesperwe 4y ago
  I once had an "audiophile" sales person in a showroom almost hit me in anger, after confronting him on his loudspeaker cables that had arrows on them pointing out which way the cable should be connected to sound best. As any EE knows from linear elements course A, a linear two-port network is reciprocal. If it is not reciprocal it is not linear. The simple conclusion is that if it matters how you orient the cable, then it has distorsion.
  • mulmen 4y ago
    Or maybe there’s a different reason for the arrows, like deciphering rats nests in tight spaces or facilitating installs over long runs. You might get the same response in a data center if you say “the color doesn’t matter because the cables are all reciprocal.”
    • rkeene2 4y ago
      I would hope someone who did datacenter cabling would be able to explain that the color coding system has a meaning to humans and not to the electronics in a calm and coherent manner to an honest inquiry. Additionally, labels on datacenter cabling tends to be less cryptic like "DCX-IN-FQP_9".
      • mulmen 4y ago
        Maybe. But if a smartass comes in to where I work and tells me how wrong I am based on their shallow understanding of the domain I am likely to become frustrated. Jesperwe said they confronted this salesperson about the cables. They then lectured the salesperson on theory. There’s no indication a question was asked with an honest desire for the answer. When a conversation becomes a confrontation nuance is the first casualty. Jesperwe and the salesperson may have been participating in completely different conversations from their perspectives. Without more information I can’t draw a further conclusion beyond jesperwe participating in (or instigating!) a confrontation with a retail salesperson.
        • rkeene2 4y ago
• elzbardico 4y ago
  Audiophiles are people that need to understand that there's such a thing as diminishing returns. Yes, good amplifiers and, more importantly, good loudspeakers and headphones can significantly improve your experience compared to listening to music in some cheap JBL boombox. But once you're a step above the cheap stuff, additional expenses don't significantly improve your experience.
  • danpalmer 4y ago
    I think all Audiophiles recognise there are severely diminishing returns, but they pursue it because it's a hobby. What they actually need to realise is that there's no magic in computers, and sometimes digital systems are literally identical as long as they aren't erroring. For example, copying over a network has integrity checks at several levels, so you can't receive a different version of the music.
• deleted 4y ago
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• Arch-TK 4y ago
  To be fair. If you had poorly shielded audio equipment (maybe because you bought directional copper and forgot to buy the necessary diamond infused audio grade shielding) then its entirely possible that different memcpy implementations might produce different frequencies of noise which would have a noticeable impact on the audio quality. Although, who am I kidding? These people also think Ethernet cables can be directional.
• outside1234 4y ago
  artisanal memcpy
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• scrlk 4y ago
  Will using the right version of memcpy help with reducing the effects of rotational velocidensity when ripping to lossy formats?
• andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  That's so dumb. Everyone knows that string.h functions produce the best sound you can get, and you should prefer `calloc' so you get clean sound. Ideally you want to write your audio rendering code in asm, too, since newer C compilers add a lot of junk to binaries that reduce the quality of the output. If you can't do this, simply use older compilers. But if you're going to write in C, I suggest Cosmopolitan Libc and running directly from BIOS since operating systems end up doing a lot of work that produces electrical noise on your hardware. You're better off running literally only audio rendering code for the best quality rendition. /s
  • neilalexander 4y ago
    > Cosmopolitan Libc HolyC or _nothing_!
  • dylan604 4y ago
    But if you're writing in C, couldn't there be transposition issues? Like what if the music was written in a different key? Do you have to use different versions of the code written in C# or F depending on the key the input audio was recorded?
    • andrewmcwatters 4y ago
      Yes. I'm particularly inspired by the work of Walter Bright whose D Programming Language finally allowed us to listen to new works.
      • dylan604 4y ago
        As a wood wind player primarily in B-flat, I've just taken it as norm to take the C programs and slow them down slightly. My E-flat stuff just never has sounded right speeding up the C programs. I'll have to try the D programs to see if it'll sound closer since it won't need as much pitch correction.
• _yb2s 4y ago
  I've always felt totally alone falling somewhere between hardcore audiophiles and the 'norm,' which seems to feel a cell phone or cheap laptop speaker is as good as anything else for music. I really notice the difference between cheap crap, and say an older used brand name receiver with freestanding floor speakers, the kind of system you can find on craigslist for about $100. But I cannot notice a major difference between the $100 system, and say a $100k system (or whatever audiophiles spend). I also do notice a big difference between a 96Kbps MP3 and 320Kbps, but not between 320Kbps and lossless.
  • LoganDark 4y ago
    Same here! We stopped using laptop speakers around 5 or so years ago when we got some good bookshelf speakers[0] instead. We mounted them to the foot of our bed where we use our laptop. We've since built our own subwoofer and also mounted a bass shaker[1] (transducer) below the bed, which produces actual vibrations in response to low frequencies, by moving a heavy weight instead of a speaker cone. The tactile stimulation from low frequencies actually significantly helps with immersion, focus, and relaxation, similar to some can easily fall asleep in a running car. Of course, it also helps when we're just in the mood to transmit high-power bass frequencies straight into our fricken' bones... Anyway, I think the total for our sound system is below $1k. We never made a parts list for our subwoofer but we estimate the cost to have been around $300–400. The rest of the system consists of the $180 (at the time) bookshelf speakers[0], the $50 (at the time) bass shaker[1], and the $80 (or so) amplifier to drive said shaker[2]. We also use a device called a "line driver"[3] (around $20) to raise the signal level for the input to our bass shaker's amplifier. "Line driver" is indeed the magic search term, and "preamp" will get you garbage (either $2 op-amp boards, or phonographs). But aside from all the engineering effort that went into it, because it was a really fun hobby project, it's mostly just a mediocre system. We're totally content with that, and proud because it is a great experience for us, and very fun to listen to. At this point, the only upgrade we would really want would be to find a new living space that can accommodate a rotary woofer[4], which changes the air pressure of the entire room to produce frequencies from around 20Hz down to even 0Hz. But our current setup is more than enough to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate. <3 Also we store our entire music library in mp3 format >:3 [0]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GMPDAHM https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00GMPDAHM [1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CDDPJTI https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01CDDPJTI [2]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TTMN51V https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07TTMN51V [3]: https://www.ebay.com/itm/271412659106 https://www.ebay.com/itm/271412659106 [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_woofer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotary_woofer -Emily
• rwl4 4y ago
  Archived: https://web.archive.org/web/20230312033446/https://discuss.systems/@dan/110008052977994607 https://web.archive.org/web/20230312033446/https://discuss.s...
• rootusrootus 4y ago
  Kind of along the same lines, my local cheapo cable store likes to run a demo by the front door with the same movie playing on identical TVs, with one TV using an expensive cable and the other using a very inexpensive cable. HDMI, of course. The owner likes to ask people to tell him which picture is better. You can guess the results of that.
  • formerly_proven 4y ago
    I'd just turn saturation and sharpening down on the TV using the cheap cable.
    • rootusrootus 4y ago
      In this case, though, the owner is trying to sell the cheap cable. That's his schtick. He doesn't even sell the Monster (or whatever) cable. He wants everyone to know his digital cables are just as good, because hey, digital.
• squarefoot 4y ago
  Those fools... first they praise vinyl, then would ruin everything by playing music through C++? Get over it, folks, for real vintage unadulterated sound nothing beats Turbo Pascal!
• AtNightWeCode 4y ago
  Some people still claim vinyl has the best sound so...
  • 77pt77 4y ago
    I've seen people claiming that for VHS when it comes to video. I kid you not.
• asveikau 4y ago
  I think I read a thread like this almost 10 years ago when I happened to be doing some audio work, maybe it was the same one. If memory serves, there was somebody saying that exiting the program cleanly sounds worse, you need to crash on a page fault reading the input buffer instead, and that's your end of file behavior. Someone else said FLAC makes it sound worse, but I suspect they just couldn't figure out how to use libflac. In other words they were bad programmers writing buggy, half baked shit, and they explained away their broken code as sounding better. Even the snippet I see in the linked post, right off the bat they start their loop with WaitForSingleObject, that's kind of suspect; the first thing they do is enter the kernel to block at every loop. I suspect they aren't doing that in an optimal way.
  • mort96 4y ago
    > Someone else said FLAC makes it sound worse, but I suspect they just couldn't figure out how to use libflac. Honestly, that's not so ridiculous. Lossless will sound different from lossy, and someone may prefer the lossy version.
    • 323 4y ago
      They were comparing FLAC with raw uncompressed PCM wave files. Some swear they can hear the difference.
      • mort96 4y ago
        Oh. Yea that's either BS or a serious software bug.
      • JohnBooty 4y ago
        It's pretty trivial to go PCM->FLAC->PCM with e.g. ffmpeg and verify there's no difference. I suppose it's possible there's a software bug with the actual FLAC decoder they were listening with. However it of course seems much more likely they're imagining it.
  • dylan604 4y ago
    since the title includes the 2013 date, might very well have been the same one
• JoeAltmaier 4y ago
  When you cannot possibly tell the difference between two things, is when the arguments/discussion can go on forever.
• ragnarsson 4y ago
  I used to own 20$ headphones for few years, I upgraded to 50$ ones for the next couple of years and finally to 200$ ones. I have felt big differences each time. I don't see whats funny about that. If I upgrade now (I can't quite afford to considering the diminishing returns and my income) but still I expect to get upgrade in sound quality, comfort, build quality, etc.
  • trafnar 4y ago
    Ok, now try the same thing with memcpy and report back.
• seshagiric 4y ago
  I wonder if the said version of memcpy did screw up some bits and indeed affect the music fidelity. I mean audiophiles can detect that change right? It’s like the gm/ ford vanilla ice cream bug: https://www.marketcalls.in/fun/vanilla-ice-cream-that-puzzled-general-motors-amazing.html https://www.marketcalls.in/fun/vanilla-ice-cream-that-puzzle...
  • justusw 4y ago
    That shows how important it is to control for all variables. I understand it is difficult to match volume/loudness when AB testing speakers, amps or codecs and that might subtly influence someone’s judgement.
  • Tor3 4y ago
    If it screwed up some bits you would have a useless memcpy and your applications wouldn't work, but as far as audio is concerned you have the additional problem that, unlike what audiophiles believe, it's not like those bits would always be the least significant bits.. it could as well be the most significant bit and anything in between, in other words you would get crazy horrible sound squeaks and not subtle changes in stage perception or whatever it is the audiophiles are talking about presently.
  • jeremyjh 4y ago
    If your memcpy did “screw up some bits” you would have much bigger problems running the app than poor sound quality.
• mauvehaus 4y ago
  I saw the observation years ago that "Normal people use their stereos to listen to their music. Audiophiles use their music to listen to their stereos." I guess if that's your thing, go for it?
• jensgk 4y ago
  That is what Ethan Winer called "Audiophoolery" here: https://ethanwiner.com/audiophoolery.html https://ethanwiner.com/audiophoolery.html
• _2d30 4y ago
  It's so funny to me how many people post links to Mastodon just to try and get people to use it on HN. There's literally no value to Mastodon being the linked to piece of content when one could actually link directly to that content! What's worse, it took >10s just to load!
  • dewey 4y ago
    Having the two line context of the Mastodon post what this post is about is valuable, more than just a headline.
  • okamiueru 4y ago
    As much as I share a similar disdain for these kinds of things, it loads much faster than any twitter page I've been to in recent years. I also get very different numbers than you: twitter: 3-6 seconds. This mastodon post ~1s
    • _2d30 4y ago
      Nothing less important than the comparison to Twitter here.
      • okamiueru 4y ago
        Hm, how so? What would be a better comparison be, for discussing the relative page load times of a mastodon page be, in your opinion? If X product exists. Then Y comes and is largely considered an alternative to X, and someone says Y is slow. Does it not make sense to compare it to X?
        • _2d30 4y ago
          Because Twitter and Mastodon are interchangeable here. If this same person posted the original content as a Tweet and there were a pattern of users posting Twitter links to boost Twitter engagement, the problem would stand.
          • 4y ago
• 77pt77 4y ago
  Also don't forget the gold(en) CDs. And the 32 bit CDs. (They were remastered at 32 bits). Audiophiles will eat anything. It's a status game.
• kebman 4y ago
  At HiFi Klubbben in Lillehammer, Norway some guy tried to sell me gold cables, because the sound quality becomes so much better with them. I worked as an audio engineer at the time. I just smiled at him politely, then I left the store. Next time I came around, he tried to sell me this CD player with a huge brick in it. "You get much better sound quality when the player has a brick in it," he told me. So I answered, "For sure! It makes the sound a lot more stable! Badum, tsch!"
  • SomeoneOnTheWeb 4y ago
    To be honest, cable quality do absolutely make a difference. Buying a crappy RCA cable from a third-party seller on Amazon vs a good quality one (we're speaking maybe $5-$10 from a reputable brand) will make a huge difference. Above that price tag sure, nothing changes (except if you have very long distances e.g. >5m cables where it could matter IIRC)
    • pelorat 4y ago
      I recently bought a HDMI 2.1 from amazon for $13 (5ft) that I hooked up to one of the newer Chromecasts. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09LYMRWLX https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09LYMRWLX It had serious problems (randomly stuttering image and failure to transmit HDR). The signal test in the TV confirmed it had to be replaced. Chinese no-name junk I guess. 4K 10-bit at 60FPS was at the limit for the cable, even though it said it could do 8K. Clearly not. Went with this instead, no problems since. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YWBVRVH https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08YWBVRVH So yep, even in the digital world there can be a big difference in cable quality, especially at the very highest transmission speeds.
      • Tor3 4y ago
        Definitely, yes.. particularly with HDMI cables and similarly complicated tech. But the problem is then that they basically don't work properly. The problem with audiophiles is that they think that these kinds of digital problems are like analog problems and will first affect details in the music.. like e.g. a low-pass filter would. Making the bass sound less crisp, or the violin muddy. While in reality, if you were connected directly to a partially working digital transmission system with no error correction or buffering, you would instead experience the equivalent of yanking out the cable of an electric guitar without first muting the amp input. Or the sound of throwing your hifi amp through the nearest glass door. Or at least horrible squeaks. Not a subtle degradation of sound quality for sure.
• the_af 4y ago
  I usually don't mind how memcpy sounds, but the flavor is awful. Especially if there is bit rot.
• lukepighetti 4y ago
  Many moons ago I found myself making parts for the audiophile community. Eventually I got in to making complete headphones. Designing and building audiophile headphones is a multi-modal skill that is very engaging. I was pretty good at it. But I had to exit the audiophile world because it was too crazy for me. I would get messages from customers that were completely insane. And if you say "yo, that's insane" word gets out and it damages your brand. So you're rewarded for perpetuating these weird myths. If I could build these really cool headphones without having to deal with audiophiles, I probably would. It was challenging and a lot of fun, and I was pretty good at it.
  • wkdneidbwf 4y ago
    consider doing an AMA on reddit! i’d love to hear all about this
• kazinator 4y ago
  The claim made is within the realm of plausibility. A memcpy call in a playback loop was replaced with an optimized version, and this made some harsh audio artifact ("edge") go away. The poster showed the code and what was done to it. The code does strange things, though, like wait for a Win32 event on every iteration. And not only one time; there are multiple calls like this: WaitForSingleObject(hNeedDataEvent, INFINITE); Is that an auto-reset event that some other thread has to be constantly banging on to keep the loop going? its odd since the code has supposedly buffered the entire file of samples; so you'd think it would just be iterating over that buffer in some chunks and shoving them into some pipe/device. There is also a puzzling ZeroMemory call.
• tsegratis 4y ago
  Retro computing just had greater empathy Running programs on modern hardware; the explosion of complexity increases the amount of impure copper; pushing you away from direct and immediate feedback, and towards an abstraction soup that makes my eyes water How can we still trust programs running on todays hardware? That is why I've ported quake to run on an abacus
• it 4y ago
  I had no idea memcpy was lossy. Astonished.
• dvirsky 4y ago
  This is totally ridiculous, but a lot of time there is a grain of truth behind some of these myths, that is just diluted by retelling from non technical people. I had a serious musician once tell me that if I rip a recording from a DAT tape to my disk it won't sound as good. It sounded about as stupid as this this claim, but the basis of it was conversion between 48khz and 44.1khz sample rates. I also remember a friend of mine learning graphic design many years ago, who told me that their teacher told the class Photoshop on Mac produces higher quality images than on a PC. I don't remember what the basis of that was.
  • MrStonedOne 4y ago
    [dead]
  • rasz 4y ago
    >conversion between 48khz and 44.1khz sample rates valid argument in late nineties when cards did it really badly.
    • dvirsky 4y ago
      Probably, this conversation took place about 10-15 years ago but I'm guessing these myths persist for years so it might be a relic of the 90s.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• azubinski 4y ago
  Of course, there is a lot of funny "audiophile" stuff. Including very funny ones who use these unfortunates to show own intelligence or even (save us, Lord) wisdom. For the most part, funny audiophiles are completely harmless old people (see photos from any audience of audiophiles), such children who are constantly waiting for Santa with new beautiful toys. Of course, the music player will sound better if you're not a programmer but managed to build some hell of a source code in a dubious version of Visual Studio :) This is an old story about expectations. If something subjective is expected, it can always be achieved. Yes, I know vinyl doesn't sound better. I have much better sound sources. But I like my turntable and I like the process of getting ready to listen to vinyl. It gives me pleasure, and I like turntables as very beautiful engineering structures, and no psychopathic fighter with Santa Claus will deprive me of this pleasure :)