11 ms·

>How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? There are many things like this. Coffee people, for instance, who will straig

>How can audiophiles continue to exist with knowledge being so easily available? There are many things like this. Coffee people, for instance, who will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool" 5 times or 10 times, and who will post "recipes" for soaking ground up beans in hot water. Just let people have their thing. They like it.

i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago
Oh no, you’ve started something now.
unmole 4y ago
> Just let people have their thing. They like it. What if my thing is making fun of such people?
rjh29 4y ago
> Just let people have their thing. They like it. Could say that about your comment, right? Let the coffee fans enjoy the process of improving their coffee. Unless they start gatekeeping shit or insulting my (very pedestrian) taste in coffee, I don't care.
- thepasswordis 4y ago
  That is exactly my point and is exactly what I want you to say about my comment.
Forgeties79 4y ago
In addition to just letting people have their fun (so long as it stays fun/isn’t just a method of gatekeeping/isn’t just picking fights or whatever) I think we should all remember to exercise a little humility and consider that maybe we are wrong about what matters or doesn’t. Sometimes things look a little ridiculous from the outside, but once it’s explained or you do it yourself, it makes a little more sense. For instance, there was a time where if you had told me that the number one thing that would improve my coffee was the purchasing of a conical burr grinder, I would’ve raised an eyebrow. Now? I find it is almost more important than the beans I buy. Even my first cheap $50 one elevated my coffee to a whole new level. Despite years of people complementing the quality of my cold brew, I still have to insist that they buy even a cheap burr before anything else. And every single one of them that has followed my advice has thanked me later! All because someone else told me first and I said “screw it why not?” Anyway, the point of the above is not to brag about my coffee at home (which I’m sure isn’t even that impressive). It’s mostly to illustrate that sometimes what sounds ridiculous does actually matter. We just don’t know it.
- selimthegrim 4y ago
  Is there a good coffee supply store in NOLA you recommend?
  - Forgeties79 4y ago
    Most “nice” coffee shops will carry a chemX or toddy systems of some sort. French press too. If you’re looking for a cold brew solution just go online to filtron and get their toddy. It’s affordable and really gets the job done. You also can’t wrong going with an aero press. They’re like $30 and super easy to clean. Only good for making one cup of coffee at a time though. If you’re looking for beans, mammoth espresso and cherry coffee roasters are both incredible.
    - selimthegrim 4y ago
      Agree on Cherry 100%, Mammoth has good coffee and I have seen them as guest roaster at places in Baton Rouge too but their shop could be cleaner
mbo 4y ago
Absurd comparison - channeling is a known physical phenomenon that occurs when you fail to declump the grounds. It causes the high pressure water to find the path of least resistance through the basket and leaves the majority of the grounds underextracted.
tysam_and 4y ago
Hey, balancing extraction is hard! You can't necessarily make a good puck without declumping it first, which helps the process a bit! I've also seen a number of people without just also alternatively thunk it to even things out a bit before making the puck. There are some silly things and not all are required -- I don't do espresso or distribute my grounds, for example. I just Chemex with too many beans and let the flood of taste flow. And the little things really do make a difference (proper filter to catch the oils, blooming, light pour on the water, burr grinder (!!!!), freshness of the grind and the right age for the beans, etc). I'm not the snobbiest of snobs but I can tell! And at a certain point, its like looking at a painting. Even the littlest 'off' brushstroke can ruin a whole piece of something like the Mona Lisa. A lot of roasting software is computerized these days too, so there is some precision in the process and in very particular roasts from certain boutique manufacturers these days. It's pretty nifty stuff. If you want to nerd snipe yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t8DZ2yHs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t8DZ2yHs8 So at that level, basically we are super far up the log curve of diminishing returns. But then again, if your coffee is an experience, pulling away some not-insignificant-% of those last notes of bitterness is really and truly helpful. On the audio side -- Yes, I'm an audiophile, but a very practical one, and I try to stay by the very old adage (as it were) that music enjoyment is 90% our emotional state and 10% equipment. That said, I can tell the difference pretty clearly between 44khz and 88khz on TIDAL -- it's really not that hard for me personally, at least. Both sound great but the 44khz feels like it's projected onto an awkward hexagon, whereas the 88khz is very semicircular and doesn't 'feel' unnatural. I really have to be into the music to be noticing though. It really is worth it for that 'art museum' experience (and yes, I did check to see if I could tell 24 bit 44khz and 24 bit 88khz apart. It's a very very clear difference to me! Above it is harder and I really can't say tbh). I do have a good DAC and lower mid-tier headphones (well-worn 598s, well over a decade at this point! :D got my originals somewhere between 7th and 10th grade. man, these have been around a while, dang). So anyways I know what I like and I get to have access to an experience that I haven't been able to before. It makes me want to cry, some songs are so beautiful. I'll go downtown to live jazz just to vibe if I can, that's the best. But here, I get to get a little bit closer to that experience, and I can tell when I'm not there. The emotional side can cover the gap, but...man. The little things do matter. So that's why I think maybe it's not so silly that some people distribute their coffee grounds. If you're interested, there's this extremely practical bloke named James Hoffman who uses it as part of his core routine, he has some phenomenal coffee videos as well. Here's a great video where he discusses some of the nuances of the different methods here, and I think he has a pretty great, balanced opinion on it! (Usually I defer to him, tbh. He does refer to at least one method as 'incremental gains'): https://youtu.be/xb3IxAr4RCo?t=239 https://youtu.be/xb3IxAr4RCo?t=239 Hope that was interesting to you. This was interesting to write, many thanks for reading and greatly appreciated for whoever stuck it out to this point! :D <3 :)))) :D
jay_kyburz 4y ago
My wife keeps asking me if I prefer Twining English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast tea. I opened both boxed and had two cups side by side. They are exactly the same.
- mnw21cam 4y ago
  My wife will insist that one cup of tea I bring her is amazing, but another one is disgusting. However, they're all from the same box of teabags, made the same way, and the biggest correlation as far as I can tell is how long she has left it to go cold.
ben7799 4y ago
Also that they can tell the difference between stirring with an expensive tool vs a toothpick or needle. Sure stirring grounds to break up clumps seems like a good idea. But it's mind boggling someone managed to name the technique after themselves and get everyone to refer to it by an acronym with their name in it.
- NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
  It's the scientific method, but without any rigor on the quality of experiments. Subjectivity will take you to ridiculous places. It's exactly the same root cause as the fringe audiophile stuff: the dictionary definition of pseudoscience.
- whitemary 4y ago
  What is the technique name you're referring to?
  - Sebb767 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure he's talking about Weiss Distribution Technique/Weiss Distribution Tools (WDT).
    - tremon 4y ago
      Would that be the same Weiss as this $10k+ DAC? https://weiss.ch/products/highend-hifi/dac502/ https://weiss.ch/products/highend-hifi/dac502/
    - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
      Well isn't that wonderfully pretentious.
      - enthdegree 4y ago
        similarly awful is "RDT" (Ross Droplet Technique: spray water on your beans before grinding to reduce clumping)
buildbot 4y ago
Not saying that you could tell the difference, but as a random physical process I am sure there is some vague difference in stirring vs. not. So at least there is no immediately obvious falsehood. Claiming that bits are not bits is on a flat earth level stupid.
- c22 4y ago
  Don't be silly, bits are ultimately conveyed via analog electrical impulses. Speakers consist of air compressors under electro-magnetic control. The analog emissions of a bit-carrier have as much impact on the acoustic element as an extra stir of the spoon does on the molecular flavour profile of the coffee.
  - p_j_w 4y ago
    > bits are ultimately conveyed via analog electrical impulses Yes, but unless the analog error reaches some certain threshold, the 0 will still read as a 0 and the 1 will still read as a 1. The bit is still a bit. The bits only cease to be bits after they reach the DAC.
    - c22 4y ago
      The bit is still a bit, but if the bit is generated at the beginning of a cycle it might have more voltage than at the end of the cycle and this difference could be discernable in the electromagnetic environment around the processor, which might effect the actual movement of the electro-acoustical element after the decoding by the DAC! It's at least as likely as the coffee scenario.
      - e44858 4y ago
        In some cheap DACs with bad isolation you might even be able to hear those bits as a hissing noise.
      - p_j_w 4y ago
        >It's at least as likely as the coffee scenario. I would bet money on a blind taste test on a well pulled shot of espresso vs just dumping some water on some ground beans would show a substantially bigger difference than these people using an audiophile grade network switch or a different version of memcpy. The two aren't even in the same league and it requires some real magical thinking to come to any other conclusion.
Shengbo 4y ago
> will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool" I could probably distribute the coffee by simply shaking and tapping the portafilter on the counter, but stirring it makes it more even and I'm less likely to make a mess that way.
temp2022account 4y ago
> Just let people have their thing. They like it. Smile & wave boys!
worksonmine 4y ago
It's probably the same conditioning that Pavlov discovered. The clinking metal creates anticipation leading to a real and measurable difference in satisfaction. The brain is interesting that way. Who am I to judge? I will fight you over spaces instead of tabs and don't you dare remove my trailing commas. If it's not supported by the language I'll write a transpiler and add it to the CI flow just before deploy, because git history.
_the_inflator 4y ago
And we didn’t talk about wine yet…
- Tor3 4y ago
  I used to be a member of an amateur wine tasting group.. and someone figured we should serve some snacks while we were testing the wine. Turns out that with cheese most red wines taste almost the same, unless they've gone bad. Or at least you certainly won't find much difference between cheap and expensive wines.
- iconosynclast 4y ago
  Wine is interesting because, while there is definitely some pretentious nonsense going on, the other extreme is hilarious as well. There are people out there insisting that it's impossible to differentiate red from white wine by blind taste test.
  - QuercusMax 4y ago
    ...except that there have been studies that show exactly that: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
    - codewarrior128 4y ago
      Interesting, but one has to ask, were they testing the hypothesis or the participants? The participants were describes as both "students" and a "panel of experts".
      - roelschroeven 4y ago
        "54 oenology (wine science) students". Them studying wine science is presumably what makes them experts.
    - iconosynclast 4y ago
smmnyc 4y ago
Off topic but I bet you could tell the difference between an espresso shot pulled after stirring the grounds to ensure even distribution vs one that hasn't been messed with. I'm not saying you can tell the difference between stirring with a toothpick vs stirring with tiny metal tines. You can actually observe a difference in how the water flows through the grounds, you can measure how much coffee has been extracted into the water with a refractometer, and you can do a blind taste test and identify which is which. If the grounds are not evenly distributed, you get channels where the water passes through under high pressure, and this over extracts those grounds making the shot taste extremely bitter, and other grinds are left untouched or under extracted. I was very skeptical of this until I observed it myself.
- ggreer 4y ago
  I just tried this and could not tell the difference. It seems like how one packed the grounds would matter more. If it’s slightly uneven, one side will get more water pushed through it.
  - atchoo 4y ago
    It is about improving the packing of grounds by breaking up the subtle clumping that occurs during grinding to reduce channeling where water finds an easy path so part of the puck is over extracted and other parts are under extracted. If you already had perfectly even flow, it's not going to improve anything. That might be true with great equipment or a very forgiving bean. It might also be true if WDT isn't enough to fix your channelling alone so there is more left to fix. This leads you to watching slow-mos of your pulls and inspecting pucks :)
- mattgreenrocks 4y ago
  Most people don’t realize that making espresso is quite complex due to seemingly minute factors like these. When you’re pushing water through grounds at very high pressure, there are a lot of things that have to line up to get a great shot.
  - 4y ago
jovial_cavalier 4y ago
I will defend the coffee people. Distribution tools are for espresso, not pour over or immersion brewed coffee. In espresso, you have extremely high pressure, so if there is a density differential in the coffee cake, you will get most of the water flowing through the spot that has the lowest density, and the rest of the cake will not be visited, making for a weaker drink. Also, the "recipes" are usually just a ratio of coffee grounds to boiling water by mass, a rough idea of how fine to grind, and a brew time. If you take these parameters and vary them by any reasonable amount, you will definitely taste the difference. Overall, it's not an apt analogy. There is no "fidelity" for coffee like there is for audio. There is a quantitative loss function you can define for audio quality - just the sound you're trying to replicate versus the sound that your system actually ends up generating. For example, no human ear can hear frequencies above ~22kHz, meaning anything over the normal ~44kHz sample rate provably makes no difference.
- SoftAnnaLee 4y ago
  Agreeing with this, and likewise I wanna suggest for some coffee drinkers who are skeptical on "coffee nerds" to try a coffee cupping (basically a form of coffee tasting, like wine tasting, where different beans are prepared identically in a particular method good for producing a very strong and flavour-filled coffee). When you have different beans, especially from different climates, regions, and preparation methods, and taste them side-by-side. You'll notice characteristics that you would not otherwise notice drinking from day-to-day; and the ability to taste and emphasize those characteristics is why coffee nerds use different techniques and forms of equipment. It's easy enough to make a quality coffee that is tasty (a sub-$10 of supermarket ground coffee, a sub-$10 french press, and a pot of boiling water can produce a good coffee). But to emphasize things like fruity and floral notes requires extracting coffee in particular ways to bring them to the forefront; like ensuring that coffee is constantly exposed to fresh unsaturated water, for particular amount of time, with a certain surface-area, within a narrow temperature range.
- an-unknown 4y ago
  > No human ear can hear frequencies above ~22kHz, meaning anything over the normal ~44kHz sample rate provably makes no difference. The real fun is when "audiophiles" give you music with high sample rate (e.g. 384kHz) and it sounds objectively worse on a standard playback device because the playback device only supports e.g. 48kHz natively and has to resample internally, with a resampling algorithm that's worse than what you would get if the audio was resampled with a high quality resampling algorithm and directly stored as e.g. 48kHz.
KptMarchewa 4y ago
There are actually some counterintuitive things in coffee making process, which affect people's ability to discern between what matters and what not.
burnished 4y ago
Not to defend stir guy, but small changes to the brewing process do change what gets extracted. Chemistry is wild stuff, but if you just pour warm water over beans you found and call it coffee I can see why you wouldn't necessarily appreciate that.
lofatdairy 4y ago
Reminds me of the invention of Fisher's exact test: >The example is loosely based on an event in Fisher's life. The lady in question, Muriel Bristol, claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup. Her future husband, William Roach, suggested that Fisher give her eight cups, four of each variety, in random order. One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct (in fact all eight), but just by chance. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea
- sterlind 4y ago
  > David Salsburg reports that a colleague of Fisher, H. Fairfield Smith, revealed that in the actual experiment the lady succeeded in identifying all eight cups correctly.[6][7] interestingly.
  - buildbot 4y ago
    I would imagine that unless you controlled the specific volume of milk, there may be systemic bias towards more or less milk depending on when it is added.
  - mrguyorama 4y ago
    Matt parker showed that whether you add the milk first or last affects the temperature and temperature over time profile of the tea. That could have an effect on the taste.
    - Espressosaurus 4y ago
      I'm not surprised someone ran an experiment. That's exactly what I thought about when I read the scenario. The level of extraction and the taste of what's extracted will vary depending on the temperature, and adding the milk first lowers the temperature of the fluid the tea is steeping in. For the undiscriminating palate (mine?) you probably wouldn't notice a difference. But someone who pays attention could, especially if they have a particular tea they're drinking regularly.
mixedCase 4y ago
The thing you're laughing at is how you deal with coffee grinders that spit out clumpy coffee. If you don't break the clumps, the high pressure water from an espresso machine will distribute unevenly throughout the puck (choosing to go through the path of least resistance) and will be the difference between drinking a notoriously-finnicky-to-get-right light roast and battery acid. It's just physics, and something you can check for yourself in 5 minutes or by asking any chemical/food engineer who knows the basics of extraction.
- SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
  You have to break up the clumps. Doing it with a specially marketed metal clump breaker vs a metal spoon, a fork, a wooden spoon, etc doesn't matter. That is what they were making fun of AFAICT, not breaking up clumps in general.
  - dagw 4y ago
    Sure you can use anything, but using a tool designed for the job is generally quicker, easier and makes less of a mess.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
matwood 4y ago
> There are many things like this. With religion being the biggest of all. Humans are predisposed to believe in something even if it makes no sense.
- ihatepython 4y ago
  Climate change falls in this category as well
arethuza 4y ago
I've become fascinated with James Hoffman's channel on all things coffee related - I have no desire to buy fancy coffee, grinders, coffee machines, kettles etc. and I'm perfectly happy with my cheap Sainsbury's coffee and a John Lewis machine that probably cost £60.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  My most upsetting opinion on James is that he calls a $60 hand grinder an "entry level grinder", when you can buy an identical hand mill burr grinder for like $15
  - valvar 4y ago
    Which grinders with identical burr sets are you referring to?
  - Toutouxc 4y ago
    I use a Hario Skerton Pro (roughly $60 where I live), considered an okay starter choice, and it's absolutely an entry level grinder. I had to mod it quite a bit to get something resembling consistency. Where can you get something that grinds almost as not-bad as this for $15?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

i-use-nixos-btw 4y ago

Oh no, you’ve started something now.

unmole 4y ago

> Just let people have their thing. They like it. What if my thing is making fun of such people?

rjh29 4y ago

> Just let people have their thing. They like it. Could say that about your comment, right? Let the coffee fans enjoy the process of improving their coffee. Unless they start gatekeeping shit or insulting my (very pedestrian) taste in coffee, I don't care.

thepasswordis 4y ago
That is exactly my point and is exactly what I want you to say about my comment.

Forgeties79 4y ago

In addition to just letting people have their fun (so long as it stays fun/isn’t just a method of gatekeeping/isn’t just picking fights or whatever) I think we should all remember to exercise a little humility and consider that maybe we are wrong about what matters or doesn’t. Sometimes things look a little ridiculous from the outside, but once it’s explained or you do it yourself, it makes a little more sense. For instance, there was a time where if you had told me that the number one thing that would improve my coffee was the purchasing of a conical burr grinder, I would’ve raised an eyebrow. Now? I find it is almost more important than the beans I buy. Even my first cheap $50 one elevated my coffee to a whole new level. Despite years of people complementing the quality of my cold brew, I still have to insist that they buy even a cheap burr before anything else. And every single one of them that has followed my advice has thanked me later! All because someone else told me first and I said “screw it why not?” Anyway, the point of the above is not to brag about my coffee at home (which I’m sure isn’t even that impressive). It’s mostly to illustrate that sometimes what sounds ridiculous does actually matter. We just don’t know it.

selimthegrim 4y ago
Is there a good coffee supply store in NOLA you recommend?
- Forgeties79 4y ago
  Most “nice” coffee shops will carry a chemX or toddy systems of some sort. French press too. If you’re looking for a cold brew solution just go online to filtron and get their toddy. It’s affordable and really gets the job done. You also can’t wrong going with an aero press. They’re like $30 and super easy to clean. Only good for making one cup of coffee at a time though. If you’re looking for beans, mammoth espresso and cherry coffee roasters are both incredible.
  - selimthegrim 4y ago
    Agree on Cherry 100%, Mammoth has good coffee and I have seen them as guest roaster at places in Baton Rouge too but their shop could be cleaner

mbo 4y ago

Absurd comparison - channeling is a known physical phenomenon that occurs when you fail to declump the grounds. It causes the high pressure water to find the path of least resistance through the basket and leaves the majority of the grounds underextracted.

tysam_and 4y ago

Hey, balancing extraction is hard! You can't necessarily make a good puck without declumping it first, which helps the process a bit! I've also seen a number of people without just also alternatively thunk it to even things out a bit before making the puck. There are some silly things and not all are required -- I don't do espresso or distribute my grounds, for example. I just Chemex with too many beans and let the flood of taste flow. And the little things really do make a difference (proper filter to catch the oils, blooming, light pour on the water, burr grinder (!!!!), freshness of the grind and the right age for the beans, etc). I'm not the snobbiest of snobs but I can tell! And at a certain point, its like looking at a painting. Even the littlest 'off' brushstroke can ruin a whole piece of something like the Mona Lisa. A lot of roasting software is computerized these days too, so there is some precision in the process and in very particular roasts from certain boutique manufacturers these days. It's pretty nifty stuff. If you want to nerd snipe yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t8DZ2yHs8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0t8DZ2yHs8 So at that level, basically we are super far up the log curve of diminishing returns. But then again, if your coffee is an experience, pulling away some not-insignificant-% of those last notes of bitterness is really and truly helpful. On the audio side -- Yes, I'm an audiophile, but a very practical one, and I try to stay by the very old adage (as it were) that music enjoyment is 90% our emotional state and 10% equipment. That said, I can tell the difference pretty clearly between 44khz and 88khz on TIDAL -- it's really not that hard for me personally, at least. Both sound great but the 44khz feels like it's projected onto an awkward hexagon, whereas the 88khz is very semicircular and doesn't 'feel' unnatural. I really have to be into the music to be noticing though. It really is worth it for that 'art museum' experience (and yes, I did check to see if I could tell 24 bit 44khz and 24 bit 88khz apart. It's a very very clear difference to me! Above it is harder and I really can't say tbh). I do have a good DAC and lower mid-tier headphones (well-worn 598s, well over a decade at this point! :D got my originals somewhere between 7th and 10th grade. man, these have been around a while, dang). So anyways I know what I like and I get to have access to an experience that I haven't been able to before. It makes me want to cry, some songs are so beautiful. I'll go downtown to live jazz just to vibe if I can, that's the best. But here, I get to get a little bit closer to that experience, and I can tell when I'm not there. The emotional side can cover the gap, but...man. The little things do matter. So that's why I think maybe it's not so silly that some people distribute their coffee grounds. If you're interested, there's this extremely practical bloke named James Hoffman who uses it as part of his core routine, he has some phenomenal coffee videos as well. Here's a great video where he discusses some of the nuances of the different methods here, and I think he has a pretty great, balanced opinion on it! (Usually I defer to him, tbh. He does refer to at least one method as 'incremental gains'): https://youtu.be/xb3IxAr4RCo?t=239 https://youtu.be/xb3IxAr4RCo?t=239 Hope that was interesting to you. This was interesting to write, many thanks for reading and greatly appreciated for whoever stuck it out to this point! :D <3 :)))) :D

jay_kyburz 4y ago

My wife keeps asking me if I prefer Twining English Breakfast or Irish Breakfast tea. I opened both boxed and had two cups side by side. They are exactly the same.

mnw21cam 4y ago
My wife will insist that one cup of tea I bring her is amazing, but another one is disgusting. However, they're all from the same box of teabags, made the same way, and the biggest correlation as far as I can tell is how long she has left it to go cold.

ben7799 4y ago

Also that they can tell the difference between stirring with an expensive tool vs a toothpick or needle. Sure stirring grounds to break up clumps seems like a good idea. But it's mind boggling someone managed to name the technique after themselves and get everyone to refer to it by an acronym with their name in it.

NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
It's the scientific method, but without any rigor on the quality of experiments. Subjectivity will take you to ridiculous places. It's exactly the same root cause as the fringe audiophile stuff: the dictionary definition of pseudoscience.
whitemary 4y ago
What is the technique name you're referring to?
- Sebb767 4y ago
  I'm pretty sure he's talking about Weiss Distribution Technique/Weiss Distribution Tools (WDT).
  - tremon 4y ago
    Would that be the same Weiss as this $10k+ DAC? https://weiss.ch/products/highend-hifi/dac502/ https://weiss.ch/products/highend-hifi/dac502/
  - SketchySeaBeast 4y ago
    Well isn't that wonderfully pretentious.
    - enthdegree 4y ago
      similarly awful is "RDT" (Ross Droplet Technique: spray water on your beans before grinding to reduce clumping)

buildbot 4y ago

Not saying that you could tell the difference, but as a random physical process I am sure there is some vague difference in stirring vs. not. So at least there is no immediately obvious falsehood. Claiming that bits are not bits is on a flat earth level stupid.

c22 4y ago
Don't be silly, bits are ultimately conveyed via analog electrical impulses. Speakers consist of air compressors under electro-magnetic control. The analog emissions of a bit-carrier have as much impact on the acoustic element as an extra stir of the spoon does on the molecular flavour profile of the coffee.
- p_j_w 4y ago
  > bits are ultimately conveyed via analog electrical impulses Yes, but unless the analog error reaches some certain threshold, the 0 will still read as a 0 and the 1 will still read as a 1. The bit is still a bit. The bits only cease to be bits after they reach the DAC.
  - c22 4y ago
    The bit is still a bit, but if the bit is generated at the beginning of a cycle it might have more voltage than at the end of the cycle and this difference could be discernable in the electromagnetic environment around the processor, which might effect the actual movement of the electro-acoustical element after the decoding by the DAC! It's at least as likely as the coffee scenario.
    - e44858 4y ago
      In some cheap DACs with bad isolation you might even be able to hear those bits as a hissing noise.
    - p_j_w 4y ago
      >It's at least as likely as the coffee scenario. I would bet money on a blind taste test on a well pulled shot of espresso vs just dumping some water on some ground beans would show a substantially bigger difference than these people using an audiophile grade network switch or a different version of memcpy. The two aren't even in the same league and it requires some real magical thinking to come to any other conclusion.

Shengbo 4y ago

> will straight faced insist to you that they can tell the difference between stirring the coffee grounds with a tiny metal "distribution tool" I could probably distribute the coffee by simply shaking and tapping the portafilter on the counter, but stirring it makes it more even and I'm less likely to make a mess that way.

temp2022account 4y ago

> Just let people have their thing. They like it. Smile & wave boys!

worksonmine 4y ago

It's probably the same conditioning that Pavlov discovered. The clinking metal creates anticipation leading to a real and measurable difference in satisfaction. The brain is interesting that way. Who am I to judge? I will fight you over spaces instead of tabs and don't you dare remove my trailing commas. If it's not supported by the language I'll write a transpiler and add it to the CI flow just before deploy, because git history.

_the_inflator 4y ago

And we didn’t talk about wine yet…

Tor3 4y ago
I used to be a member of an amateur wine tasting group.. and someone figured we should serve some snacks while we were testing the wine. Turns out that with cheese most red wines taste almost the same, unless they've gone bad. Or at least you certainly won't find much difference between cheap and expensive wines.
iconosynclast 4y ago
Wine is interesting because, while there is definitely some pretentious nonsense going on, the other extreme is hilarious as well. There are people out there insisting that it's impossible to differentiate red from white wine by blind taste test.
- QuercusMax 4y ago
  ...except that there have been studies that show exactly that: https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infam...
  - codewarrior128 4y ago
    Interesting, but one has to ask, were they testing the hypothesis or the participants? The participants were describes as both "students" and a "panel of experts".
    - roelschroeven 4y ago
      "54 oenology (wine science) students". Them studying wine science is presumably what makes them experts.
  - iconosynclast 4y ago

smmnyc 4y ago

Off topic but I bet you could tell the difference between an espresso shot pulled after stirring the grounds to ensure even distribution vs one that hasn't been messed with. I'm not saying you can tell the difference between stirring with a toothpick vs stirring with tiny metal tines. You can actually observe a difference in how the water flows through the grounds, you can measure how much coffee has been extracted into the water with a refractometer, and you can do a blind taste test and identify which is which. If the grounds are not evenly distributed, you get channels where the water passes through under high pressure, and this over extracts those grounds making the shot taste extremely bitter, and other grinds are left untouched or under extracted. I was very skeptical of this until I observed it myself.

ggreer 4y ago
I just tried this and could not tell the difference. It seems like how one packed the grounds would matter more. If it’s slightly uneven, one side will get more water pushed through it.
- atchoo 4y ago
  It is about improving the packing of grounds by breaking up the subtle clumping that occurs during grinding to reduce channeling where water finds an easy path so part of the puck is over extracted and other parts are under extracted. If you already had perfectly even flow, it's not going to improve anything. That might be true with great equipment or a very forgiving bean. It might also be true if WDT isn't enough to fix your channelling alone so there is more left to fix. This leads you to watching slow-mos of your pulls and inspecting pucks :)
mattgreenrocks 4y ago
Most people don’t realize that making espresso is quite complex due to seemingly minute factors like these. When you’re pushing water through grounds at very high pressure, there are a lot of things that have to line up to get a great shot.
- 4y ago

jovial_cavalier 4y ago

I will defend the coffee people. Distribution tools are for espresso, not pour over or immersion brewed coffee. In espresso, you have extremely high pressure, so if there is a density differential in the coffee cake, you will get most of the water flowing through the spot that has the lowest density, and the rest of the cake will not be visited, making for a weaker drink. Also, the "recipes" are usually just a ratio of coffee grounds to boiling water by mass, a rough idea of how fine to grind, and a brew time. If you take these parameters and vary them by any reasonable amount, you will definitely taste the difference. Overall, it's not an apt analogy. There is no "fidelity" for coffee like there is for audio. There is a quantitative loss function you can define for audio quality - just the sound you're trying to replicate versus the sound that your system actually ends up generating. For example, no human ear can hear frequencies above ~22kHz, meaning anything over the normal ~44kHz sample rate provably makes no difference.

SoftAnnaLee 4y ago
Agreeing with this, and likewise I wanna suggest for some coffee drinkers who are skeptical on "coffee nerds" to try a coffee cupping (basically a form of coffee tasting, like wine tasting, where different beans are prepared identically in a particular method good for producing a very strong and flavour-filled coffee). When you have different beans, especially from different climates, regions, and preparation methods, and taste them side-by-side. You'll notice characteristics that you would not otherwise notice drinking from day-to-day; and the ability to taste and emphasize those characteristics is why coffee nerds use different techniques and forms of equipment. It's easy enough to make a quality coffee that is tasty (a sub-$10 of supermarket ground coffee, a sub-$10 french press, and a pot of boiling water can produce a good coffee). But to emphasize things like fruity and floral notes requires extracting coffee in particular ways to bring them to the forefront; like ensuring that coffee is constantly exposed to fresh unsaturated water, for particular amount of time, with a certain surface-area, within a narrow temperature range.
an-unknown 4y ago
> No human ear can hear frequencies above ~22kHz, meaning anything over the normal ~44kHz sample rate provably makes no difference. The real fun is when "audiophiles" give you music with high sample rate (e.g. 384kHz) and it sounds objectively worse on a standard playback device because the playback device only supports e.g. 48kHz natively and has to resample internally, with a resampling algorithm that's worse than what you would get if the audio was resampled with a high quality resampling algorithm and directly stored as e.g. 48kHz.

KptMarchewa 4y ago

There are actually some counterintuitive things in coffee making process, which affect people's ability to discern between what matters and what not.

burnished 4y ago

Not to defend stir guy, but small changes to the brewing process do change what gets extracted. Chemistry is wild stuff, but if you just pour warm water over beans you found and call it coffee I can see why you wouldn't necessarily appreciate that.

lofatdairy 4y ago

Reminds me of the invention of Fisher's exact test: >The example is loosely based on an event in Fisher's life. The lady in question, Muriel Bristol, claimed to be able to tell whether the tea or the milk was added first to a cup. Her future husband, William Roach, suggested that Fisher give her eight cups, four of each variety, in random order. One could then ask what the probability was for her getting the specific number of cups she identified correct (in fact all eight), but just by chance. From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_tasting_tea

sterlind 4y ago
> David Salsburg reports that a colleague of Fisher, H. Fairfield Smith, revealed that in the actual experiment the lady succeeded in identifying all eight cups correctly.[6][7] interestingly.
- buildbot 4y ago
  I would imagine that unless you controlled the specific volume of milk, there may be systemic bias towards more or less milk depending on when it is added.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  Matt parker showed that whether you add the milk first or last affects the temperature and temperature over time profile of the tea. That could have an effect on the taste.
  - Espressosaurus 4y ago
    I'm not surprised someone ran an experiment. That's exactly what I thought about when I read the scenario. The level of extraction and the taste of what's extracted will vary depending on the temperature, and adding the milk first lowers the temperature of the fluid the tea is steeping in. For the undiscriminating palate (mine?) you probably wouldn't notice a difference. But someone who pays attention could, especially if they have a particular tea they're drinking regularly.

mixedCase 4y ago

The thing you're laughing at is how you deal with coffee grinders that spit out clumpy coffee. If you don't break the clumps, the high pressure water from an espresso machine will distribute unevenly throughout the puck (choosing to go through the path of least resistance) and will be the difference between drinking a notoriously-finnicky-to-get-right light roast and battery acid. It's just physics, and something you can check for yourself in 5 minutes or by asking any chemical/food engineer who knows the basics of extraction.

SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
You have to break up the clumps. Doing it with a specially marketed metal clump breaker vs a metal spoon, a fork, a wooden spoon, etc doesn't matter. That is what they were making fun of AFAICT, not breaking up clumps in general.
- dagw 4y ago
  Sure you can use anything, but using a tool designed for the job is generally quicker, easier and makes less of a mess.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

matwood 4y ago

> There are many things like this. With religion being the biggest of all. Humans are predisposed to believe in something even if it makes no sense.

ihatepython 4y ago
Climate change falls in this category as well

arethuza 4y ago

I've become fascinated with James Hoffman's channel on all things coffee related - I have no desire to buy fancy coffee, grinders, coffee machines, kettles etc. and I'm perfectly happy with my cheap Sainsbury's coffee and a John Lewis machine that probably cost £60.

mrguyorama 4y ago
My most upsetting opinion on James is that he calls a $60 hand grinder an "entry level grinder", when you can buy an identical hand mill burr grinder for like $15
- valvar 4y ago
  Which grinders with identical burr sets are you referring to?
- Toutouxc 4y ago
  I use a Hario Skerton Pro (roughly $60 where I live), considered an okay starter choice, and it's absolutely an entry level grinder. I had to mod it quite a bit to get something resembling consistency. Where can you get something that grinds almost as not-bad as this for $15?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]