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Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

naughtycomputer.uk

41–50 of 429 posts

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#41

Heh, I’ve had a Bluetooth set of earbuds from JBL for about 2 years and they’ve been providing great sound (and are really convenient as I work like an auto electrician a lot of the time and I can leave my phone in the toolbox). A good alternative perhaps besides building a portable amplifier.

I bought a Bluetooth speaker a couple of months ago. Sounds great, but if I watch a video, the sound is lagging. I thought about to get Bluetooth headphones, but after that experience I think, I just stay with cables.

Explanation of why there is lag when watching video and listening over Bluetooth and how it is taken care of:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYW4J6FyyZU

To ensure (kind of) that your BT speaker/headphones will be able to work with video, check they implement "AptX low latency".

However, as they mention in the video, there are lots of ways this could fail: application playback issue, BT transmitter issue (although anything from the last few years should be able to handle this properly) or receiver issue (the most likely cause in older or cheap speakers).

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#42
post #40

Interesting point buried in here: since Android is open source, you could go in and fix the bug, but then because you're not running an official Android version you'd lose access to the Play Store and other services. Something's not really free if there's a penalty for doing it. Since freedom to run a modified version of software yourself is one of the four freedoms of free software, this highlights the difference be…

You can run the play store just fine on lineageos, which has modifications and isn't official. https://www.google.com/android/uncertified/ just need to register here as of earlier this year apparently

Apparently Play Store is unaffected, but some other apps - banking, streaming, even Pokemon Go - will break. And your warranty (including hardware) is voided. So I stand corrected, and thank you, but I don't think the correction affects the main point.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#43
post #9
post #2

> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read: > If any…

This guy is both smart and stupid at the same time.

That made my day!

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#44

Boy does this person need to look at the ‘good headphone’ market. I paid (a very reasonable) $2k for a set of reference headphones and a suitable amp/DAC to drive them. I could have spent a lot more. It is hard to drive a set of headphones with enough SQ to make them worthwhile. You cannot plug a set of headphones into an Android phone and expect anything good to happen. And lots of DAPs suffer from software problems…

I used to plug my AKG k702s (which are maybe not 'audiophile' $2k headphones, but are good enough) into a pixel 1 without any issues.

Alas after an 'upgrade' to a pixel 3 after I crushed the first one against the deck while sailing, I had to buy a bluetooth dac and that doesn't seem to do as well.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#46
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can run the play store just fine on lineageos, which has modifications and isn't official. https://www.google.com/android/uncertified/ just need to register here as of earlier this year apparently

Apparently Play Store is unaffected, but some other apps - banking, streaming, even Pokemon Go - will break. And your warranty (including hardware) is voided. So I stand corrected, and thank you, but I don't think the correction affects the main point.

Those apps are making a conscious decision to exclude phones/roms not certified by Google. That's their choice.

Generally hardware warranty will remain if it's purely a hardware issue - you can always flash back anyway.

Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions. If app vendors choose to discriminate against those versions that doesn't make it unfree any more than software supporting windows and not Linux makes Linux unfree

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#48
post #19
post #2

> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read: > If any…

Same thoughts except with my Android phone and Bose QC. Wireless, noise cancellation and never any problems with explosive noise. Also it is indeed 2018 so what's he doing with ripped CD's, there are a lot of streaming services out there right now.

Many people perfer to own instead of lease, even in 2018.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#49

I'm super curious… a. What in these files triggers the explosion of noise (and whether other people have run into this or the author would mind sharing a representative problem file). b. Whether an output attenuator (or "resistor") would work to quiet the noise (edit: the hiss, not the explosion) without a powered circuit.

a: I had a similar issue on my Sandisk player and it was due to corrupt data on the SD. Formatting it then copying back the files from a backup solved the problem. the author's problem is different though; it seems his player doesn't like some files although they appear to be undamaged. I agree it's probably a bug in the decoder.

b: a voltage divider would attenuate everything so the listener would end up raising the volume and the noise explosions would be unaffected. In my experience those noises are much louder than the music even at its louder peak, so a limiter would work better. A limiter is a circuit which let the audio signal unaffected up to a given level, then if necessary it starts limiting it to keep it to maximum that level. The limiter should be set up to trigger only with levels above the maximum original audio signal, so that although the noises wouldn't disappear, they would be confined to a lower level with the original signal left untouched.

Re: Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?

#50
post #2

> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read: > If any…

Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage. Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium . And then catches shit for being pretentious. So, let's step through that once more: - garbage is normal - functional and interoperable is premium - premium is prete…

The Apple premium has gone so damn high though.

I got my first Mac when the Mac mini came up. It was a little more expensive than same-generation PCs but besides being OSX it was a PowerPC that never made any fan noise, and was small. I've subsequently had three Macbooks and two iPhones - but I can't afford this somewhat-better-somewhat-more-expensive racket anymore. Prices have risen too much; to boot, the quality gulf between Macs and garden-variety Dells and Acers has pretty much crashed. Macbooks have had multiple problematic years now; iPhones did away with headphone jacks; and OSX peaked at 10.6.8, where it indeed was five years into the future - but Windows 10 is decent now and even has the whole Unix toolkit with WSL.

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