Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

naughtycomputer.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 429 posts

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

#51

Post by thanatropism »

kgwxd wrote: post #48
Nashooo wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is fine if you're "stuck in your ways" (I want to use a less loaded term but can't come up with one) and have a collection of music you enjoy and have stopped keeping up.

It's not even keeping up with current music; as I go from my early to my late 30s, the pop landscape has gone from parseable to alien. But there's still good music coming out and older good music you didn't know about. Hell, I only discovered the gigantic German composer Paul Hindemith six months ago.

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

#52

Post by agumonkey »

ignoreInstinct wrote: post #8
baxtr wrote: 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…

Can I blame free market dynamics ? It's been a quite obvious trend since the 2000s. Audio components became commodities to reach bottom prices, no more middle class, good functionality is high end (which is now pushed to higher prices with branding like beats or devialet)

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

#53

Post by dep_b »

danw1979 wrote: post #18
ignoreInstinct wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not everything at the I recently got a £20 Havit Bluetooth receiver and connected it to a pair of £70 Sony MDR-7506 headphones. The receiver drives the headphones louder and with less distortion than my iPhone can, and the battery lasts for a few days of intermittent listening. Whatever loss is introduced by the aptX coding is invisible to my ears. I'm blown away by how good this setup is given the price and there sh…

The DA on older iPhones is mediocre, the DA in those lightning converters is even worse. Try a separate DA if you really want quality audio output.

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

#54

Post by ikeboy »

temp0876456 wrote: post #14

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…

Is it just me, or are $10 branded earbuds just fine for music?

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

#56

Post by oDot »

notacoward wrote: post #42
ikeboy wrote: 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.

Some Android OEMs will allow you to unlock the bootloader and makes changes to the OS without any warranty problems.

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

#57

Post by klipt »

agumonkey wrote: post #52
ignoreInstinct wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Can I blame free market dynamics ? It's been a quite obvious trend since the 2000s. Audio components became commodities to reach bottom prices, no more middle class, good functionality is high end (which is now pushed to higher prices with branding like beats or devialet)

Is Beats even good functionality? I heard they used mediocre components and spent most of their money on marketing...

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

#58

Post by notacoward »

ikeboy wrote: post #46
notacoward wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwar…

> Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions.

I don't think that's enough to make it free software, and "free software in the sense..." is nonsensical. Free software would guarantee the continuance of that freedom. Since that guarantee doesn't exist, Google could place limitations on the Play Store at any time. The fact that they haven't makes the example less clear, but it doesn't make Android free software. Even Google doesn't claim that it is.

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

#59

Post by klipt »

benj111 wrote: post #11
saagarjha wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this especially humorous given this: > Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.

Is it actually open source in that you can actually submit a fix though? Judging by the awful 'random' I would suspect not. (I havent used it I some time so it might have been fixed, but you used to get clustering of tracks from a given album)

Submit patches: https://source.android.com/setup/contribute/submit-patches

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

#60

Post by ikeboy »

notacoward wrote: post #58
ikeboy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwar…

> Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions. I don't think that's enough to make it free software, and "free software in the sense..." is nonsensical. Free software would guarantee the continuance of that freedom. Since that guarantee doesn't exist, Google could place limitations on the Play Store at any time. The fact that they haven't makes the example less clear, but…

Play store isn't part of Android. Even if it was only available to specific phones, that wouldn't make Android unfree.

Play store isn't open source at all.

Amazon was able to take Android and put it on their extremely popular devices with 0 support from Google, no play store. That's what I call freedom

Post reply on HN