I have a pair of powered studio monitors (Mackie MR5), and I completely relate to this problem. Many PCs and phones will emit an audible hissing noise while plugged in. I've tested on a dozen different devices, with integrated and external DACs, five hundred dollar sound cards, massively shielded cables, practically every modern OS you can name, tweaking every audio setting exposed to me. The only devices that work p…
Did you do a blind test on spotify's high quality vs lossless?
At least with 320mp3s I could only get it right with certain songs and not too consistently. I'd say my room treatment has a far bigger impact.
(but regarding hardware I'm totally with you and haven't found the source of my rather high noise floor either)
Hate doesn't work, I'll give you that. I'm hopeful that OP takes your feedback :) But you're very mistaken about the "disregard for convenience". Almost every human strives for convenience, even the folks you are talking about, they spend a lot of time writing automation scripts to make their work convenient. Just like you advice, please be open-minded to the idea that for some people convenience is just one checkbox…
> Just like you advice, please be open-minded to the idea that for some people convenience is just one checkbox on the list Noted, agreed and upvoted. :) From my experience with these folks, when I complained about the 1st gen Chromecast I had 3 or so years ago, one of them casually told me "Oh, just buy an RPi and install KODI on it, also make sure your TV and HDMI cable support HDMI-CEC. You should be sorted pretty…
You're not wrong, but just remember that there are people in this world looking at you and all of us "nerdy engineers" exactly the same way.
Not that we need to stress about that, I mean we all look like douchebags to somebody. I just think you might be jumping the gun with character judgements such as them not respecting your free time. The guy who told you to spend 3 hours tinkering with your Chromecast would probably love working on that project himself, and assumed you might enjoy it too. He might have been trying to help you take your mind off of the stresses he know you were dealing with.
Pro tip: There are enough PCB shops now that small designs like this can just be done in free EDA software in minutes, 10 boards in your hand with a stencil 9 real days later for less than $50 shipped. The stencil lets you paste the board all at once, you place parts and hit it with a heat gun until everything sets. For audio stuff you get the advantage of keeping everything nice and tight with lower noise. I barely…
I used to use BatchPCB and LOVED the service. When Sparkfun shut it down I couldn't find any decent alternatives and pretty much just quit making boards. It looks like Osh Park has a pretty decent offering these days, but I'm curious who you're using with 9 day turnaround time? That's amazing!
JlcPCB do a similar batch-of-customer-boards thing and deliver in about a week from China to California
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 t…
From what I can tell, the streaming catalog is still a small subset of the CD catalog, so if you're into discovering new music, you're restricting yourself by only using the former.
You are restricting yourself to a subset by streaming, but that subset probably contains more music than you could listen to in a lifetime anyways.
I'm a bit flabbergasted by all the "wow this person just wasted all his free time fixing a nonexistent problem instead of just getting an iPhone" on Hacker News of all places. Yes there's an ideological bent to the whole exercise but that's precisely the kind of passion you need to deep dive into creating your own audio device over a minor annoyance. Yes it's clunky and expensive to maintain but you have to admire th…
If he had just said "I want a phone I can tinker with, so the iPhone doesn't fit the bill", no one would object. The problem is his claim that Apple is a symbol of pretentiousness and ignorance, simply because it provides convenience and out-of-the-box usability without needing to know how it works. Most people don't tinker for a living / hobby, and thus don't have the luxury of spending large amounts of their valuable time figuring out how the device works and tinkering with it.
Not understanding this actually a sign of pretentiousness and ignorance.
Can anyone comment on what's going on with the ground channel in the circuit here? Seems like you would want to tie the input ground to the virtual ground between the two 9Vs and then maybe buffer the output ground, but this circuit doesn't do that - it just replicates the L/R chains twice between grounds. Also, what's the point of adding the two 9Vs and then splitting them again with the two 1k resistors? Why not ju…
Doesn't make any sense to me either. He's burning 2ma for no reason.
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 $10 branded earbuds just fine for music?
Did you try any more expensive ones? If not, how can you compare? I don't think you know what you're missing. From my experience, you realize how bad cheap ones are is when you try something better. For example, I thought AKG Y20 sounded pretty good before getting the chinese TFZ series 2, which are just so much 'more'. I am aware that those tfz are also lower range (~45$ on aliexpress). I also own a pair of Beyer DT770 80ohm 100 eur headphones and those are something else, esp when I had a Focusrite Saffire to drive them. Of course there is a price point after which it gets harder to notice improvement. But only after trying out different types and price points do you start to understand what sounds good and what you actually like. For me, all cheaper ones just sound muddy or like the sound is trapped in some box or tin, and I also notice sounds and instruments missing in songs I know well.
Everyone seems to be seeing this as an Android vs. iOS debate, but I see it as a smartphone vs. dedicated device debate. If you're serious enough about photography, you don't complain about your smartphone camera's limitations, you get yourself a DSLR and multiple lenses. So if you're this serious about music, why not get a dedicated device? Look at what companies like HiBy and Hidizs are doing. I have, and my ears h…
No, it's an issue with the hardware manufacturers making things hard to hack on in the name of security. It's lazy and not well thought out... though I guess it beats having your CC numbers stolen all the time for now?
I have a pair of powered studio monitors (Mackie MR5), and I completely relate to this problem. Many PCs and phones will emit an audible hissing noise while plugged in. I've tested on a dozen different devices, with integrated and external DACs, five hundred dollar sound cards, massively shielded cables, practically every modern OS you can name, tweaking every audio setting exposed to me. The only devices that work p…
>exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN. I don't think there's anything modern about this.
Yeah, there is no standard for high level APIs provided by operating systems. Everybody has always just done their own stuff. And it's not like the Open Source world is any better, with Linux and the BSDs coming up with their own solutions for common issues.
There's POSIX which is pretty great because it at least allows to write somewhat portable networking & io code. But for pretty much anything else, you'll have to write separate code for every OS, and it's always been the case.