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

We need physical audio kill switches

rubenerd.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 443 posts

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#101

Post by rytis »

brandon272 wrote: post #29

I let my spouse, who likes the novelty of a touchscreen, talk me into a Whirlpool oven a couple years ago that is controlled by touchscreen. I had no idea it was possible to hate an oven so much. The only saving grace is that the stovetop elements are still controlled by knobs.

Few years ago we were in the market for a new oven. The main criteria was the absence of any "smarts". Ended up getting Smeg gas oven (SF6341GVX if anyone's interested). So simple, so intuitive, and most importantly, so dumb that there's very few thing that could go wrong with it.

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#102

Post by teknologist »

paulcole wrote: post #89
vidanay wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our old office had a $5k fancy coffee maker with touch screen. Nobody knew what the hell all the icons meant, and nobody cleaned the milk siphon so it went moldy and was thrown out after two weeks. I insisted that we keep the old Bunn that had an advanced UI with a red illuminated On-Off switch. Six months later, it was the only one coffee maker still in use.

> Nobody knew what the hell all the icons meant, and nobody cleaned the milk siphon so it went moldy and was thrown out after two weeks. What’s the takeaway here? A group of spoiled adults couldn’t be bothered to read an instruction manual or clean something?

Fancy touch screens could potentially tell users how/when to clean stuff?

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#103

Post by ionwake »

paulcole wrote: post #89
vidanay wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our old office had a $5k fancy coffee maker with touch screen. Nobody knew what the hell all the icons meant, and nobody cleaned the milk siphon so it went moldy and was thrown out after two weeks. I insisted that we keep the old Bunn that had an advanced UI with a red illuminated On-Off switch. Six months later, it was the only one coffee maker still in use.

> Nobody knew what the hell all the icons meant, and nobody cleaned the milk siphon so it went moldy and was thrown out after two weeks. What’s the takeaway here? A group of spoiled adults couldn’t be bothered to read an instruction manual or clean something?

That the UI was shit and you’re the kind of person who endorses it.

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#104

Post by numpad0 »

formerly_proven wrote: post #26
amiga-workbench wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Topping DAC/Amp has an optical rotary encoder for volume control and it is awful, it will randomly jump 10x the amount of steps you have rotated it, sometimes even in the opposite direction. There's something to be said for a good old fashioned potentiometer.

It's kinda ridiculous that seemingly three quarters of the people who write graycode decoder firmware get it wrong, despite the correct methods being publicly available with sample code since 15-20 years at least.

Sounds like clicky 3-pin A/B bi-phase type though. I’ve done stupid things and tried to read that and two buttons with single ADC. That jumped around when Vref fluctuates.

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#105

Post by allenu »

I don't know what I'd do if my iPhone didn't have physical volume buttons. When I watch videos on YouTube now, as soon as an ad starts playing, I just mute it by using the volume button and look away for a few seconds as I can't stand ads (sadly there isn't a dedicated mute button).

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#106

Post by pwg »

puranjay wrote: post #45
brandon272 wrote: post #29

I let my spouse, who likes the novelty of a touchscreen, talk me into a Whirlpool oven a couple years ago that is controlled by touchscreen. I had no idea it was possible to hate an oven so much. The only saving grace is that the stovetop elements are still controlled by knobs.

My office (well, former office) used to have a touchscreen coffee maker. Why does a coffee maker even need a touchscreen? There are literally three options!

> Why does a coffee maker even need a touchscreen?

To differentiate it from the previous model so as to sell new product when the previous model that has already been purchased is continuing to perform its designated task. I.e., to convince some segment of their customer base to throw out the working model from last year in exchange for the "new fancy" model of this year.

Humans are often fooled way too many times by "oohhh... shiny and new and different... gotta have that...".

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#107

Post by appleiigs »

threatofrain wrote: post #51
onion-soup wrote: post #11

Nothing will ever come close to convenience of analogue volume knobs. They give both immediate action and infinite granular control. Same goes for kitchen stoves. All the modern touch controls with step-based control is the absolute nightmare in terms of UI.

I don’t trust anyone except Apple to do touch screen experiences well.

Go buy a fancy Apple Watch and jump in a pool. You won't be able to start or stop the timer with wet fingers.

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#109

Post by toxicFork »

Jon_Lowtek wrote: post #77

>> "mute buttons on keyboards shouldn’t need to go to software, they should immediately send a signal to the motherboard’s DAC" I don't have a lot of knowledge about this, but audio is often streamed via USB or HDMI or Bluetooth or WLAN to another device, like headphones, an AV receiver, or wireless speakers and then uses the DAC in that device. So the blog posts wish would result in the mute button not doing anythin…

I was working as a video/audio engineer for a bit and for Bluetooth especially the latency is insane. For some devices it was around half a second. I don't think I have seen two seconds though. The main thing was that we would need to stream the audio first, wait for the latency duration, then start showing video frames. If you press pause, the audio would stop after that much time. I haven't checked if some devices allowed sending of start/stop commands through less latency methods though. My job was mainly concerned with playback.

Re: We need physical audio kill switches

#110

Post by atoav »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #17
onion-soup wrote: post #11

Nothing will ever come close to convenience of analogue volume knobs. They give both immediate action and infinite granular control. Same goes for kitchen stoves. All the modern touch controls with step-based control is the absolute nightmare in terms of UI.

With one specific exception - stereo volume knobs often - virtually always - suffer from stereo imbalance, where the volume of the left and right channels are slightly different. Some high-end amplifiers offer a relay based volume system where the knob simply switches resistors in and out of the audio path using relays to adjust the volume, and although this does result in "steps" of volume, it does mean the stereo b…

There are even more solutions to this problem:

One is to convert the L/R Stereo image to Mid/Side do the volume control and then convert it back to L/R. This way any mismatch of the potentiometer would translate into a change in stereo width instead of shifting the image around.

Another solution would be to use one pot as a voltage divider, buffer that voltage and use the resulting current to drive two Blackmer VCA ICs (e.g. THAT2181).

Post reply on HN