I'm wholly convinced that the computing world is, in general, regressing. Audio has been a huge loser in this fight. Today, many modern phones don't ship with 3.5mm jacks. If you want lossless audio, you literally can't find it, even though there's zero reason companies like Spotify couldn't stream it when available (even if it costs extra) (Spotify literally asks artists to upload the masters when they publish, they have that data and then throw it away). Many artists don't even publish physical CDs anymore, so its a game of luck if they have a website where I can buy the FLACs/ALACs. And if you want the actual files to, you know, live your life in a completely legal way, those are gone.
Its more than just audio. Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies, and have them taken away at any time. eBooks are the same and always have been; the world's oldest technology has been coopted by companies like Amazon to increase revenue, and there's practically zero competition. Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere, eating up every conceivable megabyte of memory available literally only because developers are lazy, and now you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy. Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
Somehow we took systems and workflows that were amazing throughout the 90s-00s and, in the course of a decade, completely ruined them.
Sure, Google can revoke my access to a movie at any time but I can watch on any of my devices and I dont have to worry about finding it in stock at the local store.
I can carry literally thousands of books with me in a device smaller than a paperback.
I can’t stream lossless music from Spotify but I can stream high enough quality that most people can’t tell the difference. Not to mention you get access to pretty much every song you want for 10$ a month.
Electron apps and the web are replacing desktop apps but they are also making it easier than ever to make a cross platform app, meaning we will get apps that we otherwise wouldn’t. This is especially good for Linux, which would be much further behind macOS and windows without popular electron/web apps available like slack, Spotify, etc.
It does nobody any good to have 1000 books on a single device if the whole thing is subject to revocation, especially when you paid full retail price for the privilege of being allowed to read it. This is regression.
Previously you paid your $10 and received a paper book. You could read it, re-read it, lend it, sell it, or burn it for warmth. You owned it for as long as you kept it dehydrated. The $15 you now pay per book gets you one of these rights, temporarily.
Whether most people can tell the difference between 320k and lossless is irrelevant-- the retail price is the same for a technically inferior product. This is a regression. And again, for your money, you own nothing.
And for apps, the cross-platform compatibility comes at the expense of consumers, who have to continuously purchase and maintain newer computer equipment to do the same damn word processing, email and shopping tasks that used to be possible on a 486. And of course, since everything is a subscription, it's a double punishment for the consumer-- they have to maintain hardware to run software they don't own.
The entire premise of modern technology has become a new vector to extract the most money from the consumer while delivering the least amount of value, power or control.
I'm not going full RMS here and saying DRM is evil. I'm just saying that: I should be able to loan digital content to other people. I shouldn't be afraid that Apple will, one day, just say "I know you really enjoyed spending $200 on all that media, but its all gone. See ya." Maybe that means they need to offer downloads of the content, or maybe it means we need legislation which says we can sue the hell out of them when they try it. I have no preference. But consumers need more protection.
Also its worth clarifying: I don't hold subscription services to the same standards. That's a different business model.
This isn’t some “normies”/“audiophiles” thing. 256kbps mp3 is acoustically transparent to human beings in ideal listening situations.
The bad rap mp3 got was from 128kbps that was more common pre-broadband.
Also, using lossy compressed sources (even 256-320kbps) in derivative works (eg dj mixes, samples, et c) that will be later lossy recompressed (podcast, satellite radio, spotify, et c) is a good way to make your production sound crappy, which is why lossless is important. Any audiophile who tells you they need lossless for final listening simply hasn’t tested it. It is religion, not engineering.
If you listen to mainstream shit where the artist does not have enough control of their work to opt out of the scam that is the pay scale for streaming music.
I have had to resort to ripping vinyl and CDs from my collection to get digital versions of tracks that Spotify, Apple Music, and Google Music do not have. If I had to do it all over again, I'd keep the vinyl and CDs in the box and just grab the music from somewhere like REDacted instead.
The option is not well advertised. After you purchase a digital download, there's a tiny arrow next to the 'download' link that allows you to switch the download to flac.
I always download flac and consequently spend a lot of money at Bandcamp!
I love Bandcamp.
They also have an app that offers streaming and a bunch of social features so you can make a page for yourself where you show off the music you like and make playlists and interact with others. It's probably a great feature, but the thing that really sets Bandcamp apart is that you can just ignore the fuck out of it and pay money for some files that you can download using a browser and put on your own drives and devices.
This is a separate issue though from the usually high output noise floor and poor isolation from other components, e.g. many complaints about many makes and models where CPU/GPU or even disk activity will induce audible pulse noises in the heaphone outputs or speakers.
Those External Audio Cards receive the signal in digital form, thus free of any noise they could pick up in the process. These are decoded inside the external DAC which then feeds audio to the speakers. since this part of the signal path is analog, any interference picked up by these cables is gonna appear on the speakers, which is why the good gear usually supports BALANCED SIGNALS so that the speaker can reference the signal and weed out noises added while in-transit.
My gear is a pair of YAMAHA HS8 speakers and a YAMAHA AG06 external audio card. Both support Balanced audio so that's what I'm using regarding cables between the audio card and the speakers.
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)
That said, switching between Spotify and Tidal on the same track, I hear a pretty big difference. The lossless music has a depth that just isn't there on the compressed streams
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...
The difference is usually very, very subtle (my description for it is "soundstage differences", like slight differences in audio imaging) and if you are in the situation you are 99% of the time where you are not in a critical listening environment, you probably won't be able to even hear this. But if you are absolutely gung-ho about preserving the full spectrum of the recording, MP3 won't work. It's not an archival format by design.
> we're puking web and electron everywhere ... literally only because developers are lazy
No. This is done because developers are slow and expensive. Reusing most of your web app as a desktop app, same for every platform, saves a lot of money to companies.
> you're consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy
No. This is because companies want recurring revenue, not one-time sale. It's vastly easier to get you into ("only $3.99/mo" vs "only $199.95 for lifetime of use"), and it keeps dripping every month.
There's not a bit of laziness here, only business shrewdness.
Let's say Dow Chemical wants to start dumping chemical by-products into the Mississippi River. Thankfully, we have the EPA and strict laws which make this impossible. The only other force which would stop them from doing this is consumer outrage, which only works in some situations and even then tends to be very fleeting.
Now, let's say Slack wants to build their app in Electron. By doing so, they are collectively forcing their 8M users to burn more CPU cycles and purchase machines with larger memory footprints, all of which literally waste resources and cause pollution. Not to the same degree as the previous example, but the comparison is very valid.
What audio could you get lossless before that you now can't that you're claiming there has been a regression?
> Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies
You can buy most movies on physical disks. The old physical copy ownership option still exists. There has been no regression, just new options you personally don't like.
> Applications suck; we're puking web and electron everywhere
Clearly the market has decided that the heavier versions are just as fine. Also, in pretty much every case there's also lightweight non-electron alternative. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
> Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron/RN.
That is absolutely your own fault if your OS restricts FS access. Applications are just as unportable as they have been. There has been no regression, just new options you don't like.
You're just looking at the past like it was some gold standard and a wonderland of software, development and user freedom (of choice or of software), it's ridiculous.
Compact discs. You should look them up. :-) Lots of music out these days that you can't find on a CD.
[1] https://www.hhb.co.uk/files/product/file/user_manual_2013112...
The quality of streaming services is also a far cry from BDs.
https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/203055911-High-F...
While I agree with your general thoughts, I have to disagree with this particular point. In my opinion there's never been a better time for lossless audio. My collection is made of digital, lossless material only. I buy a lot of music - about 5-10 releases a week - and I have no problem at all finding everthing I want in a lossless format. I understand that this may differ depending on what you listen to and ironically obscure, niche music might be better served by lossles music stores, but I just wanted to provid a different perspective.
If I don't what I'm looking for at Bandcamp, Boomkat, Bleep, Qobuz or various label stores chances are that it's a physical-only release, in which case ripping it myself is always an option.
If you like electronic music, Bandcamp and Beatport (thankfully) sell stuff in lossless. Bandcamp is arguably the best: largest cut for the artist; large range of format wth no extra cost for lossless.
> literally only because developers are lazy
I think management has a lot to do with this, or priorities in general because at the end of the day working with electron and web everywhere is on a superficial level just as difficult as working with other languages-- it's a matter of training and hiring the right people for the right jobs.
These ports pick up some lint and dust after a few months and it packs in pretty hard. Eventually it will give you connection issues.
I don't think there's anything modern about this.
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.
Motherboard audio and soundcards are just terrible.
Sure but that doesn't mean the default Apple audio jack is high quality.
I have a cheap USB DAC (bought from monoprice) to power a set of Beyerdynamic headphones. The DAC beat a macbook I was using for work hands down on quality of sound.
Specifically, I noted the DAC had better definition of sound meaning that I could pick out details better. It also had better spatial attributes as well, meaning that I could pick out instruments in 3d space.
To be fair, doing a D to A conversion in a laptop is hard, and while Apple does it relatively better than average, it's still probably better off done outside of the macbook itself.
* the DAC and AMP were Schiit Magni/Modi
If almost every device has poor audio quality, maybe its not the device but the headphones that are your problem?
Neutron Player on Android > USB OTG cable > HiFimeDIY USB noise isolator > HiFimeDIY USB DAC > Beyerdynamic DT880
Although I don't use all that any longer, for convenience sake I just use a wireless Audiotechnica ATH-DSR9BT which supports aptX-HD and produces "good enough" quality with no hissing/noise.
I can plug them into an analog output device and they work perfectly. I'm talking about digital, and the only digital devices that work are a Vizio TV (possibly others, didn't really test against TVs), iPhones, iPads, and Macs.
This has always been the case, even when you "owned" the physical media. Owning a CD, DVD or even vinyl copy of audio/video did not mean you owned the content. It was always just a delivery mechanism. It always came with legal wording to state you didn't own the content, and were only allowed to listen/view in a private setting. You were not allowed to take the music and play it in public, you were not allowed to show the video to large groups of people (including in your own home).
Your OS is the same way. You don't own the software. You only pay for a license granting use of it on one computer.
The last few decades have shown a preference for accessibility over "quality":
- concord high speed luxury air travel >> cheap but slow mass air travel
- pentium >> netbooks >> raspberry pi
- professional international newsrooms >> amateur blogs
- CDs >> MP3s >> streaming
- steel cars >> plastic and aluminum
- handcrafted oak furniture >> ikea
- durable hand-me-downs >> dispensable chinese products
- etc.
The trade-off is generally positive in my opinion.
I'm not saying open source is bad and everyone should prefer free software. It's just a good example of the difference between the two in practice rather than in some debate about licenses and the abstract principles behind them.
https://www.google.com/android/uncertified/ just need to register here as of earlier this year apparently
It's not GNU/Linux that's not free, but it makes it hard to use a GNU/Linux system that is free.
I'd say it's a bit of a different situation, since the two are not being designed to work together and aren't even being developed by the same people. If the Ubuntu developers made your proprietary app key to the useful running of the system, which is the more exact analogy, then I'd say yeah, they would have made it non-free.
on the later you submit patches, they will be included in the next 2 to 3 versions of public release (if they dont't add any feature that impacts google's ad bottom line, for example, adding any sort of referrer control to chrome), then you have to hope that in those 2-3 version cycle your device is still supported, now you just have to wait for the convenient over the ait update provided by your telco or phone manufacturer (in most cases you actually need both entities to take part)
Why not?
I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read:
> If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.
Well, at least it usually simply works.
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 pretentious
- also, add $1,000 for the name brand
We can have nice things because that's for babies, and also too overtly glamorous and bougie.
I just want shit that works out of the box sometimes. I also don't need X-Files alien logos and red backlit Hunt For Red October themes everywhere. And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware. (Cough! Lenovo! [0] Cough! Intel Management Engine! [1] Cough!)
[0] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Security-Malware/Malware-preloa...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Securi...
Will someone other than Apple please step up to the fucking plate and not just dump trash onto the shelves at Best Buy?
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 shouldn't be any dependency on an expensive source device to run it.
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.
If the standard is garbage, then functionality is premium.
You act like Apple devices do not contain IME?
> 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.
Followed by:
> APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS
So iPhone users don’t know how their phone works, but Android is awesome because it’s open source and the freedom you get with that but it’s too complicated to learn how it works.
Okay.
Even if you don't make a choice, having the option to is still empowering, because the absence of a choice tells you someone else made it for you.
For many, that could be the same choice they would have made. That doesn't give any condolence to those who would have made a different one, but weren't given the option.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, but in such case he might as well drop the complaining tone.
This also leads into his statement. I own an iPhone and I kinda know what's going on beneath the surface. I can open up disassembled binaries and anyone can look at the headers from google within seconds.
That in turn would lead into that 99.9% of Android users have no knowledge of how Android works, so his whole statement is kind of odd.
Is this guy for real? I don’t know the nitty gritty of how most of the things I use work, I’m only concerned that they work. Sounds like sour grapes.
Which, as you allude to, is not guaranteed no matter what it says on the tin. Samsung is my go-to for that point. Not that features were half-assed, or kinda worked. No, having an icon on a screen does not count when what backs that icon doesn’t even pretend to do what it says. (To be specific, their fitness stuff was literally laughable in how broken or, lets be honest, how unimplemented it was.)
I think what gets missed is that the “Apple tax” (the “M$” for the 2000s, indicating the writer is to be ignored) is actually the “not a broken POS, and does what you thought it would do” convenience fee. Oh, sure, there’s Pixel and the like if you don’t like Apple. Last I looked, you’ll still pay the “Apple tax” even if it goes to Google.
And I swear, the next neckbeard ranting about how people don’t how their tech works either better take public transit to work, be ready to rattle off the Otto cycle used by their ICE car, or STFU.
At least, it sounds like he just likes being contrarian.
Android or Linux is not helping him much in this case, that's for sure.
> 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.
Would I be able to fix just the media player service, and make my smartphone use the fixed version? Without flashing it with a brand new OS, losing data, warranty, OEM drivers, and ability to receive security updates? Didn't think so. Android "open source" delivers only half of the expected value.
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)
The HW-solution is a nice challenge, but I am sure, there are simpler ways to solve it.
On a sidenote: I would be surprised if the issue he has is systemic too Android devices in general. I am sure others would have noticed it if was that widespread that it occurred on all devices.
Except newer iPhones requiring a dongle to use headphones.
I have not had any of the issues you are complaining about in Logic Pro X, FWIW, on multiple laptops and hardware audio interfaces over ~6 years of use.
This is inaccurate. Neutron music player bypasses Android's Media Player APIs and talks directly to your DAC and plays music without resampling (if the DAC supports it). Never had any audio popping or explosions using Neutron, and I've tried it on 6 different devices so far without any issues (LG G3, Nexus 6P, Nextbit Robin, OnePlus 3, Note 8, OnePlus 6). My headphones are a Beyerdynamic DT880.
HN is mostly engineering types, the poster clearly has that mindset, we should be filing or looking for a proper bug report for this instead of crafting hacks or talking about alternative products altogether right off the bat.
As if Google even considers reading any bug reports ... :(
https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-black
Edit: would work out of the box with the Eee PC he has as well.
You've already got a real split supply with 2x 9v batteries. If you use that instead of deriving a virtual ground, you will save 9mA of quiescent current.
How purposeful is that whole low side duplicated circuit and why? [0] It seems like since you're using batteries, hooking signal ground directly to your ground and driving the output single ended would work fine. Or if you want to work towards being able to AC-power, then a differential input op-amp topology and still drive the output single ended.
Isn't there a vibrant cottage industry of external USB DACs and headphone amplifiers and whatnot? I'm more of a receiver+speakers type of a person, but I often see newly designed stuff for headphones.
[0] Driving both sides does get you the ability to swing the output a full 36 volts. But given that your goal is to cut the signal by 11 and also that by mixing both channels you can't actually do that lest you get crosstalk in the form of clipping, I don't think this is your goal!
Binding the central line between the two 9V batteries to GND would give you the situation you describe, indeed you could then drop the resistors but now you have a fairly high risk of ending up with an asymmetric supply voltage, which means one side will clip earlier than the other.
If the batteries have gone that far south, they need replacing.
The liberated op-amp could be used to provide a stiff voltage reference from a 100K:100K voltage divider!
Of course, all that is unnecessary.
The virtual ground has a further flaw: It's a DC ground only. This designer forgot to AC-bypass those 1K resistors, or at least one of them.
Technically, also your THD+N adds in parallel instead of being chained, although I'm not sure there will be a discernable difference unless you uave some kind of phase delay issue (in which case you should fix that first...)
This. All of this. The author calls apples products pretentious and berates anyone who owns one for not knowing how their phone works. You know what? I don't give a flying fk about knowing how my phone works. I have a million other things to worry about in this world. It doesn't make me pretentious to spend extra to have an experience I don't have to think about.
Have you tried testing this very same thing on an iPhone? Maybe it even has the same bug!
“If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.”
Also, by the way, aren't you doing something similar? Exaggerating about GP's regard for android/apple; GP simply said they would rather pay a tax than go through what OP did. Am I mistaken? Though yes, in this case the apple tax may not even have helped.
I say this as having owned 3 Macs for the last 10 years. 4-8 years ago, the gap between Apple and the rest was so stark, it seemed paying for a premium Apple product was a no-brainer.
Even Linus got a Macbook air because the hardware was such a leap ahead.
Not only has the gap closed, Apple have been left behind, with inferior build quality in key areas (keyboards). This has coincided with raising prices further.
The 'Apple tax' is now a real phenomenon, not just the price of premium.
For me, at the moment, in my personal life Apple makes more sense. I wish it made more sense at work because Windows 10 drives me nearly crazy, but it doesn't, so I stick with Microsoft's offering for now.
Being a golden cage, I would not argue that it is better software.
I know it does work.
Would I prefer to have a more open phone and computer? Sure. At the cost of having to ever tinker with it? No.
I just switched my home built raspberry + HiFiBerry with expensive speakers to a simple closed Sonos system for the exact same problem the author had with linux, audio hardware, noise. Having something that just works and I don’t have to care how is a blessing and in the future that is where I’ll put my money. Ignorance is bliss.
For the same reason I don't want to carry a big heavy DSLR around with me, because there's a limited number of devices I want to lug around.
I ditched the DSLR years ago (yes, it took great photos, but not enough to make it worth the hassle). Though I still bring a pocket sized camera with me when I travel because my smartphone still can't compete with a big sensor and an optical zoom.
While a dedicated MP3 player is small (to be honest, I didn't even know they were still made), it's just one more thing to keep track of and keep charged up.
Here's a nice long article on the details: https://www.computeraudiophile.com/ca/bits-and-bytes/an-audi...
The fact of the matter is that most small devices have audio packages that simply are not up to the task, and that includes dedicated music players.
Not understanding this actually a sign of pretentiousness and ignorance.
Anyway, if the problem becomes big enough, some individual/organization will see the market opportunity somewhere, hopefully.
I know several very smart and creative hardware technicians and system administrators. I admire them. I truly do. They are more independently thinking than most other programmers I know, are much more resistant to trends and fashion in technology, and rarely complain about the tech they must use. Throw Python, Perl, PHP, bash and what not at them, they can and will curse but will get the job done every time.
In that regard, they are hard-working and resourceful. And I have a lot of respect for them.
That being said, I cannot help but notice things common among all of those that I know or used to know:
- Apple hate without any regard for the advantages it gives you.
- They use 80-100% of their leisure time to tinker and work outside their main work hours. One of them recently got divorced by his wife. She said the guy barely spent any time with her. I don't know if their relationship wasn't sour before but still, it's partially indicative.
- Obliviousness how Android is not the end-all-be-all of free software -- because it's not; Android is PARTIALLY open-source and comes with a lot of strings attached. Flash a ROM and your warranty is voided. But to them, if you can tinker with your tech then you absolutely, factually, practically, and for all intents and purposes, are using free tech. Details like warranties and hours-long sessions to make basic functions work again be damned in the process.
- Complete disregard for convenience and utter lack of respect for others' time. As mentioned above, they usually spend most of their free time working, are not stressed out or burned out, are in good health shape, and find it mysterious that people might be exhausted and would just want to lie on the couch reading a favourite book -- or napping.
---
I am somewhat saddened to say the OP's article confirms my bias towards hardware technicians. He's undoubtedly smart and good at what he does but also heavily biased and lacks perspective.
I believe such resourceful people should be more open-minded. If he's reading this, I hope he takes it as a constructive feedback from the sidelines and not bashing. All I am saying is that their attitude is not helping them being taken more seriously. If you turn a blind eye to nuances (case in point: Apple hate from his side) then you are not objective in your discussions.
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 on the list (unlike others, maybe including you, where convenience is of prime importance). For some people, real convenience comes from both functional convenience and tinkerability - having the confidence that they can make the product what they want to do - without feeling limited by the manufacturer's decisions. At the end its about tradeoffs, and when it comes to personal choice, people simply have different priorities.
To give you an objective example, when I buy a router, I always first go for an Asus. Why? Their UI is super easy to use - and at the same time, if you want, you can get it do to more powerful stuff. Just like Apple (as folks claim), their support is great (I've got replacements, no questions asked) but, unlike Apple, they actually encourage you to tinker around. So in this case, hell yeah, I do pay the extra premium for convenience.
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 quickly, probably three or four hours".
I had to laugh bitterly when he said that! Back then I was much less healthy compared to now, was constantly exhausted, was struggling with debts and crappy jobs, was trying to heal from a failed and ended marriage -- and in general I had a ton on my plate basically 24/7.
And along comes this guy and casually tells you that you might spend a half working day on a project for home streaming -- and he told it to me while full-well knowing my situation. It was pretty inconsiderate in my eyes.
---
It's not even only about putting convenience at the top of your priorities. Sometimes you're just tired. Or have kids constantly demanding attention. Or are trying to heal from stress and burn out (like I am trying now). There are a plethora of VALID reasons why you wouldn't embark on such DIY projects.
And to me, these people easily and off-handedly dismiss them. Which I view as inconsiderate and disrespectful. They are judging things from their own life (which is easier than mine, at least regarding the people I know) and don't give the benefit of the doubt.
But I concende that I might be projecting based on my several such negative experiences. I am not stereotyping all hardware technicians and sysadmins. I also concede that I don't give benefit of the doubt every time. :)
It's just that when things repeat themselves several times, we the humans -- at least I -- tend to try and draw a conclusion.
I admit I could be wrong. Your perspective was appreciated!
It's just that the tone of his dissent is in my eyes kicking him out of any serious discussion.
Outside of that I'm with you.
Apple's official position is that you should be arrested if you do anything with "your" device that they don't approve of. If somebody is inclined to tinker with everything, I'm not going to blame them if their reaction to that could be described as "hate".
No, it really isn't their official position.
I think the underlying point is very important. It does seem like quality has been sacrificed in many products to shave a few pennies off the BOM. Why should today's portable CD players be substantially worse than the ones available in 1995? I get that they are asking $25 instead of $115. But SONY and Panasonic have left the market, leaving it to the drugstore quality ones, and they don't appear to want to make a product that plays a clear sound.
As far as circuits are concerned, I can't help but notice that a TI TPA6100A2 costs $1.11 at qty 1, and outputs stereo from a 1.6-5.5V single supply drawing a max of 50mw. This would substantially reduce the weight and power draw of his mini amp. A couple rechargable AA batteries would do.
Can anybody explain that please? What is this dynamic load whose driving is hard?
Due to a poorly designed circuit in the CD player, noise is introduced when current flows. So the more current is flowing, the more noise. Driving a dynamic load is not hard, it has been solved for a long time. The vendor just chose a poor design, probably to shave a couple tenths of a cent from the material bill.
A proper designed amplifier requires very little current (ideally none) on the input. In electronic terms: the amplifier has a high impedance. Thus the amplifier causes very little noise when connected to the cheap CD player.
The OP build a better amplifier that causes less noise when current is drawn from it, so using that results in a better quality sound.
http://www.schiit.com/products/fulla-1
that delivers good audio quality (to my non-audiophile ears). The one I have is not perfect: there's some static when you turn the volume knob (maybe a good design tradeoff at the price, I don't know), and the metal edges on the enclosure were sharp enough that I took it apart and filed them down a bit (others might not have been bothered by this, but I was). But there sure isn't any background hissing like there is with the built-in headphone jack on my Dell workstation.
About the article circuit, I 'm not that sure the 5532 is a good part for headphone amps, unless the phones have a high impedance and resistance: they're intended as preamplifiers (and very good ones) so they hardly can supply the current to fully drive phones, though I guess they can still be ok for listening to soft jazz in a quiet room:)
"If you wanted best possible sound you'd use some actual audio op-amps rather than these cheap NE5532P. And buffer the output of the op-amps somehow. But of-course size and cost balloons if you start adding buffers and stuff."
Coincidentally I was looking for something like an ipod shuffle this week and it’s become almost impossible to find, beyond some cheap thrift-store MP3 players.
One solution would have been to just buy that 15 year old hardware he talks about, a lot of older digital music players still just work, I have a bunch of them. Or an external soundcard for a laptop. Or stream music from phone to a Raspberry Pi with a DAC. Or a portable CD player which doesn't hiss.
What's wrong with the Sandisk products?
EG Clip Jam: https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Clip-Jam-MP3-Player/dp/B00V...
Literally never heard anything like this.
My last three Android phones (two Motorola and an HTC) have excellent sound from their headphone jacks. I use my phone and two iPads on a regular basis with headphones, and I've never heard pops between tracks or noticeable hiss with any of them.I
I write audio software on embedded Linux devices for a living. I know what clicks and pops between tracks sound like, and usually why they happen. But I don't think this guy's two-op-amo buffer is doing what he thinks it's doing.
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.
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.
So I wonder if it's something with this specific phone?
The circuit design looks weird to me. Wouldn't it be better to use a inverting setup on the opamp to get get some attenuation, and then feed the gain stages into a high-current opamp like the 4556 as a buffer to drive the headphones, or perhaps a transistor that'd be good at the job? And why are there a pair of parallel gain stages on the ground line? Why not just throw your gain stages on the signal lines, ground ground and let it be ground?
1. https://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/08/op-amp-measurements.htm...
Is it better to pay a tax to Google and not be able to listen to your music?
(I say that as an Android user who hasn't run into this problem, though 90% of my listening is through streaming services, I still have all of my CD's sitting on a hard drive, but they are all (as far as I know) available over streaming now, so I just use that)
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 as well (lots of them are Android based...).
Getting good sound from a portable device, without software issues, is really only solved at the top end of the market ($700 - $4000).
It’s a bit easier if you want to use a computer as a source but far from cheap.
Have you done any blind testing against, for example, a $100-200 pair of headphones?
I disagree. Most headphones are really easy to drive, including many high end ones. And DIY builders are making perfectly good & cheap amps using parts that have been available for more than two decades now. Parts that used to make it in stereos and other off the self supermarket stuff.
I'm more than happy to plug my AKG K812 to laptops (such as a thinkpad T460s), android phones (such as LG G4, One Plus 6), portable media players (such as the Cowon D2). My Sennheiser HD650s, HD800s, and AKG K701s are generally plugged to external DACs and amps mainly because I use them at the desk (or with my music gear). But I've tried all of them on various consumer gear and many of them can deliver good sound. The Sennheisers, however, can be a little too quiet with some of the portable devices.
What the author of the linked story here is complaining about is the race to the absolutely garbage bottom (though it isn't nearly as bad for people with less sensitive phones).
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.
I do have the hissing sound he's described when using my ATH-M50's with my phone, and even my laptop. My solution (albeit more expensive than his DIY one) was to buy a portable DAC/amp, specifically a Fiio E17[0]. It connects via USB/micro/C, and it's worked on every laptop and Android phone I've had since the Samsung GSII. It also used to be able to dock with a separate desktop amp[1], until my dock broke. There are plenty of other portable, Android-compatible DAC's that are not too expensive. It's a bit of a bummer to feel like you need to pay for yet-another-piece-of-gear just so you can enjoy your audiophile headphones with your audiphile-quality music on the go, but sometimes that's the price of fidelity.
[0]https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-Alpen-Portable-Headphone-Amplifi... [1]https://www.amazon.com/FiiO-Desktop-Headphone-Amplifier-Dock...
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 just pull ground from in between the two 9Vs?
The problem with just using the middle of the batteries as ground is that it creates a potentially headphone-damaging DC offset if the batteries drain unevenly for whatever reason. The resistor bridge is the simplest way to avoid this problem, though there are lots of ways to create a dual rail power supply with various tradeoffs[2].
[1] http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/05/virtual-grounds-3-channe...
This is because the device is silly. Firstly, there is an unnecessary voltage divider for generating a reference voltage. It is too stiff (resistors are too low-valued at 1K + 1K). This provides a reference voltage that is conveyed to high impedance destinations. 18V into 2Kohms means this consumes 9 milliamps!
Secondly, the device contains a bizarre circuit that tries to amplify the GND-GND path, using two op-amps in parallel.
The numbers check out: 9 mA for the voltage divider, plus around 8 mA x 2 IC-s (typical value from datasheet): 25 mA.
Here is how we can fix things.
1. We have two batteries! That is a true dual voltage supply! We can just take the center reference voltage between the two batteries. By doing that we lose the voltage divider entirely, and save 9mA of supply current.
2. We can lose the GND-GND amplifier, and just provide a proper end-to-end galvanic ground connection. We eliminate a pair of op-amps, and thus an entire IC chip.
We're now down to the current draw for a single NE5532.
3. Use a different op-amp. The NE5532 isn't great for driving low impedances like headphones. There are op-amps that are better suited for this, and draw less quiescent current.
Well, neither do I to be fair. I seriously dislike iTunes but it can take more input than just the store..
Regardless of the official Music player app there are third party ones, some of which are super simple (presenting a http upload on the network and allowing playback of uploaded media) or, in my case, Plex (with a plex pass for local sync)
Though, seriously, if I can throw a little bit extra (shockingly not a lot, compared to similar modern Android offerings) at my phone and not have this kind of basic problem and, presumably, other basic problems of a similar nature then there is a tipping point of efficiency that isn’t terribly far away.
I actually bought Google's active USB-C audio dongle to solve this for my Mi A1. It works, but I think USB-C is not a good port for headphones. It isn't robust enough - if you wiggle it around as if it were in your pocket you easily get glitches.
Maybe it doesn't like the metadata in those tracks?
and doesn't go on to discover the answer. If my ripping and encoding routine were doing something funky that causes problems I'd really want to know about it, and it wouldn't require me to debug Android as the author implies.
It's true enough that Android playback probably shouldn't be glitching, but if the track metadata is invalid or pushing the limits of what you can do, whatever he's doing to his tracks is likely to cause problems in places other than Android playback...
For the price that some people spend on their audio gear, you could buy several musical instruments: A far more fulfilling (and sociable) use of too much money IMO.
The point of dimnishing returns starts at $0, what matters is what kind of quality you want. Every once in a while, I buy some headphones in the <$100 range but I generally turn away in disgust because the sound just isn't good to my ears.
This summer, I had to buy a new phone, I went for a OnePlus 6. I figured I could use another pair of IEMs/earbuds so I bought the kit they offered with the phone. Tried them once, for about ten minutes, and threw them away. Yuck. These are obviously $2 kit of garbage sold at a massive premium..
Oh no wait. No hole that decent headphones fit in.
Have a 6s with a dicky headphone hole and some nice HD25’s. Not sure where to go. I feel like my time on this planet is nearly over.
I've had to do this sooner or later to every phone I've owned, except my latest, which lacks this port entirely.
Local electronics shops are indispensable when you get a whim to make a curious solution to your particular problem. By the time the parts get to you, you just can't help but think how much easier it would have been to just buy something and just feel dumb.
https://www.audio-technica.com/cms/headphones/6117c014c965cd...
"The ATH-DSR9BT over-ear wireless headphones employ Audio-Technica’s new Pure Digital Drive system, which allows the headphones to operate without a sound-degrading D/A converter that conventional wireless headphones rely upon. Instead, the ATH-DSR9BT utilizes Trigence Semiconductor’s Dnote chipset to receive the digital audio signal from a Bluetooth wireless transmission, process and transfer it to the driver where the digital pulses of the chipset move the voice coil and diaphragm forward and backward to create the sound waves heard by the listener."
Otherwise the current will slowly leak through the zener diode and the 100kohm resitor and the capacitor will stay charged. So when he turns the thing on the next time it would not do the expected timed battery charge indication he wants.
The headphones themselves sound pretty good. But when playing over bluetooth sometimes compression artefacts are audible. The artefacts are caused by the bluetooth protocol for stereo audio itself, so you're going to hear them even if you play FLAC files.
Also latency is pretty horrible. 200 ms+, enough to be obvious.
Or I take my perfboard or solid copper base material and be done with it in one afternoon, without waiting 10 days and spending less than $50 shipped.
> For audio stuff you get the advantage of keeping everything nice and tight with lower noise.
IME it is way easier to do low noise / high bandwidth circuits on base material compared to making it work on a PCB layout. This is because the base material gives you a huge, continuous ground plane, and because you use all three dimensions, instead of just two (+- two component layers). Of course, semi-modern components require steady hands.
My latest hope is that Laser4DIY is gonna make progress, being able to laser the PCB entirely would make life so much easier.
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!