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Hi-MDs could hold an entire CD uncompressed, or a bunch more compressed, so Minidisc seems the obvious choice. You would have to get rid of Sony's stupid decisions, like not supporting other compression formats than ATRAC, as well as the boneheaded decision to not allow simple file transfers.
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Mar 14, 2021 09:35
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Pile Of Garbage posted:I still curate my music Same. I did use Spotify for a while, but the constantly shifting catalogue and suddenly unavailable albums/tracks really started to aggravate me. I've got 275 gigs of music on my file server, mostly in FLAC from Bandcamp or my own CD rips. The entire library is mirrored to my pCloud account, and I manually make a backup every couple of weeks to an external drive that I keep in my locker at work.
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Mar 15, 2021 23:55
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MD could have replaced the cassette tape, the floppy disk and the CD, plus all of the assorted other non-MD magneto-optic disc types, Zip/Jaz disks and so on, until flash memory was ready to take over. The tech was absolutely there, not much more complicated than floppies or CDs in caddies, but the recording business side of Sony was (perhaps rightfully) afraid of unauthorized copying. The format is completely obsolete now, but the 90s and 2000s could have looked very different from a portable music/data storage perspective.
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Mar 16, 2021 00:28
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Love 2 yeet dumbells through exposed woofers.
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May 5, 2021 14:28
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44.1KHz is really just a historical aberration, a lot of things would be simpler if everything had been standardized on 48KHz. Consumer digital audio is the only holdout, everything else uses multiples of 8KHz depending on what is needed. Even PC sound cards don't always do 44.1KHz cleanly, there was a big kerfuffle around some Sound Blaster cards (Live! or Audigy, I think?) that internally resampled everything very badly to 48KHz. As far as I know, the Android audio stack is also natively 48KHz. It's a bit of a mess, and you can easily end up in a situation on your PC where you're playing a selection of music with both 44.1 and 48KHz tracks, but the player or the audio stack doesn't switch sample rates correctly, and now your music is being put through the real-time resampler in your OS. You can end up sending a 48KHz track badly resampled to 44.1KHz to your DAC that can handle both sample rates just fine, if only the OS didn't mess it up. That's why some people do the whole ASIO driver and bit-perfect stuff and disable all OS resampling and so on. Will such a mess-up make an audible difference? Eh, probably not one you'd notice, unless you deliberately set a lower (faster, less CPU-intensive) resampling setting. But it's annoying that it's even an issue in the first place. That's actually one of the things I really admire about Opus, it has a super elegant design where it is basically always 48KHz. Lower sample rates (for voice and other non-music use cases) can be fractions of this, so Opus audio can be 8, 12, 16, 24 or 48KHz, but it always uses 48KHz timestamps and math and everything is a clean fraction of 48KHz. It greatly simplifies the compression because it only has to work on multiples of 8, instead of also having to handle 44.1KHz. In Opus that's just resampled to 48KHz before encoding, because the impact of resampling is completely inaudible, compared to even the mildest lossy codec anyway.
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May 18, 2021 10:27
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strtj posted:So... is it any good? Because size is not exactly an indicator of that, and PA speakers (which this would appear to be) are not exactly known for impressive sound quality. And I would assume that it's mono? That's a very common misconception. A lot of PA speakers sound really drat good, like for instance the JBL SRX835, which sounds like a proper old-school BIG home loudspeaker. Yamaha, QSC, Meyer Sound Labs etc., generally all of the well-regarded manufacturers make models that would work perfectly at home, as long as you don't mind the aesthetics. Using big drivers and being able to move a lot of air gives you a sound that's hard to impossible to replicate using smaller speaker drivers and cabinets. If your only experiences with PA speakers have been at concerts where the main objective it loudness and not much else, you really should find an opportunity to listen to a competently setup set of PA speakers in setting with recorded music.
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May 25, 2021 15:53
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That's certainly something alright 
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May 25, 2021 16:48
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redeyes posted:Loudness is underrated. The capability to go really loud is great, but what's most important is the capability to go loud with low distortion. A really great concert system can sound like a good home hifi on steroids. Clean and dynamic and loud. Distortion makes things sound artificially louder, but loud clean sound is beautiful.
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May 26, 2021 12:06
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Oh boy, crappy graphs!       
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May 29, 2021 14:30
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There's going to be some quantization noise, I guess that counts as "error".
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May 29, 2021 17:08
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I bet it doesn't have the warmth and fullness of a good old spinning platter drive.
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May 30, 2021 08:59
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DAT was a candidate for a recordable replacement or complement to the CD, but it got hobbled by fears of large-scale copyright infringement. These days it's only really used in situations involving old recordings originally made to DAT and not yet transferred to disk or another archival format. Sony stopped making DAT equipment in 2005, so it is very much a dying format that has no benefit over hard disk recording or portable digital recorders with flash storage. Magnetic tape in general is a shrinking niche, the only real holdout is large-scale backup to LTO tape, due to a favorable price per GB compared to hard drives. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 09:33 on Jun 1, 2021 |
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Jun 1, 2021 09:31
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It's now been a full two months since I got laid off, and company policy is to only keep laid-off people around for long enough to finish any outstanding tasks, even if they have a 6-month severance period with full pay. So I've been milling around at home, looking for jobs online, having some interesting online interviews, but also a lot of time to listen to music. As I was idly listening to some new promo albums that came in, I was fiddling around with my receiver's settings, and I realized that I actually don't like Audyssey at all, it's almost muffled compared to the direct sound. Listening to music is much more pleasing to me with it turned off, which makes sense in hindsight. I bought my speakers because I like the way they sound, so it seems silly to mash a whole ton of EQ and correction on top of that. I turned off dynamic EQ as well, it's too heavy-handed even at the 15dB setting for "loudly mixed rock/pop music". It still gets switched on automatically when I turn on dynamic volume for watching movies in the evening/night, and that seems like the best use for it. Not that Audyssey and similar systems are completely useless or anything, they make a lot of sense for subwoofers or correction up to a room's transition freqency, which is why I'm glad my Denon has the "bypass L/R" setting (which Audyssey Labs say you should never use), so my subs still have room correction applied. Of course, my experience is based on the standard Audyssey MultEQ, and from what I've read XT is even worse in how much correction it applies to higher frequencies. XT32 is supposedly much more focused on low frequencies, plus I think you can limit the frequency range it applies filters to. I don't know how bad/good YPAO, Dirac and so on are in comparison, but I think I'm just sticking with minimal correction from now on. This has been your "I've been laid off and I'm bored at home due to lockdown" moment. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Jun 2, 2021 |
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Jun 2, 2021 18:18
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At least it's aptly named.
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Jun 4, 2021 12:49
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Reverse audiophiles can be fun, too.quote:You have not heard those, they absolutely do sound more precise than cheap studio monitors. I think they may actually be flat with both bass and treble all the way down, but then they just don't sound like loudspeakers at all. quote:I understand your disbelief. I was also in disbelief as I expected the speakers to be a joke and wouldn't believe it if I didn't hear it myself. But they are as much above cheap studio monitors as the monitors are above regular hifi speakers. I guess there is some DSP magic at play, but they realy sound that good. Really the only way we could resolve this issue is that you [...] listen for yourself. quote:The problem is that you seem to be assuming I like them for the opposite reason why I do, so I guess you will just need to listen for yourself. quote:Based on comparing them with studio monitors. They sound more like good headphones or not like speakers at all. They can play string bass. The drums sound unamplified on good enough recordings. There is no doubt that their distortion is extraordinarily low, and it's not the distortion of the amplifier but the speakers. I don't know how you expect me to prove it to you. quote:They can play the kick drum without any noticeable accompanying "dunnn" sound, which is enough to tell that their distortion must be extraordinarily low. In fact the people who said they "yes, they make sound" may dislike them for their dryness. Occams razor has nothing to do with that, as your phone screen has better image quality than the best TV screens a few decades ago. And that is my last reply, do it yourself if you care about measurements, you'd probably say I faked them anyway. Context: This dude was adamant that his speakers have superior clarity and lower distortion than studio monitors costing 100x as much, based on a theory that Chinese manufacturers don't know that low frequency distortion is less audible, so they build their speakers and amps with super low distortion. And that somehow makes them sound better than studio monitors. These are the speakers in question: https://aliexpress.com/item/4001105186185.html KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 09:47 on Jun 5, 2021 |
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Jun 5, 2021 09:44
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To paraphrase B&O's tonemeister on the BeoLab 90, audiophiles are people with one chair and no friends.
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Jun 8, 2021 10:46
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Bob Stuart Must Be Stopped.
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Jun 8, 2021 11:12
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Yeah, tubes and distortion and non-linearity is for creating sound, while accuracy and clean power is for reproducing it. If an album doesn't sound good on an accurate and powerful system, the recording is bad and no amount of tweaks can really fix that. You can maybe hide some of the warts a bit, but garbage in is garbage out. I still spin LPs, but that's because it's a more tactile and visually interesting experience. Tube amps are just amps, you turn them on and that's it. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 11:44 on Sep 26, 2021 |
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Sep 26, 2021 11:39
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It's a good solid performer, I had an SL-1500 for a while (same table, but manual instead of automatic). Unless you have something better already, I'd keep it.
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Sep 27, 2021 17:14
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Because they're stuck in an analog mindset, where tweaks did often make an audible difference. Either that or they're trying to fleece people with those beliefs.
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Dec 4, 2021 10:54
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DoesNotCompute posted:To keep from going too off-thread, the stereo is the most disappointing thing about the car and apparently the higher spec B&O option sucks but just more expensively and with RGB ambient lighting. That's a real drat shame, because the original implementation in the A8 was ridiculously good. (I worked at B&O while it was being developed)
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Dec 17, 2021 16:40
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Amusingly, it's called the Bang & Olufsen Advanced Sound System, or B&O rear end. I hope they didn't change that.
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Dec 17, 2021 17:46
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I used to have a cool little half-width Yamaha A100 2x50W power amp. This model:  I sold it because I was way more into active speakers at the time, but I really should have kept that cute little thing. Half-width components are great.
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Mar 23, 2022 19:17
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You could hook up a modified subharmonic synthesizer that goes low enough. (The venerable dbx 120a's lowest frequency output is 26hz, stock) Or you could play track 9 ("Focus" or "Necropolis") from the Quake soundtrack. It digs below 10Hz, and is a real eye opener if you've only heard it on PC speakers. The theme to Terminator 2 also has a lot of super low bass. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 22:14 on Mar 25, 2022 |
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Mar 25, 2022 22:10
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I think a lot of gear has subsonic filters, because usually you don't even want to try to deal with sub-20Hz content. If you push a very strong signal below the port tuning frequency of a ported speaker, you can quickly run out of driver excursion.
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Mar 25, 2022 22:30
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I had the equivalent functionality in the dbx DriveRack PX that I used as an active crossover and EQ for a while. With a bit of tuning it really filled out the low end of music that was otherwise a bit lacking in that area.
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Mar 27, 2022 20:52
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3D Megadoodoo posted:You're an idiot, now show us your carpet so I can ridicule that, too. No carpets, wood flooring everywhere for that analog warmth.
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Mar 28, 2022 23:38
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Sure, let me just completely cover up my original 1930s solid hardwood floors 
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Mar 29, 2022 06:49
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Use room correction to tamp down peaks and correct general deficiencies, like Neurophonic says you will drive yourself crazy if you start hunting for ruler-flat response. Do narrow cuts to tame peaks only, don't try to correct narrow dips. Narrow peaks are quite audible, but our ears tend to skip over narrow dips and don't really notice them, unless they're quite bad. You can use wide cuts/boosts to correct the sound over a wider frequency range, that's fine. Remember that less is more, and that this is purely EQ correction and doesn't account for phase/time alignment. When I used EQ to manually tweak the sound in my living room, I used 4 filters and that was plenty to make it sound pleasing and balanced. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 09:12 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 09:08
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If you're already pleased with the sound of your system, room correction probably isn't going to make a dramatic difference. Where it can really help in most rooms is when integrating one or more subwoofers, by smoothing out room resonances. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 16:42
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large hands posted:Well the lintons are reasonably big ported speakers in a relatively small listening room so I'd still be curious if I could tighten up the bass. Yeah absolutely. Room correction is most important below the frequency at which the sound waves become more resonant and omnidirectional and create standing waves. Focus on correcting below 300Hz, that's where the biggest gains are. https://hometheaterreview.com/room-correction-revisited/ E: it's not the very best article on room correction, but it covers the importance of room correction mostly below a certain frequency well enough. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 18:44
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So realistically 50Hz-20KHz, got it.
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May 14, 2022 11:28
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Neurophonic posted:the price of £6k a pair is pretty good Yeah, no. quote:they’re competing with products costing four to five times as much. So way overpriced speakers competing with insanely overpriced speakers, got it.
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May 14, 2022 16:37
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Neurophonic posted:What makes you think it’s overpriced? The £6k price tag.
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May 14, 2022 17:24
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Taima posted:
This is literally never worth it. The circuits are designed around using specific opamps, you can't just switch them around willy-nilly.
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May 27, 2022 22:52
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The important measure is "does it sound good enough that no audible flaws can be heard?". Basically every AVR will show bad SINAD numbers, but I'm perfectly happy with my Denon, because the room correction and bass management more than make up for a slight deficiency in SNR. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Jun 26, 2022 |
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Jun 26, 2022 17:50
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I've noticed that a lot of YouTube channels don't use any kind of high-pass filters, or much audio processing at all, to be honest. It's fine when you listen on a crappy phone speaker or earbuds, but on proper headphones or a stereo with a subwoofer, you suddenly get massive bass from wind and bumps and stuff completely overwhelming everything else. Just put a simple 80Hz HPF on your mics people, please!
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Jul 31, 2022 13:19
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Mister Speaker posted:Yeah it's well-established practice in any audio mixing discipline that you try out your mixes on as many playback systems as you can. It's especially important to listen to it in mono, because of Bluetooth speakers etc., as you mentioned. A mix that sounds good in stereo can get really messed up in the downmix to mono, because of phase differences between the channels, leading to weird cancellations and warbly sound.
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Aug 1, 2022 19:12
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Because XLR is the best connector for audio. It just is.
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Nov 18, 2022 16:16
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 12:47 |
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Mister Speaker posted:Technics aren't great turntables. That's true, they're not just great, they are literally the best. Stable speed, outrageously solid construction, probably the best factory tonearm ever put on a turntable. KozmoNaut fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Nov 21, 2022 |
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Nov 21, 2022 07:35
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