Yes it is. Maybe I should have said "has many fanatics" instead of "full of" but they are absolutely as adamant and caustic as some religious fanatics. And on forums these people create the same kind of environment as the worst internet trolls. I'm not going to claim they are the type religious fanatics who would cause physical harm to a group of people, but they are as adamant in their beliefs as some extremely religious people and they preach their beliefs with similar aggressiveness.
10 years ago I would have never believed I would write the statement above. But after being on that forum and interacting with people in that community (e.g. at meets) for years there are most definitely people like that.
One guy who I would describe as a genuine 'Audiophile Genius' is Nelson Pass. See: https://passlabs.com/
Nelson Pass has designed a series of innovative amplifiers that he sells as commercial products. He also releases circuit diagrams and build instructions his amplifiers, and helps out DIYers on public forums.
In contrast, it is great that NwAvGuy has designed a budget headphone amplifier, and released the design with a no derivative works allowed Creative Commons license. But that falls a long way short of what Nelson Pass has produced over the years in my opinion.
I think if you asked Nelson Pass whether or not all 'decently made' amplifiers sound the same, he would suggest you need do a bit of listening to different high quality designs.
Red book CD quality at 16/44.1 isn't 'mathematically perfect' at all anyway. The 22 khz Nyquist frequency is too close to the audio band, and there are unavoidable effects in the audio band of the 20 khz brick wall anti aliasing filtering needed.
It doesn't mean that the cables or other equipment differences, can change the 'beats per minute' of a music track.
If the bass is reproduced poorly and sounds 'woolly' it will subjectively mess up the timing of the bass playing with respect to the rest of the music, as though the bass player is less skilful. Whereas listening to the same track with equipment that has tight, clear and dynamic bass can make the music sound more lively and subjectively 'faster', and it is more likely to make your foot tap.
Yeah, sure. But most of these comments are about cables carrying digital signals, a class of devices which only have two real operating modes: "working perfectly" and "catastrophic failure". Instead of respecting the principles of the physics and information encoding associated with this layout, though, we see outlandish claims of frequencies traveling at different speeds and damaging your multi-octave audio.
With digital audio going to a DAC even with cheap cables, the '1's and '0's should be arriving OK and will be in "working perfectly" mode. You have to hope that is the case with USB audio as there is no error checking.
But when bits arrive is very important in audio, and whether or not the devices and cables in the chain before the DAC have introduced noise on the ground plane is also considered very important by some.
I can't see how an ethernet cable can affect timing, as the packets with the digital signal might even arrive out of order. The earthing of the ethernet cable might influence how much noise is introduced the ground plane though. It might explain why the Audioquest cables are directional, if their earthing arrangement is directional perhaps.
USB has error checking (there are checksums on every USB packet).
Isochronous USB has no error recovery (so if that packet arrives with a mangled checksum, you have a data dropout).
However, cables are the least of your worries; it's the driver stack (USB, ethernet, whatever) and the audio software feeding it that are the main sources of error. Unfortunately for Monster (et al) it is far harder for them to sell a $5,000 piece of software that does nothing than it is for them to sell a $5K piece of snake-oil-class hardware; the software is objectively analyzable without expensive tools, for instance.
In over 100 audiophile bashing posts, at last someone who actually understands the issues. USB cables have an 'eye pattern' which affects the timing of the signal presented to the DAC.
If USB cables make a difference, then there is probably an argument for doing something else (not ignoring the problem because USB cables must be 'perfect'). Like putting the DAC and computer driving the DAC in the same box and connected by I2S with the DAC as the master.
There are some good articles on the Audiostream site about why 'bit perfect' doesn't cut it in the context of audio:
What kind of insane hardware depends on CPU timings and doesn't have a hardware buffer that always plays at the same speed? Jitter in the intermediate steps doesn't matter when you're moving digital data from one place to another, as long as the buffers are larger than the amount of jitter.
DAC is hard. Moving a couple megabits of data five feet over a cable with multi-millisecond buffers is not hard.
I don't think it's even possible to use USB for 100%-throughput unbuffered data. I call bullshit on the eye pattern affecting playback.
Just because a difference technically exists in some circumstances with an oscilloscope does not mean it makes a difference in normal use cases.
Also wow that site called wireless a 'potential long-term health risk'.
What you're describing isn't as easy as it sounds. In order to have a "hardware buffer that always plays at the same speed" you need a high-quality locally generated clock, plus a decent amount of local buffering. But in a USB audio device or SPDIF device, you can't run a totally independent clock, because it will get out of sync with the clock on the host device sending the data. There are various tricks to get around this (e.g. having a feedback loop using a sideband), but it's actually a non-trivial problem. See: http://www.cypress.com/?docID=45044 for one approach. Most USB audio devices don't even attempt to do this. They try and recover the host machine's playback clock using the timing of USB SOF packets (which are sent every millisecond-ish) plus the timing of the USB audio data packets it receives.
Yes, sure, those things are hard, and they have nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of passive components like cables, as long as they are not in the failure range. Or anything to do with working-transceiver quality except when it comes to the clocks that the transceivers are using.
When you talk about jitter introducing significant distortion based on packet timing, that's something that can only happen in two ways: either the audio receiver is using an absolute garbage clock, or it's using an absolute garbage and shortsighted algorithm for adjusting its clock rate, and not trying for a stable sync. The quality of transceiver and cable components is not a factor.
Most modern audiophile DACS have asynchronous USB inputs, and hardly any have HDMI. I assume that is because the designers of the DACs all think USB works better than HDMI for high quality 2 channel audio.
Dead right. It's people with pitchforks outside the Bastille. It's starving people rioting to reclaim common land taken as 'enclosures' by the rich people.
I somehow think that saying something like "Relax. For fuck's sake." isn't going to help.
"It's starving people rioting to reclaim common land taken as 'enclosures' by the rich people." == Complaining about having to click a cancel button on a mobile browser.
You've completely missed the point. At the moment we have a free web and we can use a variety of browsers to access it.
If instead we can only access the web via apps and those app are controlled by the likes of Apple or Google, then we don't have a free web anymore. Maybe today the apps are free (as in beer), but maybe tomorrow they won't be. We would no longer be in charge and the web would have been appropriated by business interests.
Huh? The original post wasn't about bringing a walled garden approach to the web; it was about modals encouraging visitors to download an app.
I don't think you need to worry about only accessing the web via apps - it just won't happen.
FWIW, I abhor the popups in question but I can understand a company's decision to add them to their site. However, the way to stop this pattern is by showing decision makers statistics that prove they don't work (if that is true of course). The blog in question just seems like one big hissy fit - not the most convincing of arguments.
You're one of the luck few of us that actually understand the joke. There is a very large portion of people in this thread that do not understand the swearing and are simply 'offended' by fuck all and are throwing their toys out of the pram because of a few fucking words.
Simply put, in this instance it is acceptable to explain the joke because a large percentage of people are pathetic fuckwads.
You don't need to be an native english speaker to understand what the site is about - it is mostly pictures. We don't need some 'pompous twat' (as we say in the UK) explaining blindly obvious stuff in pretentious language.
And defending the Daily Mail newspaper to top it all (they are a poisonous bunch of scumbags in case any non-UK people don't know it).
I think the idea was to start a conversation. A conversation about why so many companies are thrusting these stupid apps on you. The idea was most certainly not to start a conversation about swearing, which is what 90% of the comments seem to be about.
$ pkg install tur-repo $ pkg install code-server