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Comment by mtm7 | Hacker News Reader

I remember a story about an electronic musician who preferred to mix his songs with earbuds/headphones instead of with a high-end megabucks studio sound system. His reasoning was basically, “that’s how my fans will listen to my music, so I need to make sure it sounds good to them.”

I can’t remember who it was, but the idea always stuck with me.

Anyway, I agree that we should test our applications with the same hardware (and internet speed) of our average user. Very few people use a computer as good as a software engineer’s. :)

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That’s funny; I’m always debating my brother, talking about how earbuds sound much better than even high-end monitors, largely because of the surrounding environment (or lack thereof, when earbuds are in).

When I make music I have to do the opposite; take my earbuds out and listen to the music over my car stereo or via my MacBook Pro speakers, to make sure it doesn’t sound good only through earbuds.

Hah, I have nice studio monitors since forever, but I also make music with Earbuds.

I like them, but I've found that they make a bit too conscious about the sound, so I have to be extra careful. The isolation emphasizes noise and frequencies that the monitors don't, and that will be masked in the full mix. It used to lead me to a rabbit hole of noise-gating and EQs.

Interesting; I could totally see myself going down the same rabbit hole, or the opposite, thinking that a certain faint sound will be great, but when I play it in my car later it's completely unnoticeable.

> thinking that a certain faint sound will be great, but when I play it in my car later it's completely unnoticeable.

That's true! This happens all the time with super expensive recordings too, and I love it. IMO discovering new sounds in the music you're used to only adds to the experience.

Unfortunately this isn't the perfect solution as there is no universal device or average user. Especially with music, mixing songs for earbud/headphones will produce a worse quality song for another pair. In the same way we've seen software written by users primarily using x86 work less effectively when compiled to arm. Plenty of open source projects are developed on by people with less than adequate hardware yet they're still bloated and slow.

I think it's very sensible (if a little unrealistic) to test applications on as many pieces of intended hardware as possible, and this somewhat reminds me about this story of snow clearance[0], where the solution was not only the intrudction of a new perspective but also empirical measurements.

[0]: http://info.gritit.com/blog/what-is-gender-balanced-snow-cle...

No one said you have to test on everything. Just adjust your target and testing hardware to something midrange, maybe even budget optioned. As above, test on some mid-range or even budget-level 2015 hardware, laptop or phone, and if it's smooth on that, it'll be smooth for people running 2020 hardware. You can never be sure about the reverse.

That being said, there's a lot of crap software out there that's slow even on 2020 hardware.

I think testing with multiple hardware is a good idea. For audio, I'd say that editing audio on low grade audio equipment might backfire. I've always heard that professionals listen through multiple sources to make sure it sounds good on everything but idk how true that is these days.

I've listened to quite a few people on YouTube and some musicians who clearly did their editing with a certain pair of headphones/earbuds. It comes through immediately on my speakers because high pitched whining noises made it through the edit (making it nearly unbearable to listen to) and/or they boosted the bass to infinity. (Usually indicates they never listened to their project on speakers because the bass heavy music between cuts becomes disgustingly loud whereas on headphones it's not that bad)

It makes listening to their content impossible on decent speakers but fine on okay headphones.

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