Comment by varunsrin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by varunsrin | Hacker News Reader

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Hey stoev - Amp founder here. Great comments, tailoring to your hearing pattern and headphones is a big part of what we focus on in addition to your environment, and I'm glad you're excited by it.

Music, and audio in general, has traditionally been mastered for 'ideal' studio conditions, which are perfect listening environments. In the real world, a lot of people are listening to their iPod earbuds while walking down a busy streets and have less than perfect hearing, which completely negates a lot of the hard work that the studio engineers put into the mastering process.

Look at any live event where audio plays a big role - you almost always have a sound engineer leveling and remixing sound, so that the little details shine through as the environment changes constantly. We're automating that process , and bringing it to your phone, so you can enjoy great sound no matter where you are.

Speaking to the speakers specifically, we've done a lot of work with our DSP engine and acoustics to really reinforce the sound in the low 200 - 300 Hz range, which is where a lot of the warmth perception comes from. There are a lot of really cool acoustical tricks you can play with resonances and backflow volumes - its not just the speaker driver itself, but what you do with the enclosure and the volume behind the speaker that makes a huge difference.

For one thing, adding external DSP is rather redundant since the program material can be optimized for the peculiarities of the iPhone's DAC in firmware or software.

For another, it's not true to say music is mastered for ideal studio conditions. It's typically mastered in ideal studio conditions but then it's also typically tried out in known inferior ones - for example, almost every recording studio used to have a pair of Yamaha NS-10 speakers, which were deliberately engineered to deliver crap home hifi performance, with the rule of thumb being 'if it sounds good on them, it'll sound good on anything.' Do a Google Image search on'recording studio' and you'll loads on these el-cheapo monitors sitting atop mixers that cost tens or even hundreds of times as much.

Learn more here: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/sep08/articles/yamahans10.ht...

And even after using tools like that, the final test is (and has long been) to listen to the program material in a car, on a boombox, on a phone, or whatever - just like in film, the director doesn't usually sign off on the final product until after taking it to a screening theater or putting it in the DVD/bluray player at home, as appropriate.

People who work in audio production are abundantly aware that music is listened to in very different environments from where it is created. This is something that is stressed in just about every mastering article/tutorial/book I have come across in 20 years as a sound engineer. We're also aware that the human brain tends to compensate for the effect of the listening environment on the signal. We even have a name for this phenomenon, which has been the subject of considerable academic study: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cocktail_party_effect

You're offering a product that does some dynamic signal processing based on a combination of the program material and the listening environment, that's fine and there's a market for it. By all means lay claim to some new secret sauce - as pointed out above, everyone else in this industry does. But spare me the spurious arguments about elitist engineers in their ivory tower studios who don't care about the plight of the average listener.

Hey anigbrowl - thanks for the detailed reply and the tip on the Yamaha NS-10's, I'll have to pick up a pair soon.

To my earlier point - you're correct, what I meant is that its mastered in ideal studio conditions, but to a specific taste. The sound engineer usually has to make this call - do I want this to sound good on the radio and when streamed at 128 Kbps over Spotify to someones car? Or do I optimize for the discerning listener who is using his Hi Fi system at home?

And studio engineers definitely take people's listening abilities into account, but again are force to make some hard choices - most are aware that their hearing is usually better trained than the average consumer, and will shy away from including details that are very subtle in for pop music (i'm using this term broadly) for example.

We really believe that as portable sound systems start becoming cognizant of their environment and their users' habits, they'll be able to deliver audio that delights people - a lot of our initial testers have really liked the dynamic changes we provide in DSP. Even if they have the know-how to tweak their own music, changing settings on a mobile device every time their headphones, song or environment changes is a challenging affair and limited to simple EQ changes for the most part.

If you're interested in playing with an early version of our DSP and giving us some feedback, I would love to get your thoughts - shoot me an email (in my HN profile).

There seems to be a large demand for a device like the Pono player, which I'm sure is great, but is not very practical - nobody needs to carry a separate player when they already have a phone with plenty of memory. Although I only listen to lossless files at home, I am certain that their benefit over regular 320 kbps mp3s on a noisy street are nonexistent. What the audiophile consumer needs is a good portable amp/DAC that would drive even high impedance headphones and that's what I like about your product.

Speaking of audiophile consumers, I tink that it would be great if you could offer two separate verisions of your product: 1. The full version that you have just released. 2. A second version, specifically aimed at people who only care about HiFi sound coming through their headphones. I don't really care about the speakers as they will never replace a proper audio system. To me they are just taking up space and it would be great if I could buy the rest of the technology in a smaller package.

One more question - I guess you'll offer Amp with a separate music player iOS app. It will probably run a few hearing tests in a quiet environment and that's how it will adopt to one's hearing. If so, will it also support various headphones? Not having to EQ the Beyerdynamic DT1350 and other cans with weird frequency response would be very helpful and will make your app bring the best out of any pair of headphones.

Stoev, thanks for the feedback we'll keep that in mind, we've had a couple requests for a DAC only version so far. If you shoot me an email (in my HN profile) I can reach out to you with updates.

And yes, Amp will ship with a setup app that calibrates to you and your headphones, but after the setup process, you can use any music player you like (the case will do all the processing). And the case will be able to detect different headphones as well, so you can assign specific audio profiles to each set of cans.

'has traditionally been mastered for 'ideal' studio conditions' - really?

I thought things were mastered for the format often times...

They are, and that's the point of reference monitors that are capable of 'modeling', an engineer can have a single pair of monitors which can change dynamics to mimic the specifications of more common consumer equipment or environments in order to achieve a well-rounded experience for whoever your target consumer is.

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