202 karma · joined February 28, 2013
"Every part of the signal chain—from earbuds to digital/audio converters—is improving and getting cheaper." Like other technologies, digital audio had rapid improvements in the first 10 years but has mostly leveled off as we have reached the limits of physics, signals and sampling. Good audio equipment is still expensive and power hungry in every part of the chain.
Technology won't save what are fundamentally psychological issues. We respond emotionally to louder signals. We like songs that sound similar but not identical to things we've heard before. We listen to things that our friends like. All of this points to why top 40 songs sound the same, but "all records" is pretty broad. There has never been a better time to create something new in music, and yet we lean heavily on what has worked before -- in songwriting, in arrangement, in production -- so that others will like and identify with the creative output.
Running the 55x for voice detection/recognition consumes far less power than an OMAP core, since it has to be running all the time.
Basically if you need to interface with any digital hardware that isn't natively supported by your microcontroller/CPU/DSP, you'll probably want an FPGA to do it unless you have enough resources to write a bit-banged interface in the micro.
Bose and other manufacturers have done a good job of developing tricks that fool undiscerning listeners into thinking their system matches the performance of a full range system. But there's no tricking out the physics of low frequencies. Baffles and complex tube resonators can have limited positive effects but they often cause problems in other areas.
That said, unless all you care about is sound quality, the aesthetics and performance of a Bose system can in many cases be very attractive.
Of course you won't hear this outdoors because the sounds are not in an enclosed space.
And I agree, both coffee and tea are better without additives.
> many artists do not actually need professional mastering
Almost everything sold commercially has been mastered, the only stuff I have heard unmastered is on Soundcloud/Youtube for a reason. Having a skilled third party polish a track is essential.
> why not make your music free
Why is this acceptable for a musician but not for a film director, actor, programmer, or any other career professional? Should all films now be made DIY with volunteer actors and we'll just have hobbyist special effects and post added? What are these hobbyists supposed to do to pay rent and eat?
Music is an expensive business, and digital downloading hasn't changed that. That's why it's frustrating to hear people feel entitled to free music, even if there's not much we can do to change it.
At some studios, their price includes an engineer, but often a good engineer charges extra. Once the song is recorded, a separate mixing engineer will take the raw tracks and make a finished mix. Then a mastering engineer will polish them further for different markets including radio or AAC. And if you need or want a producer, arranger, cowriter, or session player, you have to pay them for their time. All the while you need to eat and pay rent as an artist or band.
$10k is an average budget for a short album, and consider to break even an artist must sell 13,000 songs if independent through iTunes, more if they split revenue with a label. How many artists have less than 13,000 fans? This is why many record deals today include touring revenue as part of the contract, because they know they can't sell enough downloads to recoup the cost.
I find that with drip coffee, it's much harder to tell the difference between bean varieties and burr ground vs conical. The AP brings out the flavor as intensely as you can stand.
It has been proven over and over via ABX testing that high res formats are completely indistinguishable from a 24b/44.1kHz master. And further studies have proven most audio engineers can't distinguish between lossless audio and 320kbps MP3. That's what the Xiph link elsewhere in the thread shows.
Sampling theory says that a perfect square wave can be represented at any frequency below Nyquist. That doesn't mean that the codec or the analog electronics are capable of responding instantly at those frequencies, but that has nothing to do with the fact that a 1kHz square wave can be perfectly sampled with a 44.1kHz sample rate. The image is simply incorrect.
Transient response in the real world is generally limited only by the acoustic transducer response of the system, because everything else has the ability to respond much faster than audio rates. With Pono, this means that the earbuds or headphones you use with the player will have a greater affect on the transient response than the electronics inside.
Maybe people who work in professional (not consumer) audio? Who design these systems for a living?
If you set up a 20 bit system (120dB) so that you can hear the lowest bit toggling, 120dB above that will most certainly cause hearing damage if used for very long.
144 dB (24 bit) or more SPL will cause near instantaneous damage and pain.