> Right now I'm absolutely astonished at how difficult it appears to be to just listen to music with a good pair of headphones. Is it not 2018? The media is full of talk about preposterously ambitious ideas such as AI and self-driving cars and yet I can't even listen to a fuck-damn music track? O_o
I enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read:
> If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Is it actually open source in that you can actually submit a fix though?
Judging by the awful 'random' I would suspect not. (I havent used it I some time so it might have been fixed, but you used to get clustering of tracks from a given album)
Android may be "open source", but it means little if you're not a company wanting to write their own clone, or a security researcher.
Would I be able to fix just the media player service, and make my smartphone use the fixed version? Without flashing it with a brand new OS, losing data, warranty, OEM drivers, and ability to receive security updates? Didn't think so. Android "open source" delivers only half of the expected value.
I think it is just a matter of what one is most comfortable with.
The HW-solution is a nice challenge, but I am sure, there are simpler ways to solve it.
On a sidenote: I would be surprised if the issue he has is systemic too Android devices in general. I am sure others would have noticed it if was that widespread that it occurred on all devices.
Makes me wonder if the guy wants (subconsciously or not) to have more problems with technology he’s using just to have an opportunity to tinker with it to make it better. Certainly seems like the type.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, but in such case he might as well drop the complaining tone.
Probably, I have spent 100s of hours to make my iPhones better when in reality they would have worked just as well without the modifications. I frequently see people complaining and finding issues just so they can try to fix it, rinse and repeat.
This also leads into his statement. I own an iPhone and I kinda know what's going on beneath the surface. I can open up disassembled binaries and anyone can look at the headers from google within seconds.
That in turn would lead into that 99.9% of Android users have no knowledge of how Android works, so his whole statement is kind of odd.
Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium. And then catches shit for being pretentious.
So, let's step through that once more:
- garbage is normal
- functional and interoperable is premium
- premium is pretentious
- also, add $1,000 for the name brand
The author simultaneously complains that nothing works, but refutes using the only thing that works because it represents training wheels that are too fashionable and ostentatious.
We can have nice things because that's for babies, and also too overtly glamorous and bougie.
I just want shit that works out of the box sometimes. I also don't need X-Files alien logos and red backlit Hunt For Red October themes everywhere. And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware. (Cough! Lenovo! [0] Cough! Intel Management Engine! [1] Cough!)
Not everything at the <£100 price point is rubbish...
I recently got a £20 Havit Bluetooth receiver and connected it to a pair of £70 Sony MDR-7506 headphones. The receiver drives the headphones louder and with less distortion than my iPhone can, and the battery lasts for a few days of intermittent listening. Whatever loss is introduced by the aptX coding is invisible to my ears.
I'm blown away by how good this setup is given the price and there shouldn't be any dependency on an expensive source device to run it.
Not to bag on Rockwell, I appreciate his reviews and viewpoints, but do you trust that he has the requisite expertise to correctly analyse the quality of such an adaptor?
I... don't. His write-up doesn't inspire confidence either - I have no idea how he has performed the measurements.
I know enough to know that audio measurement is a very tricky endeavour, and most other measurements put the lightning adaptor's output at a few dBA worse in SNR and dynamic range than the iPhone 6S' jack output (but otherwise similar). Both are easily worse than a good external DAC. Certainly not "better quality" than the inbuilt option as Rockwell claims.
It's good enough for almost everyone, and is likely to be capable of higher fidelity than most source material, but most agree that it is objectively a worse DA.
I have to agree with the other commenter here. I have not noticed any difference moving from iPhone 6s to 7 (with dongle) listening through my Shure 530 headphones.
Did you really just call apples products interoperable? maybe among their other crap, but sure as hell not among other devices. Which are all interoperable among themselves btw.
And yet every time I go to a presentation or a lecture people ask to borrow my MacBook for it because their Windows or Linux laptops can never even connect to their projectors or Bluetooth speakers on the first try. Often they cannot at all connect.
Yet the MacBook connects to everything on the first go with zero fuss.
So yeah, I am calling part of Apple's functions and devices interoperable. Why aren't you? These are observable facts in the wild and it happens every day somewhere around you as well.
Hah. This is the opposite of every single experience I've seen at my work, where both PCs and Macs are supported. Usually the Mac person plugs into a projector and it doesn't work, or they don't have their adapter. The HP works every time.
Well if they don't have their adapter that's not really a problem with the Mac's compatibility now, is it? They simply forgot a very important piece that will help them achieve the goal. I don't blame my TV for not getting a signal from my PC if I lose my HDMI cable.
I know my experience is anecdotal. So is yours. Just shared what I've observed 30+ times now.
I got my first Mac when the Mac mini came up. It was a little more expensive than same-generation PCs but besides being OSX it was a PowerPC that never made any fan noise, and was small. I've subsequently had three Macbooks and two iPhones - but I can't afford this somewhat-better-somewhat-more-expensive racket anymore. Prices have risen too much; to boot, the quality gulf between Macs and garden-variety Dells and Acers has pretty much crashed. Macbooks have had multiple problematic years now; iPhones did away with headphone jacks; and OSX peaked at 10.6.8, where it indeed was five years into the future - but Windows 10 is decent now and even has the whole Unix toolkit with WSL.
Disclaimer: not trying to convince you, just sharing an anecdote like you did.
- I agree Apple pricing has gone out of control. I should not have to shell out 1500 EUR for a 256GB phone with a bigger display no matter what (XS Max). I mean okay, it's probably the best phone out there but come on. It's a mobile computing device, not a life's insurance bill.
- I fully agree MacBooks and desktop Macs haven't had good years in a while. IMO the MacBook Pro 2015 15" was Apple's laptop peak. They haven't produced anything worthwhile in the laptop departments ever since.
- Desktop Macs are a horrid mess where greed trumps everything else so much that even I who spent 6 figures on tech during my life cannot justify paying 5000 EUR for an iMac 27" 5K with maxed out specs (i7 CPU, 64GB RAM and 1 or 2TB SSD). Right now your only viable choice for a future-proof machine however is either the iMac 27" or the iMac Pro, and both are expensive as hell.
- macOS version, not sure, I started actively using it only a year or so ago so it feels quite good to me and is tons more predictable than Windows 10. You have to fight with Windows 10 to make it your own and not be barraged with popups. macOS in comparison stays out of the way.
---
To summarize, Apple has peaked, including in the smartphone and tablet departments. Upgrades are very smallish and iterative while the price tags remain huge.
The way I see it, Apple has been coasting for a while. They need to get back on track because inevitably somebody will try and displace them.
(As a random example, Xiaomi phones are probably the best physical designs and software experience I ever had. But I still don't trust Google's binary blobs and the general baseband processor stuff so I stay away from Android.)
> At least on android you can get rid of most Google code with Lineage + microg
...as far as we know. What about the baseband processor that has access to everything at any time?
> Why do you trust the Apple ones then?
Becase they took a stand and refused to introduce a security backdoor in the FBI San Bernardino case. And because iPhone hacks cost more on the net compared to Android ones. This to me indicates that iPhones are harder to crack -- so the demand is higher, suppy is lower and thus the prices are higher.
All circumstantial evidence of course, but it's what we have to go on.
That doesn't mean much when flashing their ROM means voiding your warranty though. Also, their efforts don't really count in the very important areas like the OS security itself; Google reigns supreme there, mostly.
I am a former flashing-ROMs fanboy but the truth is, you are either stuck on ancient kernels or sometimes part with functionality you prefer to still have (like rooting).
>I should not have to shell out 1500 EUR for a 256GB phone
Yes, we're lucky that a lot of people in the world are not in a position to fight for higher quality of life for the resources coming out of the land near them or their labor, nor do we have to pay for environmental damage from manufacture and disposal of our devices, otherwise it would be much more than 1,500 EUR.
It all depends on one's perspective. There was a time when a typical PC was $5000+ in today's dollars. We just got used to Moore's law bringing cheap disposables.
You're taking it pretty far off track. This article is about listening to music.
The "premium" only applies to new products. The author here tried using a CD player, so the storage (and novelty) requirements are pretty low. A $5 used iPod would work just fine.
Can I blame free market dynamics ? It's been a quite obvious trend since the 2000s. Audio components became commodities to reach bottom prices, no more middle class, good functionality is high end (which is now pushed to higher prices with branding like beats or devialet)
My kid has some wireless Beats headphones and she loves them because she likes how they look and they are very comfortable for her.
She might be able to find headphones that sound better, but she has never found any that also are comfortable and have good industrial design. At least not in the price range that Beats typically sell for.
That depends on your definition of functionality. Don't assume the purpose of Beats is to produce accurate audio. If the purpose is to make people feel good because they own the same headphones they saw some celebrity wear, they are apparently quite functional.
They added weights to their headphones to add a "quality" feel to them, because they were made of plastic and usually high-end headphones use metal in some places like the mounts and the headbands.
Fewer and fewer people can even recognize quality anymore. People mistake popularity for quality. They blindly trust brands. They accept things not working or falling apart. Companies have picked up on this, and don't have to invest in quality anymore. Prices get lower, then everyone has to not invest in quality. People would rather buy and throw away a $50 pair of shoes every year than buy a $200 pair and have it last 10 years.
"Yeah, but what really gets under my skin is that every other company out there is okay with producing garbage.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium."
If the standard is garbage, then functionality is premium.
I envy the people who have the free time to tinker but what they keep forgetting, time and time again, is that they are the minority. Many people have happy family lives and prefer to spend most of their leisure time with people -- or non-tech hobbies. I do enough programming already, thank you.
(EDIT to add: and not everybody is in perfect health shape as well, so they use their free time to recharge -- not to work some more. Stress and overworking come with an army of health issues. Climbing a hill with a 50kg backpack, to give an analogy, is not as easy as it looks like from the side.)
I respect smart hardware technicians but he lost me as an audience with his Apple hate.
+1 on "hate doesn't work". Just adding a perspective that you might be missing. The stuff that OP described doesn't really feel like "work" to him. To him its the exact thing you described - it helps him recharge - so that he can go back to "work" the next day :)
[P.S. "I do enough programming already, thank you." doesn't help as well. To get an idea of how sad it is to read, imagine if someone tells an artist "I do enough painting already, thank you.". People love to do different things, and that is okay.]
Yep, I know it helps them recharge. But I find it sad how oblivious they sometimes are that others might be so beat up that they need an almost passive recharge. :(
As for my programming, I actually do some small work outside of work hours on my own enthusiastic basis. But I have to tell you, even this minor 4-5h a week thing took me years of recharging and healing before I felt the passion for the first time in years and years.
(As an aside, we the techies need non-tech hobbies but that's just an opinion.)
Same thoughts except with my Android phone and Bose QC.
Wireless, noise cancellation and never any problems with explosive noise.
Also it is indeed 2018 so what's he doing with ripped CD's, there are a lot of streaming services out there right now.
This is fine if you're "stuck in your ways" (I want to use a less loaded term but can't come up with one) and have a collection of music you enjoy and have stopped keeping up.
It's not even keeping up with current music; as I go from my early to my late 30s, the pop landscape has gone from parseable to alien. But there's still good music coming out and older good music you didn't know about. Hell, I only discovered the gigantic German composer Paul Hindemith six months ago.
From what I can tell, the streaming catalog is still a small subset of the CD catalog, so if you're into discovering new music, you're restricting yourself by only using the former.
Good news - you can do both! I use Spotify for regular everyday listening and finding new artists/new albums by artists I like, and I collect vinyl for fun and to support artists more directly.
I still use streaming to discover but buy to own for disconnected times, which are usually intentional. For example, I don't want touch interface or internet connected anything while driving.
Either stuck in your ways, or want to save money. Streaming services are not free. Sure, it's a small amount but I simply don't want to add to my monthly costs. Still, streaming is much more convenient and in the short term, saves on disk space.
Which, as you allude to, is not guaranteed no matter what it says on the tin. Samsung is my go-to for that point. Not that features were half-assed, or kinda worked. No, having an icon on a screen does not count when what backs that icon doesn’t even pretend to do what it says. (To be specific, their fitness stuff was literally laughable in how broken or, lets be honest, how unimplemented it was.)
I think what gets missed is that the “Apple tax” (the “M$” for the 2000s, indicating the writer is to be ignored) is actually the “not a broken POS, and does what you thought it would do” convenience fee. Oh, sure, there’s Pixel and the like if you don’t like Apple. Last I looked, you’ll still pay the “Apple tax” even if it goes to Google.
And I swear, the next neckbeard ranting about how people don’t how their tech works either better take public transit to work, be ready to rattle off the Otto cycle used by their ICE car, or STFU.
After re-reading the blog, I feel a bit bad about the negativity I and others expressed here. If you do read this xylon, don’t take it to heart! Also thanks for sharing your circuit, it certainly provoked an interesting discussion.
It's a well documented issue. Maybe your headphones and/or ears just aren't sensitive enough to notice the issue. Plenty of people don't see the difference between flac and 240p youtube uploads, after all.
Hmm, did you make the 240p vs FLAC strawman deliberately? Or is the bug (as you're able to reproduce it) really that bad? I know OP was using high-end headphones but I expected at least a slight hissle.
(My attempts to reproduce were with a PX80, S2PGFY-003, JBL Pulse and Bose Companion 50. I included the speakers because I couldn't get the headphones to do the trick)
I'm not sure why Apple is receiving any sort of praise here. I was constantly assaulted by an "explosion of noise" glitch when working with Logic Pro in OS X. I could have the system volume level set to the lowest possible setting (25% of 1 notch), and yet I'd still occasionally get deafening explosions of noise as if I had the system volume set to the full 16 notches. The explosion is just short enough that there's zero chance of you having any hope of ripping your headphones off as quickly as possible to spare your hearing. No, by the time you hear the explosion, it's already too late. I did in fact start losing my hearing from this and completely gave up on making music.
That sounds like a hardware problem or drivers issue. If it was a software problem, why give up on music when there are other options both free and paid like Reaper, Ableton, etc. which run perfectly fine?
I have not had any of the issues you are complaining about in Logic Pro X, FWIW, on multiple laptops and hardware audio interfaces over ~6 years of use.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Followed by:
> APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS
So iPhone users don’t know how their phone works, but Android is awesome because it’s open source and the freedom you get with that but it’s too complicated to learn how it works.
Yes okay, its about having the choice and the option. Its rooted in the fundamental instinct to cling to freedom and seek it out.
Even if you don't make a choice, having the option to is still empowering, because the absence of a choice tells you someone else made it for you.
For many, that could be the same choice they would have made. That doesn't give any condolence to those who would have made a different one, but weren't given the option.
I understand the need for people to feel like they have a choice by using free software (the choice to modify it if they want to), but at this point it is just an illusion unless you are prepared to dedicate a huge amount of time. If you practically couldn’t do it even if you wanted to, does it still mean you have a choice?
It’s a different time today than it was 40 years ago when RMS modified printer drivers, and software is much more complicsted than it used to be.
Totally depends on what you're thinking of modifying and how you want to modify it. Some experience gained through one modification also carries over to others, even when done on different programs. I've done modifications that only take a few minutes, and I have my systems setup so it's really, really easy to pick a package by name to modify it and distribute the mods to all my machines, complete with version control. I very much appreciate the ability to modify the free software I use.
Theres a degree of philanthropy to free software contribution. Yes, there are often hacks and workarounds for problems in code that don't require dedicating the substantial time to learn a codebase and fix the problem forever, but if you do fix it you aren't fixing it only for yourself, but for everyone else who encounters that problem.
I've made dozens of contributions to esoteric projects - from music players to game emulators to HTML template libraries. It does take a ridiculous amount of upfront reading of code to become comfortable enough with the environment to make the change, but I at least only try to fix problems I see as impacting more people than just myself.
Sometimes I wish it were easier to just sit down, take the highest rated bug on a project, and spend all the time it would take to fix it. Its a shame I wasn't lucky enough to be born into wealth so I could just do that all the time. So instead I hope to get there sooner rather than later, where I can amass enough wealth to stop wasting my time on CRUD apps for some business interest and actually do something meaningful.
> Sometimes I wish it were easier to just sit down, take the highest rated bug on a project, and spend all the time it would take to fix it. Its a shame I wasn't lucky enough to be born into wealth so I could just do that all the time. So instead I hope to get there sooner rather than later, where I can amass enough wealth to stop wasting my time on CRUD apps for some business interest and actually do something meaningful.
This really hits the nail on the head.
Since I became a father of three, my time priorities have shifted quite a lot, and I’d rather spend it with my kids than nose in code that should work but isn’t.
A perfect example is trying to get Nextcloud or Lychee working. After literaly days trying to get it working right, I just gave up. All I want is to share pictures of my kids with my family, but due to bugs or config, I have to wade through someone else’s code?
Philantropy is for someone else’s benefit. If it was just at my expense, that would be one thing, but it’s at the expense of my kids too. And that’s something I can’t justify.
Heh, I’ve had a Bluetooth set of earbuds from JBL for about 2 years and they’ve been providing great sound (and are really convenient as I work like an auto electrician a lot of the time and I can leave my phone in the toolbox). A good alternative perhaps besides building a portable amplifier.
I bought a Bluetooth speaker a couple of months ago. Sounds great, but if I watch a video, the sound is lagging. I thought about to get Bluetooth headphones, but after that experience I think, I just stay with cables.
To ensure (kind of) that your BT speaker/headphones will be able to work with video, check they implement "AptX low latency".
However, as they mention in the video, there are lots of ways this could fail: application playback issue, BT transmitter issue (although anything from the last few years should be able to handle this properly) or receiver issue (the most likely cause in older or cheap speakers).
Since you have two channels that source current (L and R) it makes sense to have two parallel op-amps for the GND pin to have the same slew rate & maximum current, as both L and R channels return current through the GND line (I would assume).
I am curious as to why it needs any circuitry on the ground line - would a direct connection not work? (I guess I am assuming that L, R and ground are the only connections made to the headphones.) Do the amplifiers put a DC bias on the L and R outputs that needs to be matched on the ground, and if so, would a capacitor in series with the L and R outputs not be enough to isolate it?
You could just use the middle connection between the two batteries as a ground. I'm not sure why he didn't do it. Perhaps so that the whole thing works longer even if one of the batteries is discharged faster. That would be my guess.
As it stands, 40% of its 23mA current draw is through the 1kΩ x 2 voltage divider... Now I am wondering if a circuit with the between-battery link connected to ground would risk damaging the op amps (or phones) if only one battery was in?
You can't really replace android-media-player-service on your phone with your patched version without replacing the whole OS and losing (among other things) automated security updates and OEM stuff... so I can see how a hardware fix is easier. The system of <phone> -- <headphones> is more modular.
I've had this problem a lot with sensitive in-ear headphones. I guess it is a problem of dynamic range - the same amplifier has to drive insensitive and sensitive headphones, so to avoid being too quiet on the insensitive ones (definitely noticeable) they make them super-loud at the cost of easily audible noise when you're using sensitive headphones on low volume.
I actually bought Google's active USB-C audio dongle to solve this for my Mi A1. It works, but I think USB-C is not a good port for headphones. It isn't robust enough - if you wiggle it around as if it were in your pocket you easily get glitches.
a. What in these files triggers the explosion of noise (and whether other people have run into this or the author would mind sharing a representative problem file).
b. Whether an output attenuator (or "resistor") would work to quiet the noise (edit: the hiss, not the explosion) without a powered circuit.
a: I had a similar issue on my Sandisk player and it was due to corrupt data on the SD. Formatting it then copying back the files from a backup solved the problem. the author's problem is different though; it seems his player doesn't like some files although they appear to be undamaged. I agree it's probably a bug in the decoder.
b: a voltage divider would attenuate everything so the listener would end up raising the volume and the noise explosions would be unaffected. In my experience those noises are much louder than the music even at its louder peak, so a limiter would work better. A limiter is a circuit which let the audio signal unaffected up to a given level, then if necessary it starts limiting it to keep it to maximum that level. The limiter should be set up to trigger only with levels above the maximum original audio signal, so that although the noises wouldn't disappear, they would be confined to a lower level with the original signal left untouched.
Ah, I missed the hissing part. Apparently he gets that noise only from a CD player, and that noise is constant through all song and unaffected by volume settings. That would mean the audio section of that player is really noisy and/or possibly the volume control has been put in the wrong place, for example too far (circuit wise, not distance) from the power amplifier section.
When connecting multiple stages together care must be taken to minimize noise. Besides careful design and choosing low noise parts, some practices can at least reduce the perceived noise even on noisy devices, for example by putting the volume control just before the power amplifier. This ensures that when the user lowers the volume the noise generated by previous stages gets also lowered along the signal.
I don't have this issue on my Android phone (G5+) but I did have a very similar issue on my laptop (XPS 9350) where there was lots of line noise whenever the power management turned off the audio chipset.
So I wonder if it's something with this specific phone?
Hi, this isn't related to the parent comment, but I'm wondering why you went through all this effort, which you don't seem to have enjoyed, just to be able to listen to music at home but not at your desk. Isn't all the stuff you have pretty bulky to be carrying around? Not to mention the portable CD player probably skips if you're walking around with it somehow in a pocket.
It seems like all of this could be solved with some bookshelf speakers. You can hook up your portable CD player or browse Craigslist/Goodwill for an older HDCD player that'll run higher sampling rates and queue up multiple CDs, have music for cooking/cleaning/exercising. Maybe even get a Chromecast Audio and have effortless streaming.
Boy does this person need to look at the ‘good headphone’ market.
I paid (a very reasonable) $2k for a set of reference headphones and a suitable amp/DAC to drive them.
I could have spent a lot more.
It is hard to drive a set of headphones with enough SQ to make them worthwhile.
You cannot plug a set of headphones into an Android phone and expect anything good to happen. And lots of DAPs suffer from software problems as well (lots of them are Android based...).
Getting good sound from a portable device, without software issues, is really only solved at the top end of the market ($700 - $4000).
It’s a bit easier if you want to use a computer as a source but far from cheap.
A $100 amp and good headphones do the job just fine. The current generation of phones has very high quality DACs, beyond what was considered top of the line for premium audio players 5-10 years ago.
I used to plug my AKG k702s (which are maybe not 'audiophile' $2k headphones, but are good enough) into a pixel 1 without any issues.
Alas after an 'upgrade' to a pixel 3 after I crushed the first one against the deck while sailing, I had to buy a bluetooth dac and that doesn't seem to do as well.
I've tried a few different pairs and the pricepoint where sound quality becomes "good enough" seems to be somewhere around ~£35. If you want a microphone too, bump that up to ~£50.
My _purely anecdotal_ experience is that cheaper headphones tend to work well for pop music, likely because their reproduction range is bass heavy. Sadly the moment you want to add podcasts into the mix, the balance is off. Spoken word just sounds stuffy.
When I'm not on the move, you can pry my AKG K270 off my cold, dead hands.
Did you try any more expensive ones? If not, how can you compare? I don't think you know what you're missing. From my experience, you realize how bad cheap ones are is when you try something better. For example, I thought AKG Y20 sounded pretty good before getting the chinese TFZ series 2, which are just so much 'more'. I am aware that those tfz are also lower range (~45$ on aliexpress). I also own a pair of Beyer DT770 80ohm 100 eur headphones and those are something else, esp when I had a Focusrite Saffire to drive them. Of course there is a price point after which it gets harder to notice improvement. But only after trying out different types and price points do you start to understand what sounds good and what you actually like. For me, all cheaper ones just sound muddy or like the sound is trapped in some box or tin, and I also notice sounds and instruments missing in songs I know well.
If I'll enjoy my current ones less after trying more expensive ones, isn't that a reason not to try them?
I do see a difference between the branded ones I've used (mostly Panasonic and the Samsung AKG one that comes with phones) and the cheaper generic ones I've tried out here and there
For example, I couldn't tell the difference between some ~100$ and "reference" ~1000$ headphones, so I am not the person to buy high end DACs, fancy shielded cables or whatnot. But I like some thumping bass and clarity in the top end. It's therapeutic for me to have an immersive experience where the sound just floats around you, sort of 3d vs flat.
Same here. I've found that cheap (£10-15) sony "ear-plug"-style ones [1] have been really surprisingly good for just wandering around shops and listening to pod casts or some music on my phone. Not worth paying more IMO since they get lost, or you lose one of the silicon-bits, or the wires get lose fairly frequently.
There are some very crap ear buds around (e.g. Norwegian Air's freebie handout ones are quite possibly the worst things I have ever used), but I was pleasantly surprised by the sony ones. No relation - just a satisfied customer.
If you're over 12 you just wasted some money. Your ears are going downhill pretty much from the day you are born. Really good audio equipment is wasted on almost every adult.
> It is hard to drive a set of headphones with enough SQ to make them worthwhile.
I disagree. Most headphones are really easy to drive, including many high end ones. And DIY builders are making perfectly good & cheap amps using parts that have been available for more than two decades now. Parts that used to make it in stereos and other off the self supermarket stuff.
I'm more than happy to plug my AKG K812 to laptops (such as a thinkpad T460s), android phones (such as LG G4, One Plus 6), portable media players (such as the Cowon D2). My Sennheiser HD650s, HD800s, and AKG K701s are generally plugged to external DACs and amps mainly because I use them at the desk (or with my music gear). But I've tried all of them on various consumer gear and many of them can deliver good sound. The Sennheisers, however, can be a little too quiet with some of the portable devices.
What the author of the linked story here is complaining about is the race to the absolutely garbage bottom (though it isn't nearly as bad for people with less sensitive phones).
Converting an electric signal into mechanical movement takes energy. Thus, current needs to flow from the audio amplifier in the CD player to the headphones. In electronic terms: the headphones have a low impedance (AC resistance).
Due to a poorly designed circuit in the CD player, noise is introduced when current flows. So the more current is flowing, the more noise. Driving a dynamic load is not hard, it has been solved for a long time. The vendor just chose a poor design, probably to shave a couple tenths of a cent from the material bill.
A proper designed amplifier requires very little current (ideally none) on the input. In electronic terms: the amplifier has a high impedance. Thus the amplifier causes very little noise when connected to the cheap CD player.
The OP build a better amplifier that causes less noise when current is drawn from it, so using that results in a better quality sound.
I'm no EE, but dynamic headphones (i.e. 99.5% of them) have a generally high impedance (relative to earphones) and require a higher voltage to operate. Add to that the fact that they are a mostly inductive load, and you get the recipe for a hard to drive device, that requires a high voltage paired with an strong inductive kickback
I love how people can do this type of stuff. Whenever I get out the soldering iron to fix any problems, I face a 50% chance of success against 50% chance of fucking it beyond repair. Well, I guess it fixes it in both cases...
> I do not have to pay a tax to apple to listen to my music.
Well, neither do I to be fair. I seriously dislike iTunes but it can take more input than just the store..
Regardless of the official Music player app there are third party ones, some of which are super simple (presenting a http upload on the network and allowing playback of uploaded media) or, in my case, Plex (with a plex pass for local sync)
I think his point was less about the purchasing ecosystem for the music and more about the premium for the hardware/OS/brand/accessories/what-have-you required to play any music at all.
Though, seriously, if I can throw a little bit extra (shockingly not a lot, compared to similar modern Android offerings) at my phone and not have this kind of basic problem and, presumably, other basic problems of a similar nature then there is a tipping point of efficiency that isn’t terribly far away.
Interesting point buried in here: since Android is open source, you could go in and fix the bug, but then because you're not running an official Android version you'd lose access to the Play Store and other services. Something's not really free if there's a penalty for doing it. Since freedom to run a modified version of software yourself is one of the four freedoms of free software, this highlights the difference between free software and open source.
I'm not saying open source is bad and everyone should prefer free software. It's just a good example of the difference between the two in practice rather than in some debate about licenses and the abstract principles behind them.
Apparently Play Store is unaffected, but some other apps - banking, streaming, even Pokemon Go - will break. And your warranty (including hardware) is voided. So I stand corrected, and thank you, but I don't think the correction affects the main point.
Those apps are making a conscious decision to exclude phones/roms not certified by Google. That's their choice.
Generally hardware warranty will remain if it's purely a hardware issue - you can always flash back anyway.
Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions. If app vendors choose to discriminate against those versions that doesn't make it unfree any more than software supporting windows and not Linux makes Linux unfree
> Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions.
I don't think that's enough to make it free software, and "free software in the sense..." is nonsensical. Free software would guarantee the continuance of that freedom. Since that guarantee doesn't exist, Google could place limitations on the Play Store at any time. The fact that they haven't makes the example less clear, but it doesn't make Android free software. Even Google doesn't claim that it is.
No, only for apps that value certified behavior over accessibility. Typically this is payments (high liability for fraud, higher fraud rates from non-certified users), DRM, and multiplayer gaming (prevent cheating).
The problem with this is that the bootloader is now becoming more and more locked down and the consumers have to jump ever more hoops to unlock it.
Some years ago I had Samsung S2 where unlocking the bootloader was an offline activity. I don't remember how but doing that was quick and easy. Now I own a MotoG4 where unlocking means going to some website, entering my email address and then receiving unlock code in my email. If Motorola knows my email address, or can link the (supposedly unique) unlock code to my phone, what's stopping them from voiding my warranty?
I have a hunch that newer versions of some mainstream phones do not allow unlocking the bootloader, and this is going to become more and more common.
It’s not legal to void your warranty because you changed some software, unless the software change actually caused the problem you’re trying to get fixed under warranty.
> It’s not legal to void your warranty because you changed some software, unless the software change actually caused the problem you’re trying to get fixed under warranty.
Because that debate tends to get very contentious. It's an important debate to have, but I've already been in it many times and watched it even more so I'm not particularly in the mood to go through it this morning.
there is open source and open source thru google's gates.
on the later you submit patches, they will be included in the next 2 to 3 versions of public release (if they dont't add any feature that impacts google's ad bottom line, for example, adding any sort of referrer control to chrome), then you have to hope that in those 2-3 version cycle your device is still supported, now you just have to wait for the convenient over the ait update provided by your telco or phone manufacturer (in most cases you actually need both entities to take part)
That's not Google's gates, that's the OEM's and the ISP's. Google can only control that for their own devices, and the Nexuses have always been some of the most modded ones.
Google own the merge rigths, and what goes into each version. and their process timings ensure that by the time you patch is out, your device is not getting updates anymore (update timeframe that they set both in contract with oem or via "example" via their nexus series)
What merge rights? You can build Android yourself and install it directly on your phone, and let others do the same - unless if the OEM's and ISP's gates prevent you.
unless "your device" is the emulator, there is no way to get hold of drivers or firmware for anything other than lifting them of an blessed rom ... and only if you can get the parity you need with the kernel you are using.
there's a very good reason the "supported device list" of all forks is always very, very small (even with the outlandish claims on most of them such as "supported. touch screen and modem still not working" )
just becuase the build steps for your fork project automates some of that driver/kernel lifting, doesn't make it any better.
So if I make a proprietary application that only runs on, say, Ubuntu, does that mean GNU/Linux is no longer really free, since you can't replace your distro with Arch without losing access to my application?
> does that mean GNU/Linux is no longer really free
I'd say it's a bit of a different situation, since the two are not being designed to work together and aren't even being developed by the same people. If the Ubuntu developers made your proprietary app key to the useful running of the system, which is the more exact analogy, then I'd say yeah, they would have made it non-free.
Mobile technology moves so fast Android can't keep up with the support of all hardware out there, so you can't simply buy any smartphone and expect everything to work with the latest Android release.
Were would that go? The author doesn't seem too keen on actually soldering on the inside of the devices, and they all give analogue out. Maybe you meant an amp?
A USB DAC connected to the old-laptop maybe? I have one on a Mini-PC that's the player for my music library - totally moved the digital-to-analogue conversion out of the noisy PC, and results in really clean audio. Obviously you get what you pay for - a £20 DAC wont do a very good job, but a £100 one will be good enough for most people.
> _It turns out that all music players on Android actually play music using the Android-media-player-service._
This is inaccurate. Neutron music player bypasses Android's Media Player APIs and talks directly to your DAC and plays music without resampling (if the DAC supports it). Never had any audio popping or explosions using Neutron, and I've tried it on 6 different devices so far without any issues (LG G3, Nexus 6P, Nextbit Robin, OnePlus 3, Note 8, OnePlus 6). My headphones are a Beyerdynamic DT880.
I've never had any problems with "explosions" using standard media players, even when plugged into my HD650s - anyone else have that happen?
HN is mostly engineering types, the poster clearly has that mindset, we should be filing or looking for a proper bug report for this instead of crafting hacks or talking about alternative products altogether right off the bat.
> we should be filing or looking for a proper bug report for this instead of crafting hacks or talking about alternative products altogether right off the bat
As if Google even considers reading any bug reports ... :(
The downside of that is, of course, greater battery consumption. MediaPlayer API will offload music playing to a separate DSP (if available) and that allows the main application processor to go to sleep. There is some nuance here, but that usually significantly reduces battery consumption while playing music with the screen off.
Could’ve spent $199 on an iPod, have high quality audio, load your own music, no “apple tax”.
Coincidentally I was looking for something like an ipod shuffle this week and it’s become almost impossible to find, beyond some cheap thrift-store MP3 players.
I was getting tired of replacing batteries in another device
and after some searching located the SanDisk Clip Sport. It was also only around $40. USB rechargeable, FM radio, and a micro SD card for my music. I've been very happy with it.
Ah, I miss my good ol' Sandisk Sansa Clip+. This device with rockbox firmware and a MicroSD-Card had an amazing interface, enough storage for lots of music, supporting FLAC and other lossless formats, all while being small, lightweight and providing high audio quality. For about 40 bucks.
There's actually quite a bunch of less than $199 solutions (and also not requiring a soldering iron) the OP could also have used to achieve a good experience listening to music.
One solution would have been to just buy that 15 year old hardware he talks about, a lot of older digital music players still just work, I have a bunch of them. Or an external soundcard for a laptop. Or stream music from phone to a Raspberry Pi with a DAC. Or a portable CD player which doesn't hiss.
Most modern laptops have more than decent audio output, but if more quality is needed one could buy a small external sound card for a lot less than €100.
This one for example would fit easily in a notebook bag.
https://www.thomann.de/gb/miditech_audiolink_light.htm
About the article circuit, I 'm not that sure the 5532 is a good part for headphone amps, unless the phones have a high impedance and resistance: they're intended as preamplifiers (and very good ones) so they hardly can supply the current to fully drive phones, though I guess they can still be ok for listening to soft jazz in a quiet room:)
Regarding the op amp selection, he just used them because he had them lying around.
"If you wanted best possible sound you'd use some actual audio op-amps rather than these cheap NE5532P. And buffer the output of the op-amps somehow. But of-course size and cost balloons if you start adding buffers and stuff."
What I like about his project how he simply used a couple magnets to hold the lid on. Microsoft did something similar on my keyboard, but I don't know that it is something used much on DIY projects like this.
The headphones themselves sound pretty good. But when playing over bluetooth sometimes compression artefacts are audible. The artefacts are caused by the bluetooth protocol for stereo audio itself, so you're going to hear them even if you play FLAC files.
Also latency is pretty horrible. 200 ms+, enough to be obvious.
I think those are what I have at work. I'm quite sure they do a bunch of stuff of DSP/EQing to make them sound better than they are. When you turn the power off and use them as normal headphones they're mediocre at best.
My last three Android phones (two Motorola and an HTC) have excellent sound from their headphone jacks. I use my phone and two iPads on a regular basis with headphones, and I've never heard pops between tracks or noticeable hiss with any of them.I
I write audio software on embedded Linux devices for a living. I know what clicks and pops between tracks sound like, and usually why they happen. But I don't think this guy's two-op-amo buffer is doing what he thinks it's doing.
Likewise - never experienced any of these issues from any android phones I've had (mainly nexuses and pixels, but some old HTC things years and years ago), both wired and via bluetooth.
For < $100, I got a USB device which is a DAC+PreAmp+HeadphoneAmp which works great with all Androids, iPhones and computers. I didn't have to solder or breadboard.
I’ll happily pay the “apple tax” so I can live my life and not have to deal with all the bullshit you did just to listen to some music. Good lord. I’d rather experience the world then mess around with the tech that’s supposed to be helping me live better.
It’s amusing to still hear “Apple tax” in 2018, as if there is no additional value in better hardware, software and support for many people’s use cases.
If anything, the 'Apple tax' is greater in 2018 than it has ever been.
I say this as having owned 3 Macs for the last 10 years. 4-8 years ago, the gap between Apple and the rest was so stark, it seemed paying for a premium Apple product was a no-brainer.
Even Linus got a Macbook air because the hardware was such a leap ahead.
Not only has the gap closed, Apple have been left behind, with inferior build quality in key areas (keyboards). This has coincided with raising prices further.
The 'Apple tax' is now a real phenomenon, not just the price of premium.
I know. The choice of Apple vs. Android is a trade-off, as is the choice of Apple vs. Microsoft/Windows 10. It all depends on what's most important to you and what makes most sense.
For me, at the moment, in my personal life Apple makes more sense. I wish it made more sense at work because Windows 10 drives me nearly crazy, but it doesn't, so I stick with Microsoft's offering for now.
I always thought of the apple-tax not as the cost of the product but the additional costs, like fifty dollar dongles because the new version doesn't use the same connectors as the old, or being forced to use iTunes, itself a montrosity of painful design, to put some mp3s on your mp3 player. As far as I can tell, Apple still charges $50 for a $2 wire dongle.
> It’s amusing to still hear “Apple tax” in 2018, as if there is no additional value in better hardware, software and support for many people’s use cases.
Being a golden cage, I would not argue that it is better software.
Is another 8gb of RAM or 128gb of storage worth $200 each? I guess it is when you have no option to upgrade it after purchase. Apple doesn't do the decency to give you proper hardware either, opting for previous generation processors and a keyboard who's reliability is still up in the air even after their third attempt. Apple is further undermining their lofty pricepoint each product release.
That's such a straw-man it hurts. You're concluding, from the fact that a user has found one obscure bug, that android is a broken mess that only Arch Linux types should dare mess with, while Apple products are bastions of stability. The reality is that Apple products are (it appears) no more bug-free than the rest.
Have you tried testing this very same thing on an iPhone? Maybe it even has the same bug!
Is it really "such a straw man"? Serious question, I'm trying to figure it out. The part about "just to listen to some music" is definitely exaggerating, since OP wants to listen to music and relax. Also, GP doesn't recognize that the tech that's supposed to be helping them live better may not be doing that by OPs standards. Is that what you're talking about? I did think what OP went through could be considered a lot of bullshit though.
Also, by the way, aren't you doing something similar? Exaggerating about GP's regard for android/apple; GP simply said they would rather pay a tax than go through what OP did. Am I mistaken? Though yes, in this case the apple tax may not even have helped.
The above comment is reacting directly to a quote in the article, not jumping to any new conclusions.
“If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.”
Hey now! I had been using Arch and Debian om different machines. All non-prod machines have since been moved to Arch because I was having more issues with Debian. Granted I require running the newest stable software, but the act of getting that software onto my Debian machines was breaking other things. Arch? Never had to mess with anything I didn't want to mess with (I use i3 and write most of my own utilities)!
Not really. I made that choice. I also run/ran the exact same setup on my Debian machines. Could use my wife's machine as an example. Runs Arch, uses Plasma for a WM and never has any problems.
I don't doubt it. I use i3 & arch at home and have for almost a decade without problems. I use i3 and debian at work and enjoy it far less. I'm merely stating that your exactly the kind of person that likes to tinker with things and is likely not just going to accept defaults.
Seriously, people, do you get paid for this marketing in every topic that doesn't directly concern Apple? You didn't even seem to read the article to understand it.
> I’ll happily pay the “apple tax” so I can live my life and not have to deal with all the bullshit you did just to listen to some music.
This. All of this. The author calls apples products pretentious and berates anyone who owns one for not knowing how their phone works. You know what? I don't give a flying fk about knowing how my phone works. I have a million other things to worry about in this world. It doesn't make me pretentious to spend extra to have an experience I don't have to think about.
> Shame Maplin closed because now I have to order parts off the internet and WAIT.
Local electronics shops are indispensable when you get a whim to make a curious solution to your particular problem. By the time the parts get to you, you just can't help but think how much easier it would have been to just buy something and just feel dumb.
I had to dish out for Audioquests Dragonfly red just so I could enjoy my headphones on pc. The audio quality is really good but I can't really endorse that as the general go-to solution since the price is quite steep. Would not go back, though.
To discharge the capacitor when he turns the thing off in a controlled fashion?
Otherwise the current will slowly leak through the zener diode and the 100kohm resitor and the capacitor will stay charged. So when he turns the thing on the next time it would not do the expected timed battery charge indication he wants.
I saw similar problems creating music and sounds: having “good” audio hardware means that every sound flaw you have is now obvious and annoying. I had to be much more careful. Frankly, good sound production and programming are both underrated, they are not trivial.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 334 ms ] threadI enjoyed reading this. The whole time I thought however: that’s not an issue on my Apple devices. Then I read:
> If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.
Well, at least it usually simply works.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Judging by the awful 'random' I would suspect not. (I havent used it I some time so it might have been fixed, but you used to get clustering of tracks from a given album)
Would I be able to fix just the media player service, and make my smartphone use the fixed version? Without flashing it with a brand new OS, losing data, warranty, OEM drivers, and ability to receive security updates? Didn't think so. Android "open source" delivers only half of the expected value.
The HW-solution is a nice challenge, but I am sure, there are simpler ways to solve it.
On a sidenote: I would be surprised if the issue he has is systemic too Android devices in general. I am sure others would have noticed it if was that widespread that it occurred on all devices.
Not necessarily a bad thing, though, but in such case he might as well drop the complaining tone.
This also leads into his statement. I own an iPhone and I kinda know what's going on beneath the surface. I can open up disassembled binaries and anyone can look at the headers from google within seconds.
That in turn would lead into that 99.9% of Android users have no knowledge of how Android works, so his whole statement is kind of odd.
Meanwhile, Apple produces things that work comparatively well, doing what you expect and then, claims that reasonable functionality is premium. And then catches shit for being pretentious.
So, let's step through that once more:
The author simultaneously complains that nothing works, but refutes using the only thing that works because it represents training wheels that are too fashionable and ostentatious.We can have nice things because that's for babies, and also too overtly glamorous and bougie.
I just want shit that works out of the box sometimes. I also don't need X-Files alien logos and red backlit Hunt For Red October themes everywhere. And oh yeah, let's not get started on OEM spyware masquerading as harmless adware. (Cough! Lenovo! [0] Cough! Intel Management Engine! [1] Cough!)
[0] https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/Security-Malware/Malware-preloa...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Management_Engine#Securi...
Will someone other than Apple please step up to the fucking plate and not just dump trash onto the shelves at Best Buy?
I recently got a £20 Havit Bluetooth receiver and connected it to a pair of £70 Sony MDR-7506 headphones. The receiver drives the headphones louder and with less distortion than my iPhone can, and the battery lasts for a few days of intermittent listening. Whatever loss is introduced by the aptX coding is invisible to my ears.
I'm blown away by how good this setup is given the price and there shouldn't be any dependency on an expensive source device to run it.
Absolutely not true.
https://www.kenrockwell.com/apple/lightning-adapter-audio-qu...
I... don't. His write-up doesn't inspire confidence either - I have no idea how he has performed the measurements.
I know enough to know that audio measurement is a very tricky endeavour, and most other measurements put the lightning adaptor's output at a few dBA worse in SNR and dynamic range than the iPhone 6S' jack output (but otherwise similar). Both are easily worse than a good external DAC. Certainly not "better quality" than the inbuilt option as Rockwell claims.
It's good enough for almost everyone, and is likely to be capable of higher fidelity than most source material, but most agree that it is objectively a worse DA.
Yet the MacBook connects to everything on the first go with zero fuss.
So yeah, I am calling part of Apple's functions and devices interoperable. Why aren't you? These are observable facts in the wild and it happens every day somewhere around you as well.
I know my experience is anecdotal. So is yours. Just shared what I've observed 30+ times now.
You act like Apple devices do not contain IME?
I got my first Mac when the Mac mini came up. It was a little more expensive than same-generation PCs but besides being OSX it was a PowerPC that never made any fan noise, and was small. I've subsequently had three Macbooks and two iPhones - but I can't afford this somewhat-better-somewhat-more-expensive racket anymore. Prices have risen too much; to boot, the quality gulf between Macs and garden-variety Dells and Acers has pretty much crashed. Macbooks have had multiple problematic years now; iPhones did away with headphone jacks; and OSX peaked at 10.6.8, where it indeed was five years into the future - but Windows 10 is decent now and even has the whole Unix toolkit with WSL.
- I agree Apple pricing has gone out of control. I should not have to shell out 1500 EUR for a 256GB phone with a bigger display no matter what (XS Max). I mean okay, it's probably the best phone out there but come on. It's a mobile computing device, not a life's insurance bill.
- I fully agree MacBooks and desktop Macs haven't had good years in a while. IMO the MacBook Pro 2015 15" was Apple's laptop peak. They haven't produced anything worthwhile in the laptop departments ever since.
- Desktop Macs are a horrid mess where greed trumps everything else so much that even I who spent 6 figures on tech during my life cannot justify paying 5000 EUR for an iMac 27" 5K with maxed out specs (i7 CPU, 64GB RAM and 1 or 2TB SSD). Right now your only viable choice for a future-proof machine however is either the iMac 27" or the iMac Pro, and both are expensive as hell.
- macOS version, not sure, I started actively using it only a year or so ago so it feels quite good to me and is tons more predictable than Windows 10. You have to fight with Windows 10 to make it your own and not be barraged with popups. macOS in comparison stays out of the way.
---
To summarize, Apple has peaked, including in the smartphone and tablet departments. Upgrades are very smallish and iterative while the price tags remain huge.
The way I see it, Apple has been coasting for a while. They need to get back on track because inevitably somebody will try and displace them.
(As a random example, Xiaomi phones are probably the best physical designs and software experience I ever had. But I still don't trust Google's binary blobs and the general baseband processor stuff so I stay away from Android.)
Why do you trust the Apple ones then? At least on android you can get rid of most Google code with Lineage + microg
...as far as we know. What about the baseband processor that has access to everything at any time?
> Why do you trust the Apple ones then?
Becase they took a stand and refused to introduce a security backdoor in the FBI San Bernardino case. And because iPhone hacks cost more on the net compared to Android ones. This to me indicates that iPhones are harder to crack -- so the demand is higher, suppy is lower and thus the prices are higher.
All circumstantial evidence of course, but it's what we have to go on.
Maybe it means they are finding more bugs and fixing them, or maybe it means Android is basically security Swiss cheese. my money is on the latter.
I am a former flashing-ROMs fanboy but the truth is, you are either stuck on ancient kernels or sometimes part with functionality you prefer to still have (like rooting).
I gave up, eventually.
Yes, we're lucky that a lot of people in the world are not in a position to fight for higher quality of life for the resources coming out of the land near them or their labor, nor do we have to pay for environmental damage from manufacture and disposal of our devices, otherwise it would be much more than 1,500 EUR.
The "premium" only applies to new products. The author here tried using a CD player, so the storage (and novelty) requirements are pretty low. A $5 used iPod would work just fine.
She might be able to find headphones that sound better, but she has never found any that also are comfortable and have good industrial design. At least not in the price range that Beats typically sell for.
If the standard is garbage, then functionality is premium.
Drinking the Apple hate juice in particular.
I envy the people who have the free time to tinker but what they keep forgetting, time and time again, is that they are the minority. Many people have happy family lives and prefer to spend most of their leisure time with people -- or non-tech hobbies. I do enough programming already, thank you.
(EDIT to add: and not everybody is in perfect health shape as well, so they use their free time to recharge -- not to work some more. Stress and overworking come with an army of health issues. Climbing a hill with a 50kg backpack, to give an analogy, is not as easy as it looks like from the side.)
I respect smart hardware technicians but he lost me as an audience with his Apple hate.
[P.S. "I do enough programming already, thank you." doesn't help as well. To get an idea of how sad it is to read, imagine if someone tells an artist "I do enough painting already, thank you.". People love to do different things, and that is okay.]
As for my programming, I actually do some small work outside of work hours on my own enthusiastic basis. But I have to tell you, even this minor 4-5h a week thing took me years of recharging and healing before I felt the passion for the first time in years and years.
(As an aside, we the techies need non-tech hobbies but that's just an opinion.)
It's not even keeping up with current music; as I go from my early to my late 30s, the pop landscape has gone from parseable to alien. But there's still good music coming out and older good music you didn't know about. Hell, I only discovered the gigantic German composer Paul Hindemith six months ago.
Except newer iPhones requiring a dongle to use headphones.
Is this guy for real? I don’t know the nitty gritty of how most of the things I use work, I’m only concerned that they work. Sounds like sour grapes.
Which, as you allude to, is not guaranteed no matter what it says on the tin. Samsung is my go-to for that point. Not that features were half-assed, or kinda worked. No, having an icon on a screen does not count when what backs that icon doesn’t even pretend to do what it says. (To be specific, their fitness stuff was literally laughable in how broken or, lets be honest, how unimplemented it was.)
I think what gets missed is that the “Apple tax” (the “M$” for the 2000s, indicating the writer is to be ignored) is actually the “not a broken POS, and does what you thought it would do” convenience fee. Oh, sure, there’s Pixel and the like if you don’t like Apple. Last I looked, you’ll still pay the “Apple tax” even if it goes to Google.
And I swear, the next neckbeard ranting about how people don’t how their tech works either better take public transit to work, be ready to rattle off the Otto cycle used by their ICE car, or STFU.
At least, it sounds like he just likes being contrarian.
Android or Linux is not helping him much in this case, that's for sure.
(My attempts to reproduce were with a PX80, S2PGFY-003, JBL Pulse and Bose Companion 50. I included the speakers because I couldn't get the headphones to do the trick)
I have not had any of the issues you are complaining about in Logic Pro X, FWIW, on multiple laptops and hardware audio interfaces over ~6 years of use.
> Although Android is Free Software, meaning I can modify the code, it would probably take me months to learn enough about music decoding and the Android-media-player-service to write a fix.
Followed by:
> APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS
So iPhone users don’t know how their phone works, but Android is awesome because it’s open source and the freedom you get with that but it’s too complicated to learn how it works.
Okay.
Even if you don't make a choice, having the option to is still empowering, because the absence of a choice tells you someone else made it for you.
For many, that could be the same choice they would have made. That doesn't give any condolence to those who would have made a different one, but weren't given the option.
It’s a different time today than it was 40 years ago when RMS modified printer drivers, and software is much more complicsted than it used to be.
I've made dozens of contributions to esoteric projects - from music players to game emulators to HTML template libraries. It does take a ridiculous amount of upfront reading of code to become comfortable enough with the environment to make the change, but I at least only try to fix problems I see as impacting more people than just myself.
Sometimes I wish it were easier to just sit down, take the highest rated bug on a project, and spend all the time it would take to fix it. Its a shame I wasn't lucky enough to be born into wealth so I could just do that all the time. So instead I hope to get there sooner rather than later, where I can amass enough wealth to stop wasting my time on CRUD apps for some business interest and actually do something meaningful.
This really hits the nail on the head.
Since I became a father of three, my time priorities have shifted quite a lot, and I’d rather spend it with my kids than nose in code that should work but isn’t.
A perfect example is trying to get Nextcloud or Lychee working. After literaly days trying to get it working right, I just gave up. All I want is to share pictures of my kids with my family, but due to bugs or config, I have to wade through someone else’s code?
Philantropy is for someone else’s benefit. If it was just at my expense, that would be one thing, but it’s at the expense of my kids too. And that’s something I can’t justify.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYW4J6FyyZU
To ensure (kind of) that your BT speaker/headphones will be able to work with video, check they implement "AptX low latency".
However, as they mention in the video, there are lots of ways this could fail: application playback issue, BT transmitter issue (although anything from the last few years should be able to handle this properly) or receiver issue (the most likely cause in older or cheap speakers).
I actually bought Google's active USB-C audio dongle to solve this for my Mi A1. It works, but I think USB-C is not a good port for headphones. It isn't robust enough - if you wiggle it around as if it were in your pocket you easily get glitches.
a. What in these files triggers the explosion of noise (and whether other people have run into this or the author would mind sharing a representative problem file).
b. Whether an output attenuator (or "resistor") would work to quiet the noise (edit: the hiss, not the explosion) without a powered circuit.
b: a voltage divider would attenuate everything so the listener would end up raising the volume and the noise explosions would be unaffected. In my experience those noises are much louder than the music even at its louder peak, so a limiter would work better. A limiter is a circuit which let the audio signal unaffected up to a given level, then if necessary it starts limiting it to keep it to maximum that level. The limiter should be set up to trigger only with levels above the maximum original audio signal, so that although the noises wouldn't disappear, they would be confined to a lower level with the original signal left untouched.
b: Good point, but I just meant quieting the hiss that the author ended up solving with the op-amp circuit, not the 'explosions'.
So I wonder if it's something with this specific phone?
It seems like all of this could be solved with some bookshelf speakers. You can hook up your portable CD player or browse Craigslist/Goodwill for an older HDCD player that'll run higher sampling rates and queue up multiple CDs, have music for cooking/cleaning/exercising. Maybe even get a Chromecast Audio and have effortless streaming.
I paid (a very reasonable) $2k for a set of reference headphones and a suitable amp/DAC to drive them.
I could have spent a lot more.
It is hard to drive a set of headphones with enough SQ to make them worthwhile.
You cannot plug a set of headphones into an Android phone and expect anything good to happen. And lots of DAPs suffer from software problems as well (lots of them are Android based...).
Getting good sound from a portable device, without software issues, is really only solved at the top end of the market ($700 - $4000).
It’s a bit easier if you want to use a computer as a source but far from cheap.
Alas after an 'upgrade' to a pixel 3 after I crushed the first one against the deck while sailing, I had to buy a bluetooth dac and that doesn't seem to do as well.
I've tried a few different pairs and the pricepoint where sound quality becomes "good enough" seems to be somewhere around ~£35. If you want a microphone too, bump that up to ~£50.
My _purely anecdotal_ experience is that cheaper headphones tend to work well for pop music, likely because their reproduction range is bass heavy. Sadly the moment you want to add podcasts into the mix, the balance is off. Spoken word just sounds stuffy.
When I'm not on the move, you can pry my AKG K270 off my cold, dead hands.
I do see a difference between the branded ones I've used (mostly Panasonic and the Samsung AKG one that comes with phones) and the cheaper generic ones I've tried out here and there
There are some very crap ear buds around (e.g. Norwegian Air's freebie handout ones are quite possibly the worst things I have ever used), but I was pleasantly surprised by the sony ones. No relation - just a satisfied customer.
1 - https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/in-ear-headphones/mdr-ex1...
Have you done any blind testing against, for example, a $100-200 pair of headphones?
I disagree. Most headphones are really easy to drive, including many high end ones. And DIY builders are making perfectly good & cheap amps using parts that have been available for more than two decades now. Parts that used to make it in stereos and other off the self supermarket stuff.
I'm more than happy to plug my AKG K812 to laptops (such as a thinkpad T460s), android phones (such as LG G4, One Plus 6), portable media players (such as the Cowon D2). My Sennheiser HD650s, HD800s, and AKG K701s are generally plugged to external DACs and amps mainly because I use them at the desk (or with my music gear). But I've tried all of them on various consumer gear and many of them can deliver good sound. The Sennheisers, however, can be a little too quiet with some of the portable devices.
What the author of the linked story here is complaining about is the race to the absolutely garbage bottom (though it isn't nearly as bad for people with less sensitive phones).
Can anybody explain that please? What is this dynamic load whose driving is hard?
Due to a poorly designed circuit in the CD player, noise is introduced when current flows. So the more current is flowing, the more noise. Driving a dynamic load is not hard, it has been solved for a long time. The vendor just chose a poor design, probably to shave a couple tenths of a cent from the material bill.
A proper designed amplifier requires very little current (ideally none) on the input. In electronic terms: the amplifier has a high impedance. Thus the amplifier causes very little noise when connected to the cheap CD player.
The OP build a better amplifier that causes less noise when current is drawn from it, so using that results in a better quality sound.
Thanks! This was the missing part.
Well, neither do I to be fair. I seriously dislike iTunes but it can take more input than just the store..
Regardless of the official Music player app there are third party ones, some of which are super simple (presenting a http upload on the network and allowing playback of uploaded media) or, in my case, Plex (with a plex pass for local sync)
Though, seriously, if I can throw a little bit extra (shockingly not a lot, compared to similar modern Android offerings) at my phone and not have this kind of basic problem and, presumably, other basic problems of a similar nature then there is a tipping point of efficiency that isn’t terribly far away.
I'm not saying open source is bad and everyone should prefer free software. It's just a good example of the difference between the two in practice rather than in some debate about licenses and the abstract principles behind them.
https://www.google.com/android/uncertified/ just need to register here as of earlier this year apparently
Generally hardware warranty will remain if it's purely a hardware issue - you can always flash back anyway.
Android is free software in the sense that you can make and distribute modified versions. If app vendors choose to discriminate against those versions that doesn't make it unfree any more than software supporting windows and not Linux makes Linux unfree
I don't think that's enough to make it free software, and "free software in the sense..." is nonsensical. Free software would guarantee the continuance of that freedom. Since that guarantee doesn't exist, Google could place limitations on the Play Store at any time. The fact that they haven't makes the example less clear, but it doesn't make Android free software. Even Google doesn't claim that it is.
Play store isn't open source at all.
Amazon was able to take Android and put it on their extremely popular devices with 0 support from Google, no play store. That's what I call freedom
It is extremely well integrated into it, by design.
Isn’t the entire point of Google’s certification process to encourage app vendors to make that choice?
Some years ago I had Samsung S2 where unlocking the bootloader was an offline activity. I don't remember how but doing that was quick and easy. Now I own a MotoG4 where unlocking means going to some website, entering my email address and then receiving unlock code in my email. If Motorola knows my email address, or can link the (supposedly unique) unlock code to my phone, what's stopping them from voiding my warranty?
I have a hunch that newer versions of some mainstream phones do not allow unlocking the bootloader, and this is going to become more and more common.
Citation, please?
Why not?
on the later you submit patches, they will be included in the next 2 to 3 versions of public release (if they dont't add any feature that impacts google's ad bottom line, for example, adding any sort of referrer control to chrome), then you have to hope that in those 2-3 version cycle your device is still supported, now you just have to wait for the convenient over the ait update provided by your telco or phone manufacturer (in most cases you actually need both entities to take part)
there's a very good reason the "supported device list" of all forks is always very, very small (even with the outlandish claims on most of them such as "supported. touch screen and modem still not working" )
just becuase the build steps for your fork project automates some of that driver/kernel lifting, doesn't make it any better.
It's not GNU/Linux that's not free, but it makes it hard to use a GNU/Linux system that is free.
Unfortunately most people consider the play store to be a necessity, so its non-free nature is a problem.
I'd say it's a bit of a different situation, since the two are not being designed to work together and aren't even being developed by the same people. If the Ubuntu developers made your proprietary app key to the useful running of the system, which is the more exact analogy, then I'd say yeah, they would have made it non-free.
This is inaccurate. Neutron music player bypasses Android's Media Player APIs and talks directly to your DAC and plays music without resampling (if the DAC supports it). Never had any audio popping or explosions using Neutron, and I've tried it on 6 different devices so far without any issues (LG G3, Nexus 6P, Nextbit Robin, OnePlus 3, Note 8, OnePlus 6). My headphones are a Beyerdynamic DT880.
HN is mostly engineering types, the poster clearly has that mindset, we should be filing or looking for a proper bug report for this instead of crafting hacks or talking about alternative products altogether right off the bat.
As if Google even considers reading any bug reports ... :(
(source: I work for Google)
https://www.audioquest.com/dacs/dragonfly/dragonfly-black
Edit: would work out of the box with the Eee PC he has as well.
Coincidentally I was looking for something like an ipod shuffle this week and it’s become almost impossible to find, beyond some cheap thrift-store MP3 players.
What's wrong with the Sandisk products?
EG Clip Jam: https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Clip-Jam-MP3-Player/dp/B00V...
One solution would have been to just buy that 15 year old hardware he talks about, a lot of older digital music players still just work, I have a bunch of them. Or an external soundcard for a laptop. Or stream music from phone to a Raspberry Pi with a DAC. Or a portable CD player which doesn't hiss.
About the article circuit, I 'm not that sure the 5532 is a good part for headphone amps, unless the phones have a high impedance and resistance: they're intended as preamplifiers (and very good ones) so they hardly can supply the current to fully drive phones, though I guess they can still be ok for listening to soft jazz in a quiet room:)
The headphones themselves sound pretty good. But when playing over bluetooth sometimes compression artefacts are audible. The artefacts are caused by the bluetooth protocol for stereo audio itself, so you're going to hear them even if you play FLAC files.
Also latency is pretty horrible. 200 ms+, enough to be obvious.
Literally never heard anything like this.
My last three Android phones (two Motorola and an HTC) have excellent sound from their headphone jacks. I use my phone and two iPads on a regular basis with headphones, and I've never heard pops between tracks or noticeable hiss with any of them.I
I write audio software on embedded Linux devices for a living. I know what clicks and pops between tracks sound like, and usually why they happen. But I don't think this guy's two-op-amo buffer is doing what he thinks it's doing.
I say this as having owned 3 Macs for the last 10 years. 4-8 years ago, the gap between Apple and the rest was so stark, it seemed paying for a premium Apple product was a no-brainer.
Even Linus got a Macbook air because the hardware was such a leap ahead.
Not only has the gap closed, Apple have been left behind, with inferior build quality in key areas (keyboards). This has coincided with raising prices further.
The 'Apple tax' is now a real phenomenon, not just the price of premium.
For me, at the moment, in my personal life Apple makes more sense. I wish it made more sense at work because Windows 10 drives me nearly crazy, but it doesn't, so I stick with Microsoft's offering for now.
Being a golden cage, I would not argue that it is better software.
Have you tried testing this very same thing on an iPhone? Maybe it even has the same bug!
Also, by the way, aren't you doing something similar? Exaggerating about GP's regard for android/apple; GP simply said they would rather pay a tax than go through what OP did. Am I mistaken? Though yes, in this case the apple tax may not even have helped.
“If anyone reads this post I'm sure loads of people will tell me that my problems are all my own making and if only I invested in an iPhone all my problems would go away. Well you know what? APPLE IS A SYMBOL OF PRETENTIOUSNESS AND IGNORANCE - YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW HOW YOUR PHONE WORKS - I DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A TAX TO APPLE TO LISTEN TO MY MUSIC.”
You're kind of confirming his/her point here.
This. All of this. The author calls apples products pretentious and berates anyone who owns one for not knowing how their phone works. You know what? I don't give a flying fk about knowing how my phone works. I have a million other things to worry about in this world. It doesn't make me pretentious to spend extra to have an experience I don't have to think about.
Local electronics shops are indispensable when you get a whim to make a curious solution to your particular problem. By the time the parts get to you, you just can't help but think how much easier it would have been to just buy something and just feel dumb.
Otherwise the current will slowly leak through the zener diode and the 100kohm resitor and the capacitor will stay charged. So when he turns the thing on the next time it would not do the expected timed battery charge indication he wants.