Posts by anonymous boring coward

Re: Stuff

"they should have bought Bose, B & W, Denon etc"

B&O would have been by far the best fit, design-wise.

But they bought the Beats customers. Not old farts who know about hifi, and spend a pittance on phones.

Re: Sound @SpeakNoEvil

"For those with a real love of cables"

There's the thin cable coming out of a small 3.5mm connector. And there's the tangle of adapters and different cables... I don't have any love for the latter.

I do like good sound though, so any modern iPhone is off my list. Just one stupid annoyance factor I can do without.

Re: Sound

"either way the DAC in the phone is now irrelevant"

Sure, if you are happy to carry around yet another gadget that needs charging, takes up space, and can get stolen or lost (and runs out of power). I think a simple 3.5mm jack with quality IEMs beats that proposition easily for portable everyday audio. And I own a Creative E5, which I use at home mainly.

Re: Play back depth is a red herring...

Don't give your kids good headphones. Give them cheap but adequate ones. Better yet, make them buy their own, and they'll learn to not break them...

Re: Sound

" It's chosen to match the capabilities of the human ear - the complete capabilities of the perfect human ear."

Nahh.. It was chosen partly to match our ears capability, but mostly due to the technical limitations at the time. Using such a small margin between sampling frequency and actual Nyquist cut-off frequency introduced a lot of challenges. 16 bit's for the full +/- swing of a signal isn't that spectacular a resolution. Low level signals will be coded with poor resolution.

One question is why CDs are mastered with such awful "hot" (compressed) sound? Is it a result of the characteristics of CD sound? Or is it just engineers that are sh*t compared to the ones that did LP..

Oh, the irony!

"AC for obvious reasons."

Working for ElReg then?

Re: One word springs to mind

"usually involves somebody standing over you and pis"

I think that's called a "Trump-shower"?

Re: Nope

Sure, but it's a BIGGER POS on Windows. Much bigger.

Re: Sigh, Poor Ordinary Folks

"It's not like MS never tried to force insufficiently tested updates on people with Win7 or something."

Actually they didn't. Until that "special" update called Windows 10...

Re: A Gamer's Story

This reminds me how I just a few days ago had to quickly help my son with his PC, and realising I had to install something from my account I switched to sign in as myself. Guess what..

"Hi!"... "Installing updates, this may take a while".. "I'm the effing annoying text prompter that pretends I'm some effing AI robot from the future talking to you while doing some I'll implemented updates that takes forever".."Enjoy!"

Would it be too much to ask to not have updates installed upon switching user?

Re: Nope

"A friend's Win 10 box can't even stream iPlayer without the video stuttering and crackles on the audio"

Assuming that is something from Apple, part of iTunes, that would most likely be an Apple issue.

iTunes is a POS on Windows compared to OSX. It's hard to know if it's Apple trying to punish Windows users and shift them to OSX, or MS trying to punish Apple, or just Apple hiring sh*t programmers for the Windows version (which, would be trying to punish WIndows users, as they certainly could afford making a proper effort).

"Tell me again about how this 'evidence' is to be found by the US investigators?"

The Americans will just order their poodles in the UK to retrieve it. Simples.

Re: Rules

"See, no black helicopters, they don't have the bottle, useless bunch of nosy parkers."

That's because GCHQ is British, so can distinguish a joke from a real threat. The US guys? Not so much...

They can't even distinguish research form terrorism. Bit of an IQ deficit over there.

Re: Or maybe they still couldn't make a case against him even with Blairs extradition law

Given that anyone with a brain would be working for the NSA, not the FBI, I'm not surprised if they are desperate.

" If there is evidence he did this then he'll do time, if not then he'll come home."

Did what, exactly?

You do know that Americans invent crimes right, left and centre nowadays, don't you?

Hell, you might not even be safe!

Re: The mind absolutely boggles.

since there weren't any changes in Earth's gravitational field that we're aware of, your wife obviously tried a *different* way that time

Define "different". Or, more to the point, define "same". Exactly the "same"!

Pretty hard.. The universe is ageing, if nothing else...

Re: Actually, Word For Windows 1.x does exist

"possibly wasn't really sold as Windows wasn't good enough" about Windows 1.x must be the understatement of the year, so far!

Are you trying to defend the walking scab that finally fell off that festering pus-pit POTUS?

Re: Yep pretty much says it all

Planning? What's that?

Please explain to someone living in the UK..

Re: Modernised audio? Hmm...

"Audio is often painfully bad in the big modern multiplexes near me (the area's moderately affluent, urban, well connected, and densely populated with a fair bit of cinema competition) and I can't understand why. There's usually far too much bass, the gain's generally cranked up so high the repro system distorts horribly, and I try to forget the rest of the flaws."

The speakers aren't specified correctly, leading to dynamic compression and distortion. Powerful PWM amps are no substitute for efficient large speakers with the ability to play soft as well as give proper slam. To give good slam you need dynamic headroom -i.e. the maximum deliverable sound pressure need to be a lot higher than what you actually take out of them during use.

It's just overall shoddy audio engineering today.

I think the decline in sound started when multiplexes became the norm.

My home setup sounds far superior to cinema audio.