Samsung Now Owns Denon, Bowers and Wilkins, Marantz, Polk, and More Audio Brands

It's not self-contradictory at all. Proponents of Chat Control want to be able to spy on their own citizens, and have the technological wiggle room to expand their powers to collect data in the future. At the same time, they generally don't want customers to be abused by large companies that strong-arm them into increasingly lopsided contracts by moving in unison and using the average person's technical illiteracy against them. For people like us, these two things are related because we don't want every bit of our data collected, examined and studied for either tracking or profit - but for them, companies and governments operate on entirely different levels of rights and expectations.

Also, the EU isn't even remotely like "a country".

different groups, different goals. They are against corps prying into your business, but government overall is pretty in favor of gaining as much power as possible for themselves.

Just buy the $9 Apple adapter and you will have a better setup than those old Chinese cheap tablets.

And your point? Samsung is likely more adherent to the USB-C spec than cheap Chinese devices. Audio Accessory Mode (the technical term for the analog audio mode in USB-C) was removed as an optionally supported mode from the specification last year. Adoption among flagship phones was basically nil for years. It's basically the worst of all worlds in terms of complexity: you still need a DAC/ADC in the phone AND you need a muxing switch to switch between data pins and analog audio.

For context on why it was removed: it was replaced with a moisture detection functionality, which can be used to monitor and protect the USB-C port against shorts from moisture ingress into the charging port.

Heh, usb-c the connector is used for many protocols only a few of which are actually USB (pci-e /thunderbolt, DisplayPort, i2c, etc). The analog dongle is one of these. There is no usb involved, just using the pins of the connector for analog audio. Dongles with a DAC are actually a usb sound card, and are usable even on desktop computers or using usb-c to usb A converters.

I have the feeling that Korea has quite an issue with corruption.

You don't need corruption to make bad decisions, though.

Never seen any decent audio gear at a thrift store.

Plus, does all of that stuff integrate with your tv remote like the right soundbar can? Most people don't want multiple remotes or have to manually turn a receiver etc on

> stereo imaging will absolutely be able to place dialogue in the center

For me, if I were to watch alone while sitting straight up in the middle of the couch. Which I almost never do. Either I'm casual or I'm watching with others.

I agree with regards to sound quality and dynamic range though. We have a soundbar in the main livingroom of good quality, but as expected it has no lower end.

I got the stereo+center speaker setup in the basement with the big TV, they're just bookshelf sized but on stands with center just below TV.

They're enough that our neighbors would complain if they were home when I crank it up, and have much better clarity for normal sounds and dialog.

I like Yamaha, I have an older one in my living room, but for the $550 (local price) I am not extatic of what it offers. The digital part is a joke, it has a DAC in it but I cannot use a laptop as a digital source over USB, it has an Ethernet port, but it cannot use it for an embedded management web site, you need to run a phone app for that. My $15 relay controlling the lights has WiFi and embedded management web site, a $550 AV received does not. Also you cannot play movies, only music, even if it has in it what it takes for that. Figured out why?

And this is not Yamaha, everyone is selling the same stuff. You can find cheaper Chinese integrated DAC + amplifiers, WiFi and BT with more modern stuff in it. Yes, the amp part is much lower quality, but you need features, convenience, great user experience, not just good audio. At least with the cheap soundbar you don't have high expectations, no disappointments.

Hard to play without a screen though!

It can bitrot tho.

Early CDs would sometimes be made just from the vinyl master. They didn't sound very good.

These are easily fixable problems! M-Disc exists for disc longevity. High quality cases exist.

I realize this isn't the world we live in so I guess I'm just yelling at clouds. But come on, Vinyl is just so obviously a bad way to preserve music...

> there’s a certain magic and immediacy to knowing you’re using a physically destructive playback mechanism—that this right now is the best this record will ever sound again

Maybe I just don't get it - I'm much younger than the average HN user, growing up with physical media but not physical media that rapidly degraded on use like how vinyl does. But to me this sentiment is so alien that it seems like some kind of a milder nostalgia Stockholm syndrome.

When we think of other physical media, no one ever romanticizes that type of thing because degradation never really existed there. Would you want a photograph that faded away a significant amount each time you looked at it? A book that had the ink on its pages visibly rub off?

To me it just seems that the hard technical limitations of a long bygone era (that some people would've undoubtedly hated at the time) were given a mystique to them when people come back to them. Is the harsh fact of media degradation really inherently "magical"? Or is it that people ascribe good qualities to it because it's just the way it was?

Usually that means the record was mastered differently (because you literally physically can't make a record as "loud" as a CD).

It's not the CD's fault, it's the mastering engineers.

Digital is digital, but you’re ignoring multiple places where things might not be the same:

That $30 CD player… if it’s connected to headphones, how were the headphones driven? Especially if you have nice headphones, it’s very easy for a cheap device to not be able to competently drive them.

Vinyl vs CD mastering is a thing. There could be differences there. Additionally, depending on how you ripped the vinyl (especially with a “cheap dongle”) that may introduce its own color to the record.

There’s a reason why music collectors differentiate between every single source, because often there are differences (sometimes small, sometimes big) between the various sources.

If your CD player had cheap anti-skip it probably does lossy digital audio compression before output. A lot of the CD-player-as-a-package chips had older, crappy lossy audio compression and saved to a small bit of RAM on the CD player. Not much of a power envelope for compute power for audio compression logic. With memory being really expensive back in the day and prices being cutthroat there wasn't much memory for the blanti-skip buffer. So you needed fast, cheap, and really compact audio compression. Nobody really bothered improving it once MP3 players came out and memory got cheaper, so even "new" CD players use the same hardware portable CD players were using in the 90s.

And even then, it's not digital square waves coming out of your headphones. At some point that digital signal needs to be converted to analog waves. The quality of the DAC matters as well and can give a different quality of output.

If you used an analog audio output of the cheap CD player then the "digital is digital and it shouldn't matter that it was cheap" argument may not hold. The low quality of sound could be due to low quality of Digital to Analog Converter in the cheap player, not due to low quality of CD records that you have tried.

Indeed. What the GP is talking about would be a record player that requires vinyl, but plays only enough of the vinyl to do a Shazam-style identification and then stream the remainder, adding vinyl-sounding noise with a DSP. (Alternatively, the stylus is entirely fake and contains a camera that identifies the album by label, and is moved toward the center using a stepper motor.)

I really hope no-one ever makes such a monstrosity.

Ah ok, sounds like a smarter way to do it. How hackable would you say is it, eg to register your own NFC chips? It seems like a nice platform.

This reminds me of the modern fisher price record players.

The old ones were traditional music boxes, and each record had the musical notes.

The new ones have the score built in to the player, and each record just provides an ID for which track to play. So you can only play music that is built in to the device.

Most people outside their teenage years, unless music is their passion, are not actively engaging with the streaming services enough to consume 2 albums of new content monthly.

The old iTunes pay per song / album model with 30+ second previews is arguably a better model than where we’ve landed.

But another problem with online streams is that they are increasingly not the original music. More and more are remastered, autotuned, rebalanced to sound good on a phone speaker or earbuds. This can probably be done largely with AI now. A vinyl album or even a CD or local mp3 file is what it is when it was recorded, and will stay that way as long as it lasts.

This is why the happy medium is owning your own data.

You can have the CDs or not, but owning your copy of the MP3 file, which you keep on a hard drive, or on a thumb drive, or on a portable SSD (in any of these cases, with a backup somewhere!), or wherever, means that

1) you can play it any time you want, for no extra money

2) your access to it can never be revoked

3) you can keep copying it onto new physical media any time you're worried about the old one wearing out

Asceticism is a term, like "large" or "small", that only has meaning relative to some standard. Relative to "hear whatever I want from the entire history of recorded music right now using a single cheap device", the act of playing a physical format on a complex assortment of devices you integrated is relatively ascetic. Hence the softening of the term with "middle path".

While I don't disagree, I find that small speakers are dramatically better today than they were even 15 years ago.

I vaguely remember reading about heterodyning speakers in the mid 90s - the physics does check out, and such technology should be able to deliver perfectly flat response along the entire audible spectrum and with a tiny footprint. I guess they never managed to make it work or cheap enough or safe enough (yes, it’s also supposed to be flat at the harmful subsonic frequencies)

IIRC the idea is to have two crystals, one at a constant e.g. 100khz, and the other at (100+x)kHz for x corresponding to the sound you want. By physically connecting them, you get the sum (ultrasonic, lost energy but not a problem) and the difference - which is the sound you want - with most of the physics across half an octave so easily flat. Something along those lines.

To be fair to those Bose speakers, to someone that didn't have a proper stereo set up, nor ever experienced one, they sounded amazing and people are notoriously bad at discerning audio quality

One thing you can try with headphones is changing the earpads: specifically the shape, but maybe also the material. I have Shure SRH840A headphones, and out-of-the-box I was NOT happy with the sound. Someone suggested trying different aftermarket earpads, and I found a pair of "angled" pads that changed the sound quality to exactly what I wanted. I was surprised how dramatic the effect was. The pads are huge and look ridiculous, but I only use these headphones at home so it's fine.

> all reviews praise for sound quality

objectively or compared to similar bluetooth, noise-cancelling headphone? Most of the reviews I heard agree that even a mid-tier IEM or wired headphone beats shit out of them.

Nobody is saying headphones can’t deliver a good experience, but you can’t cheat physics when going below a couple hundred hertz.

>AirPods Pro streaming 5.1, you get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups.

The audio experience itself, sure - "Want high-end audio without breaking the bank and remodeling your room? Get a pair of decent headphones." has been sound (heh) advice for decades.

The surround sound part, though? Eh, not quite yet. I mean, on paper, they have the ingredients - (personalized) HRTF and head tracking. But in practice I found even the personalized HRTF somewhat underwhelming, and knowing what's possible from the VR world the gap is still significant (IMO the Valve Index off-ear solution is still the pinnacle in immersive positional audio without surround speakers, even without personalization of the HRTF, I haven't really tested the AVP implementation yet, though) - which leads me to second, IMO even larger issue:

Extremely limited usage scenarios. For the living room, it's basically just supported Apps/content on AppleTV. Compared to the reality of a standard AVR (or even just Soundbar) plus surround speakers setup - take any multichannel input (LPCM, DD, DTS MA, Atmos you name it) and output surround sound - that's...just not a substitute. And that's not even getting into latency issues with gaming/interactivity (a general BT issue, though, at least it's slowly improving...).

Yeah while home audio tech has moved sideways, consumer headphone tech has gone through the roof in every way.

But you touch on another of my pet peeves - took some work, but getting rid of those noises in my tv-watching space was very worth it.

> ou get a better surround sound and audio experience than 99.9% of speaker setups

Headphones and earbuds are not the way everyone listens to music, though.

With a good amplifier and speakers, I can be seated a few metres away and enjoy classical music and jazz with comfort and very realistic acoustics.