@vidister there was a reddit post or something a whole back where someone was unironically arguing about how the audio driver using C sounded better or some such

@vidister people claiming that alsa dmix is superior to everywhich sound server is literally a thing, yeah

@vidister wait legit gagron boost? Wild.

@vidister miss me with that SSD shit, I like the warm quality of a spinning disk

@vidister there are, but they all end up in the JACK user groups ;)

@vidister "if you really like music, you run Linux on POWER9"

@vidister your sound works on your distro? 😢

@vidister also memcpy https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/

@vidister@chaos.social "I use a realtime kernel because otherwise stuff can in the way of my music player"

@vidister
Not really like that.
It's more about what dist...
"By the way, I run arch." is a common one.

@vidister nothing like warm vintage OSS sound of 2.4 kernel

@vidister I mean... the colors are different if you ask me. ALSA is a fierce red compared to the calmer black and blue of pipewire. Might be my #synaesthesia speaking more so than acoustics, though 😬

@vidister How much, if any, is down to resampling at either the software or DAC level making the difference? None of that stuff should happen with straight up alsa.

@vidister

I don't consider myself quite an #audiophile saying that:

- FIFO: First In First Out
- LIFO: Last In Last Out
- GIGO: Garbage In Garbage Out
- LINUX AUDIO without kernel PREEMPT_RT: Garbage Out Garbage Out

#linux #audio #mao #computermusic #recording #homestudio

(I think I read recently that switching PREEMPT_RT on the fly was in the work for a future kernel release, but I just skimmed the article)

@vidister You can imagine anything with enough confirmation bias ^_^J

@vidister ncurses player sounds better than GTK.

act 1: shitposting about linux audiophiles

act 2: post is boosted by gargron, immediately blows up

act 3: people start arguing about audio stuff in my mentions

sometimes the mere act of joking about a hypothetical thing brings it into existence

@vidister gold Bluetooth adapters ...

@vidister can confirm from a previous job…they are a thing 😐

@vidister Linux audiophiles? You mean there are people who actually got their audio working on Linux? Sorcery.

@vidister the “ALSA sounds better than PulseAudio” definitely used to be a thing

@vidister Pipewire is just a little too cold-sounding. I prefer the smoother warmth of JACK2.
But you really have to crank the settings down for the authentic experience - the occasional xrun is like a static pop from a record, and makes you feel like you're really there, y'know?

@vidister@chaos.social

"PulseAudio sounds more analytical than Pipewire"

"Using VLC for flac files instead of Amberol definitely increases the soundstage and makes everything sounds more breathy"

"Using BTRFS on a Samsung disk opens up the mids way more than BTRFS on a Lexar drive".

@vidister i've seen people argue that oss sounds better than alsa soooooo

(and i've seen audiophiles talk about sound differences with ssds and ethernet cables so...)

@vidister
"Don't mix encoding and decoding between AMD and Intel"

"MP3s sound so much warmer than the clinical FLACs, especially with VBR"

"I have a collection of original IUMA recordings I like to play on my emulated WinAMP 0.20a"

"For extra cleanliness I like to use the original Frauenhofer decoder and pipe it to /dev/audio on a classic kernel"
@Gargron

@vidister *pushes blocks together until they say Clementine*

@vidister I only use gold-plated SATA connectors, they just sound better.

@vidister

“ext2 sounds better than ext4”

cat /dev/sda1/ > /dev/audio moment.

@vidister

"pulseaudio doesn't crash bluetooth as much anymore"

"yes, I can use high fidelity sink when using my microphone. Don't know what y'all issues are."

@vidister "I use ZFS without zstd compression, so that my FLACs retain their crystal clear hi hats"

@vidister I remember following tutorials to achieve "bit perfect" audio on Linux many years ago 😋

@vidister I would be surprised if ext2 sounds different to ext4. Its the same driver.

@vidister I only hear music on old Mac. big endian just sounds cleaner

@vidister Definitely not an audiophile (those are delusional people), but old fashioned 4front oss sounded better than ALSA. Perhaps, all these centuries later it might not be true, but it was then.

@vidister
Hope you are running a RT kernel
@Gargron

@vidister 😂

@vidister I don’t see a difference to things regular “audiophiles” say tbh *scnr*

@vidister I know it's a joke post, but the fine system one could be real. I find btrfs makes VMs work more poorly than ext4

@vidister it surely exists, but there isn't a huge industry propping it up, making tons of money off gullible people.

@vidister

I love the smooth sound of
cat audio.wav > /dev/oss/sblive0/pcm0

@vidister The gaslighting in the replies oh my god 🤣

@vidister I mean, the first thing that PulseAudio did was to add at least half a second latency. (Low latency sound server my a**.) Watching videos or playing games was impossible. But back then simply uninstalling PulseAudio was easy. Later it got too deeply integrated into the distributions that I used so when you uninstalled PulseAudio you had no sounds at all. Haven't tried PipeWire yet.

@vidister @siracusa I’m still running OpenSoundSystem because that’s how I remember these mp3s sounding

@vidister

I mean, I *did* once read (well, skimmed) an article comparing different brands of SSD for sound quality when playing lossless audio...

(Nobody--not me, not the link aggregator I found it on--could tell if it was satire or not.)

@vidister
Yes, because you need to get away from using USB to drive DACs and you need SBCs with I2S bus which run Linux.

Anything which reduces jitter will likely make audio sound better, but special hardware like streamer or DAC hats are the way to go.

@vidister ZFS is definitely required for maximum sound reproduction. The very low latency of an array of disks and fast seek allow for the DAC to never be starved. The parity bits going back to the CPU with the data provide a gentle filter to the data, shielding it from the electrostatic noise of your other components. The recommended configuration is 5 disks raidz2, mirrored. The mirroring allows to filter off machine noise from signal, again improving clarity.

@vidister I might be too close.

- I prefer direct ALSA because oh my god, how many layers can you freaking put on a sound system

- motherboard noise and audio crossover, ARG. <bzzt..... bzzt bzzt..............blip.......click....>

@vidister Oh 100%. My ears are shit but I swear plain ALSA just sounds fresher than pulseaudio

@vidister You made me think about the probability that something in my software isn't providing the best output my monitors could play... (and yes I use linux)

@vidister music from non-advanced format drives sounds better than from advanced format and shingled sounds worse than conventional. I can hear parts of the other music tracks on those (/j)

@vidister You guys got it all wrong. It's the old story of electrolytic vs. solid capacitors. The electrolytic sound considerably warmer with a 6.11 Kernel, at least as long as they haven't dried out, exploded or whatnot. If - and I repeat, this is very undesirable in terms of sound quality - if you absolutely have to use solid capacitors, go for tantalum polymer ones paired with a 4.x Kernel. Everything else is inferior. I can clearly hear the difference on my rig.

@vidister there is a certain je ne sais quoi to the staccato click of pipewire xruns that you don't get with regular alsa

@vidister@chaos.social
Reiser4 helps with crackles.

@vidister this is what JACK is for

Linux audiophiles are obsessed with low latency rather than warmth or audio quality.
There used to be a set of low latency kernel patches that they'd use to get better low latency output.

The patches are dead now but some of them still compile their own custom kernels, eg. https://wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/system_configuration

@vidister well, this curse is your fault now 😂

@vidister well, good music takes you on a journey, so ext4 has some clear advantages for that.

@vidister I am sure the #systemd hater cult has an audiophile sub-cult. “Without systemd I can hear the snare drums so much more clearly, and the subtleties of the oboe are exceptional”

@vidister Linux audiophile be like “ooh I think I hear a sound” after seven hours of tinkering with alsaconf

@vidister
"disabling IPv6 makes it sound cleaner!"

@vidister
I also have to confess that I might have owned this one. Mostly because of the RCA connectors.

M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Sound Card
http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/maudioaudiophile/index.html

@vidister "btrfs just makes the overtones smoother and the bass fatter"

@vidister yep, some of us out here 😂 Music does sound better on my Linux running empeg https://www.empeg.com

@vidister I've lived in that household and just the thought of it has triggered the twitching. But if I remember correctly: have a dedicated machine with no internet access, use a low-latency kernel, don't install X, don't use ALSA, pre-load your FLACs into memory to avoid jitter from the fs, buy a custom DAC, spend a fortune on cables, give up and develop a vinyl fetish instead.

@vidister I exclusively listen to hi-def flac files through zfs. None of this ext2/4 nonesense! I also actually prefer going back to pulseaudio over pipewire, to me it just sounds classic. Of course the sound is piped into the pc speaker for easy listening but that goes without saying.

@vidister searches thread to see if anyone else has had this take

ALSA? God that's far too harsh, I maintain my own patch set of OSS/Commercial that I rebase against each new kernel as it comes out. I could go with a newer official release of OSS, but they don't have as wide a sound as the older ones

(...TIL OSS for Linux is still a thing that had an update as recently as 2019)

@vidister Not *exactly* audiophile, but... https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@nh/112097524494239379

@vidister reminds me of the time I was doing a search on I can't remember what about PCIe and one of the first results was a thread on an audiophile forum where people were debating what was better between a SATA or NVMe ssd for audio quality.

@vidister oh no, can't be unseen 😱

@vidister "ext4 has twice the sampling rate as ext2" ?

@vidister Linus must block merging Rust sound drivers into the kernel! Dynamic range is utter trash with drivers that use substructural type systems.

@vidister@chaos.social i've never thought or knew about this intersection of topics before until now. does audio sound better open source? /j

@vidister I'm a linux audiophile, i spend most of my life telling other audiophiles that digital transmission of files is lossless.
sometimes i even get to listen to music on my rasberry pi hooked up to speekers like 100x bigger then it.

@vidister OSS for that warm sound.

I jest.

@vidister

Also is the best way to listen to Dubstep... because even when it (alsa) works correctly... You still get a slightly different remix of your music every single time you play it. 😉

@vidister Nah, they're all on BSDs.

@vidister Compiler optimizations for richer sound with more presence.

@vidister

#JACK will never die.

@vidister
True Linux audiophiles use JACK, not Pipewire. 😉
@dancingtreefrog

@vidister lol

@vidister probably, we definitely have people who think vectorised memcpy ruins the sound and they need to use a classic scalar memcpy for better soundstage. this is not a joke

@vidister I have long argued that we should use the term "audiophile" in place of the (racist, ESR-promoted) term "cargo cult". The so-called "cargo cults" are full religions practised by informed 21st century members, and portraying them as mere ignorance and blind adherence to routine is offensive.

@vidister I’ve seen it over the years with our Logic Pro releases: “the new version sounds warmer, better, worse, quieter, etc.” despite that we tested that the digital output is identical for an identical song.

@vidister I keep all my crime movies and crime radio plays on a ReiserFS hard disk. 😈

@vidister cat sample.wav |
goldplated | aplay

@vidister the conversations below remind me that someone did make an ffmpegFS module. https://github.com/nschlia/ffmpegfs read-only FS in tandem with ffmoeg to dynamically transcode media.

@vidister btrfs actually does sound better than ext4