@dan this is truly one of the most perfect exhibitions of human nature that ever happened

@dan oh god, lol, lmao

Did you see the audiophile SSD that made the rounds a couple years ago? They said it sounded best with the OS loaded onto it and music on a different drive entirely.

@dan switched from std::memcpy to Monster’s $60 gold-plated one and I can definitely hear a difference

@dan from a reply later in that thread:

“I have found the best sound is an infinite goto loop with it throwing an exception after it reads beyond the end of the buffer, I set exceptions off so it doesn't crash the program. “

I can’t stop laughing 😀😀😀

@dan @hazel that makes monster cable seem less stupid. Still stupid though.

@dan @donmelton
Almost as good as the mental gymnastics when someone needs a Yamaha CL5 mixing console cause of the pre-amps but they are using wireless microphones…….

@dan TIL audiophilia = mysticism.
It’s reminiscent of homeopathic infinite dilution of some substance or another. But it’s even more baseless.

@dan More and more, I'm thinking the whole audiophile community is a trolling competition that got way out of hand.

@dan
This site is addictive, it led me to https://6moons.com/audioreviews/furutech/rd2.html

It's a CD demagnatizer. It removes magnetism from aluminum CDs.

@dan it's the undefined behavior that provides a subtle frisson. audio code in Rust just sounds more boring, this is all provable

@dan Oh, there’s no end to them. Oxygen-free copper *USB* cables… Noughtier noughts, oneier ones! Analog numbers! I guess we should be glad their gullibiity doesn’t translate into anything more dangerous than listening to the sound of empty wallets.
http://the-ear-net.blogspot.com/2012/11/cad-cable-controversy.html

@dan Yet another example of how extremism is indistinguishable from its parody.

Thanks to @jcfischer for the pointer; this gave me a good chuckle to start my Sunday morning. 🙂

@dan You'd be amazed what compiler optimizations will do to the developer's original intent!

@dan My brain hurts

@dan In the scale of stultifyingly pretentious bullshittery, audiophiles are just above cryptobros and just below wine bores.

@dan what a fascinating thread. Thank you for sharing.

I am still trying to grasp the confusion of concepts where one build was too “bass heavy”.

@dan Don't forget, the HDD brand you use to store your music can also affect the SQ. 🤦‍♂️

https://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm

@dan LOL. Found out yesterday that you can buy audiofile network switches 😳 - so much snake oil…

@dan This is just the high-budget version of that classic thread with the bodybuilders arguing about the number of days in a week.

@dan I honestly can't work out whether this was an elaborate troll.
It reminds me of debate about jitter on cd drives affecting sound quality (ignoring that resynchronising to an accurate clock is easy to do in hardware). Or eliminating negative feedback from audio amplifiers. Oh, and shaving the sides of cds. And many many more...

@dan real audiophiles only listen to music decoded on vacuum tube computers

@dan

what

how

@dan Should we tell them about acoustic cryptanalysis? At least they could come up with more plausible nonsense.

@dan i.. what?

EDIT: why are there no voices of reason

@dan Poe's Law means I have no idea if the original post is serious or not. I'm fairly sure that at least some of the replies were taking the piss, though.

@dan I worked in film sound (post-production) in the late 90s, just as everyone had switched to computers. I had two sound editors tell me to never put a WAV file in a zip, because it would ruin the audio quality.

@dan This reminds me of Wat HiFi? which sadly hasn't posted in years.

https://wathifi.com/

@dan hilarious, but it also reminded me of a glibc memcpy (I think) bug that broke Linux audio for ages (iirc, it had something to do with the direction of copying)
https://lwn.net/Articles/414467/

@dan that's it, I'm burning my headphone stash, the world does not deserve audio gear

@dan and in 2023 you can part with $1200 EU for the "best sounding" ethernet cable 🤣 https://jcat.eu/product/signature-lan-cable/

@dan
Do not forget to add a 'ground box' to your hifi system.
(most expensive soil a man can buy)
https://www.entreq.com/products/ground-boxes-17667704

@dan my favourite sentence from that thread: "I guess they think bits are bits. ".

@dan the ONLY way I could see this making any difference is if your use of memcpy were on a device with just marginal ability to play audio in the first place, producing jitter.

Even in that extreme edge case IDK if it would matter 😂

@dan audiophiles will believe anything if you sell it to them at a high enough price

@dan

@dan wat

@dan 😭 I miss when the worst thing I knew audiophiles believed was vinyl >> PCM 44kHz > mp3 because there was at least some sort of theoretical argument for loss of precision that some small subset of super-heaters (à la super-tasters of broccoli) that could hear the difference.

@dan that list of 'RE's' in reaction

@dan
I would be surprised that the thread wasn't on the first of April, but then I remind myself that it came from an audiophile forum

@dan In grad school (late 90s) my desktop machine was a Dell PC with some sort of Soundblaster card and a CD burner. If I played music through the sound card, it was picking up all the internal electrical noise of the machine. Scroll your web browser and get a ton of high frequency noise.

Luckily, the CD burner had its own headphone jack, and that sound output was clean.

@dan Honestly, while reading about ridiculous audiophile junk is endlessly entertaining, there is a little part at the back of my mind that knows, for sure, that there is some area of my life where I don't know nearly as much as i think I do, and am completely susceptible to this kind of stuff. And of course I don't know what area(s) they are.

@dan are they..were they.. serious?
Like..for real??

@dan #LittleKnownFact Be sure to keep your digital cables straight. The 0s can get around the corners more smoothly because they're round but the 1s can sometimes get stuck.

@dan I think you may have misspelled "audiophool".

@dan My gob has been smacked

@dan Audiophiles can't be reasoned with, it is known.

@dan

Audiophiles are funny, but this music fan conspiracy stuff filters down into a lot of regular people's lives, they're just the extreme version.

So many clueless people talking about how record labels and producers work, how you can't hear music the way it was intended because manufacturers don't think you can handle the truth...

It's pretty much the equivalent of your relatives who don't believe Qanon entirely or that lizard people from space rule the Earth, but do believe Fox News.

@dan Oh I almost forgot about audiotards

@dan that thread made it to here https://wathifi.com/

@dan@discuss.systems Jesus...

“playing wav files from a ramdisk gave best sound” 😃

@dan WTF? How were they ever let anywhere near a compiler.

@dan @ariadne the what O_o

@dan

Lots of snake oil and golden ears in the audiophile scene ..

There are some reasonable folk out there also, many of them hanging out at places like https://www.audiosciencereview.com

@dan That’s just basic science! Also it’s why I only use one-way audio cables, so the ions can flow more freely! 🙄

@dan decades before that, I recall watching a Usenet audiophile group get into a days-long debate over whether CDs read from the center to the outer edge, or from the outer edge to the center, complete with lots of theories and suggestions for scientific experiments to prove one hypothesis or the other.

Instead of just looking the answer up in the technical documentation for the CD format.

@dan Qanon for audio enthusiasts.

@dan That's quite an argument to dig through... Though there is some theory suggesting that audio has special performance considerations, which *might* give this argument some credence.

On the otherhand I don't trust internet arguments!

@dan Modern C++ and Rust are noisy and bad.

RAII = resource allocation is interference

Of course m68k assembly has the sound that's the most uh... bright? Warm? Smooth? Iridescent? Homeopathic? Tanniny?

@dan "playing wav files from a ramdisk gave best sound" something similar to this (e.g. playing AIFFs from RAM Disk) may have been true on Commodore Amigas, in the 1980s, back when the CPU was 7MHz and disk i/o could theoretically cause an audio drop out.

Given that, IMHO Windows has always been a downgrade from Amiga Workbench, it wouldn't surprise me if maybe some system set ups are less optimal, but if that alternative memcpy exists, it can be tested, empirically, not just subjectively.

@dan I have never before seen a mailing list where the reply list itself is a message from god

@dan reminds me of that mp3 player that has different implementation with bias to use eax instead of ebx and vice-versa, because person argues the cpu registers have a different feel/quality :D

@dan Different instruction mixes can cause the CPU to use different amounts of power and so make the coil whine sound different.

But I don't think that just a different memcpy would be enough to cause an audible difference. Java vs C for an application using a lot of CPU (and generating a ton of garbage) *might* be audible, especially if garbage collection causes frequencies to ramp up on other CPU cores.

@dan reminds me of the Monster Cable ads - for digital audio.

@dan @mischmus yeah, so when you remove the thread ID from the URL to get other funny posts to other funny topics, you'll get indead other funny full stacktraces. Quite some fun. :D

@dan Did they work out whether or not Wario was a libertarian?

@dan Whenever my mouse moves I hear noises out of my speakers. Do I need a gold plated mouse mat?

https://rheinneckar.social/@walsonde/109982009276049278

@dan This is a joke right? Right?

@dan Nonsense, everyone knows malloc sounds better /sarcasm

@dan seems like they did a solid job choosing the right domain name for their site.

@dan In Chinese-language audiophile pop culture, it jokingly matters which kind of power plant generated the electricity, be it hydroelectric, wind turbine, coal, solar, nuclear, or whatever.

@dan Neither comes close to analog memcpy. 😉

@dan I kinda don’t understand, is it speed that makes it sound better? I fail to see how either one would sound different lol

@dan why is there no programming language called Vinyl? Surely that would provide the ideal development environment. It would run in QEMU-Needle to provide richer sound.

@dan This does not surprise me in the slightest!

@dan
Remember the premium sound sd cards?

@dan if you're broadcasting you're music via radiowaves with your PDP8 circuitry, debating the sound quality of memcopy implementations might actually make sense.

@dan never mess with audiophiles 😂

@dan

The exact claim is that replacing memcpy in a playback loop with an optimized version removes some audiblea artifact ("edge").

This is within the realm of the plausible.

The code shown contains not only a memcpy, but several Win32 event waits in the middle of the loop, which are suspicious. As a general remark, if you want to be streaming samples without any skips, you have to just shove bits into some pipe/device, without synchronizing with other threads.

@dan

@dan And then people run around lumping C/C++ together like one language when C++ CLEARLY SOUNDS BETTER!

@dan@discuss.systems Now I'm wondering if anyone debated Linux vs. BSD, or CISC vs. RISC, or x86 vs. aarch64, or STP vs. USTP, or ext4 vs. btrfs...

@dan this is awesome!

@dan appropriate domain name

@dan to be fair, a decade ago we weren't neccesarily oozing clock cycles with Audio, and some of us were getting pretty bad latency/clicks and pops. It did actually matter how things were allicated and used, and Malloc actually had several successors that did a better job by default. I've personally run into these kinds of horrendous system level issues for decades, so I can relate. That doesn't mean it's not a ridiculous convo, just that I can see why it exists 😂

@dan @erd and a new Pope was selected. Coincidence?

@dan Heh, the idea that different memcpy implementations would result in different bits is silly. However the idea that different implementations would have different performance, clock speeds, CPU utilization, power utiliziation etc isn't. I've heard fans, coil whine, power differences, and interference definitely impact near by speakers.

@dan given that with sufficiently bad board design (interference from the power ciruitry into the audio circuitry) you can hear code behavior such as CPU wakeups, i would be curious to see someone take the documented situation, discard any and all explanations given in that forum (which are trash), and investigate if there's a measurable difference

different memcpy implementations might activate SIMD units in the CPU or not, which may be measurable.

new vs. malloc is definitely nonsense though

@dan every day we are further from the light

@dan @bsdphk You might joke about it, but sound mapped in #FreeBSD superpages sounds a little bit better than sound mapped in #Linux hugepages.

@dan gold plated something something rewrite it in rust

@dan thank you for the big laugh 😅

@dan was ever thus - a million years ago i worked on a hi fi shop and you heard so many crazy theories...

replace fuses with nails to give you "cleaner"electricity

tie an odd number of loops into mains cables to suppress eddy currents

@dan I prefer oxygen-free memcpy

@dan The effect might be real. The CPU might cause electromagnetic interference that is picked up by one of the analog components. Executing something different will then result in a different audible effect, which might sound better. The real fix of course is not changing the software but the hardware.