After reading all these comments I invented a new word: audiophobe. It's the opposite of audiophile. It's someone who plays low-bitrate mp3s through a crappy raspy speaker in their phone at full volume and is totally fine with that.

@dan whats stunning is that no one trolled the discussion

@dan I find using alloc() instead of malloc() gives my audio a richer tone. Heaps are just too messy for clean audio!

@dan we were discussing this at work the other day. I was amazed just how *angry* that thread made me.

Not sure if it was the unearned confidence, the tutorial-grade playback code presented like it was a PhD thesis, the phrase "engineers think that bits are just bits", or a combination of all the above.

@dan these lot have a really good pusher

@dan and a friend of mine pointed out that thread, or a related one, as an example of a very bizarre form of cargo cult programming.