I once met a person that never drank water, only soft drinks. It’s not the unhealthiness of this that disturbed me, but the fact they did it without the requisite paperwork.

Unlike those disorganised people I have a formal waiver. I primarily drink steam and crushed glaciers.

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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • I was amazed that we transitioned from one GPU heavy bubble (Crypto) to another (LLM/AI). Whilst the hype for crypto imploded the use for the hardware sort of didn’t. I wonder if the next bubble with be the same, or if we get some refreshing variety to our money sinks?

    Microsoft et al are subsidizing GenAI to an insane degree. […] prices shoot up for their customers and serve as a rough awakening to all the websites that integrated a crappy chatbot.

    I’ve run some much simpler chatbots on just my desktop PC, so they will have some fallback (if they really choose to take it). Still it locks up my entire computer for a few second for each reply, so even a few hundred users per second peak would be an expensive service.

    (Insert joke here about customers not noticing or caring about the difference between website chatbots built on big company services vs smaller ones, because they have exactly the same problems just in different hues.)








  • There have been constant news articles coming out over the past few years claiming the next big thing in supercapacitor and battery technologies. Very few actually turn out to work practically.

    The most exciting things to happen in the last few years (from an average citizen’s perspective) are the wider availability of sodium ion batteries (I believe some power tools ship with them now?), the continued testing of liquid flow batteries (endless trials starting with the claim that they might be more economic) and the reduction in costs of lithium-ion solid state batteries (probably due to the economics of electric car demand).

    FWIW the distinction between capacitors and batteries gets blurred in the supercapacitor realm. Many of the items sold or researched are blends of chemical (“battery”) and electrostatic (“capacitor”) energy storage. The headline of this particular pushes the misconception that these concepts can’t mix.

    My university login no longer works so I can’t get a copy of the paper itself :( But from the abstract it looks first stage, far from getting excited about:

    This precise control over relaxation time holds promise for a wide array of applications and has the potential to accelerate the development of highly efficient energy storage systems.

    “holds promise” and “has the potential” are not miscible with “May Be the Beginning of the End for Batteries”.



  • Oh. Back to resistance: Doesn’t really matter audio quality doesn’t care it’s still the same AC signal just with less amplitude

    Only for ideal resistors.

    Resistors are noise sources. Intentional resistors tend not to be too bad (and probably won’t be heard in this situation unless you have super-high-impedance headphones, perhaps 10’s of K), but unintentional resistors (eg corroded unstable metal contacts inside a plastic part) can be atrocious.

    A few things to add to this:

    (1) If your resistor acts even slightly like a diode then you will encounter partially rectified RF signals (more noise yay). Metal oxides between metals can do this, eg if the connector has crimped two badly-plated bits of metal together.

    (2) Plasticisers in some plastics can leak out, causing corrosion on unseen internal metal parts.

    (Of course linking all of this together is just conjecture, the causes of Moss’ bad adaptors might be something completely different)



  • This could end up competitive.

    Invite people to your house, give them a tour and briefly mention the shelf before scurrying them on. Watch their faces contort but don’t give them the opportunity to ask any questions.

    EDIT: I have a vague guess at what could have gone wrong with your adaptor. It might have had OK L and R contacts but a broken G contact. You would then hear the difference between the L and R channels, which most often sounds like garbage. Music would be weird (entire instruments/vocals disappear) and mono audio would be silent or near-silent (so you’ll have to turn it up a lot and will hear noise).


  • Balanced will reduce noise (in terms of RF noise, of course) significantly better than unbalanced,

    In this situation I don’t think it will at all.

    I don’t think that balanced vs unbalanced is actually electromagnetically that different in this particular configuration (see my edit at the end of above). Things like where the wire is sitting on your body and what pose you are in will probably affect RF noise pickup levels on the headphone wires much more than changing between bal & unbal signalling.

    but the source of noise does need to be far enough away from the capturing device to not affect it directly and, therefore, be able to be negated by the balanced cable.

    I didn’t get into near-field and far-field effects. I’m not sure that it really matters here, but I might be wrong.




  • I wouldn’t say placebo. It’s definitely doing something.

    I would say this is still a placebo. Placebos always still do something. A sugar pill tastes sweet and modifies the sugar levels in your blood. The important questions are validity and effectiveness, not whether or not it does something.

    Balanced audio will not eliminate noise in most of the circumstances where a headphone user hears noise. There are far more likely sources (the source file itself, DAC limitations, audio amp limitations, external sound from their environment, etc). It will help in some very specific circumstances, but that’s like trying to sell snow chains to all car owners on the planet because you can claim that they improve traction.

    If you do work in an environment where changing to balanced headphone signalling helps… why are you working with your head inside an RF hazard zone?

    (From page): However, balanced audio does a better job of eliminating noise, should it exist in your signal. In a case where extraneous noise is present

    Misleading.

    Noise exists in all signals. Balanced audio only “does a better job” in circumstances other than what this product is being sold for. Discussing this at all gives it false merit anyway.

    EDIT: Giving this some further thought: balanced and unbalanced signalling is mostly moot when you’re an isolated device with one cable attached. From an RF standpoint you’re not forming both halves of an antenna (dipole or monopole+ground). Electrically they both look extremely similar in this scenario. Your partially conductive human arms waving around will probably couple to RF noise better than the headphone cable.