And no, 16 bits isn't fine for anything more critical than listening to a portable music player on the train.
Uh, yes it is.
16 bits gives ~96dB of dynamic range. That's larger than the difference between a very quiet room (~20dB) and a chainsaw going full tilt at a distance of 1 meter (~110dB). Now tell me, which music do you listen to that actually needs that much dynamic range?
Keep in mind that the average room has about 30dB of background noise, so to use 16 bit audio to its full extent, the peaks would have to be over 126dB. That's louder than the peak SPL at most rock concerts. Considering most popular music is mastered for maybe 5-6dB of dynamic range at the most, and even well-produced classical recordings are somewhere around 20-30dB. There are a few recordings out there with upwards of 40-50dB of dynamic range, but that's about it.
And then you have to take into account that with proper noise-shaping dither, you can move the noise floor to frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive, and get an effective dynamic range of over 110dB when taking the studio masters down from 24 bit to 16 bit, anything beyond 16 bit for listening is absolutely ridiculous and a waste of storage space and processing power, even in a very quiet room on a very good stereo.
Nobody should be dictating what an adult is allowed to willingly put in his or her body.
When said willful self-damage causes increased rates of death and illness, which has to be treated by tax-funded services, it is only right for the tax payers to have some say in the matter.
I'm not saying an outright ban is the solution, because it absolutely isn't, but the taxes on self-damage products such as tobacco and alcohol should match or slightly exceed the increased burden placed on public services as a consequence of their use. That plus smoking bans inside workplaces and other places like public buildings, plus information campaigns will not work as an outright ban, but it will help. Enforced plain packaging like in Australia is another good idea, I just wish it could be applied to all products and marketing in general.
And before the smokers get to whine about how "oppressed" they are, they can start by picking up every single goddamn cigarette butt they just throw wherever, out of car windows and on the streets.
Yeah, I like voice recognition and control for tasks where it's so much quicker than manually clicking through menus to set up a playlist or something.
But I sure as hell don't want it to be always on, always listening.
The only thing I really want (apart from better recognition, obviously) is voice commands for casting.
Today, I can go "OK Google, play Iron Maiden on Google Play Music" and it'll start playing a random playlist. But after that, I have to manually cast it to my stereo. If I could tack on "cast to living room" or "cast to multiroom", it would work so much better.
The idea of ubiquitous always-on voice control is cool in a sci-fi way, but also slightly worrying, as it will always be listening. At least the voice control on my phone is only active when it's unlocked and on the home screen.
That's strange, because there are a hell of a lot of extremely competent engineers here in Denmark, who disagree quite strongly with your "conclusion".
You can cite as many technical papers and sources as you want, but reading whitepapers and studies will not actually tell you if MP3 is audibly transparent to you.
You hear with your ears, not with your eyes.
What are you afraid of? That your hearing is not as perfect as you thought? Why not just give it a go, do a couple of ABX tests and hear for yourself?
I can say from experience sweeping public roads that are temporarily used as a racetrack once a year, that there is definitely such a thing as road dust. As you would expect, it's black, so it's probably mostly tire particles. But they don't get whirled up, because they're much too large and heavy (compared to something like diesel exhaust particulates).
I hope you're not driving 100mph or even 100kph between city blocks.
I rented a BMW i3 a little while ago, and drove it right across Copenhagen, red lights and all, without touching the brake pedal. It's all about looking further ahead, anticipating traffic and making the most of the regen braking (which is significant on the i3 with full regen enabled). BMW calls it "one-pedal driving", and it really does work, even in stop-and-go traffic.
Maybe a tiny bit more, due to weight transfer to the front wheels. On the other hand, you also have weight transfer away from the rear wheels, so maybe it evens out.
If there was a significant loss of material from tires caused by simple driving around and braking normally, tires wouldn't last ~50,000 kilometers.
The source you provided was a link to Wikipedia, which has a particularly vague section on audio quality and mistakenly asserts that MP3 does not provide "critically transparent quality at any bitrate". If you had actually bothered to do a double-blind test yourself, you would know that this is blatantly false. High-bitrate MP3 can easily provide audibly transparent compression, which would become clear to you, if you would only bother to actually test it yourself, instead of blindly relying on second- or third-hand information from Wikipedia.
Yes, there are some non-musical problem samples that will trip up any MP3 encoder, but that's only of interest to the codec developers.
Like I said: Do an ABX test yourself, it can be done on your own PC using Foobar2000 and the ABX plugin. After you've done that, come join the discussion at http://hydrogenaud.io. Unless you're afraid of learning something new?
I know of a bunch of virulent anti-muslim groups on the Danish part of Facebook. They've been operating for years, spreading hate and inciting violence against muslims. Somehow Facebook refuses to shut them down because "the page is not in violation of our terms of conduct", despite several posts and comments calling for all-out race war and vigilantism.
This is probably a stupid question, but how much exercise did you add to your weekly routine, alongside the diet?
I'm only asking because I had a hell of a time losing weight through a calorie deficit and good macronutrient ratios, but when I started exercising (crossfit and weightlifting), I started losing weight even though my diet suffered a bit. I'm still technically overweight at 5'11" and 210lbs and could stand to lose another 40-50lbs, but my body fat percentage is significantly lower now.
You don't have to go all-in gung-ho crossfit crazy, but the exercise must be strenuous to actually make a difference. You can probably lift a lot more than you think, once you get the technique down.
It is mostly a gimmick, but there are some legitimate use cases. Like for instance dictating text messages while you're driving, like if you're going to be a few minutes late. One could argue that you could just as easily call directly, but there are bound to be some cases where that's not practical.
I can also go "OK Google, play Iron Maiden on Google Play Music" (or Spotify or whichever service you use), and it's a bit faster than navigating through the app to find the artist in question to start a random mix. I wish it would let me add "and cast it to all rooms" to the end of that command. Hopefully that feature is on its way.
There is some real convenience to be had through speech recognition and voice commands, once it reaches a certain quality level. "Computer, play my favorite jazz songs from 1956 to 1974, primarily Afro-Cuban jazz" is something that would be a little annoying to input manually, but the voice command is quick and reasonably straight-forward.
In Europe Siri is close to useless anyway as it only works via the internet. And no one with a sane mind is using internet via a phone outside of his own country. It is just retardedly expensive.
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And no, 16 bits isn't fine for anything more critical than listening to a portable music player on the train.
Uh, yes it is.
16 bits gives ~96dB of dynamic range. That's larger than the difference between a very quiet room (~20dB) and a chainsaw going full tilt at a distance of 1 meter (~110dB). Now tell me, which music do you listen to that actually needs that much dynamic range?
Keep in mind that the average room has about 30dB of background noise, so to use 16 bit audio to its full extent, the peaks would have to be over 126dB. That's louder than the peak SPL at most rock concerts. Considering most popular music is mastered for maybe 5-6dB of dynamic range at the most, and even well-produced classical recordings are somewhere around 20-30dB. There are a few recordings out there with upwards of 40-50dB of dynamic range, but that's about it.
And then you have to take into account that with proper noise-shaping dither, you can move the noise floor to frequencies where the human ear is less sensitive, and get an effective dynamic range of over 110dB when taking the studio masters down from 24 bit to 16 bit, anything beyond 16 bit for listening is absolutely ridiculous and a waste of storage space and processing power, even in a very quiet room on a very good stereo.
So please, stop the audiophoolery.
Nobody should be dictating what an adult is allowed to willingly put in his or her body.
When said willful self-damage causes increased rates of death and illness, which has to be treated by tax-funded services, it is only right for the tax payers to have some say in the matter.
I'm not saying an outright ban is the solution, because it absolutely isn't, but the taxes on self-damage products such as tobacco and alcohol should match or slightly exceed the increased burden placed on public services as a consequence of their use. That plus smoking bans inside workplaces and other places like public buildings, plus information campaigns will not work as an outright ban, but it will help. Enforced plain packaging like in Australia is another good idea, I just wish it could be applied to all products and marketing in general.
And before the smokers get to whine about how "oppressed" they are, they can start by picking up every single goddamn cigarette butt they just throw wherever, out of car windows and on the streets.
Yeah, I like voice recognition and control for tasks where it's so much quicker than manually clicking through menus to set up a playlist or something.
But I sure as hell don't want it to be always on, always listening.
The only thing I really want (apart from better recognition, obviously) is voice commands for casting.
Today, I can go "OK Google, play Iron Maiden on Google Play Music" and it'll start playing a random playlist. But after that, I have to manually cast it to my stereo. If I could tack on "cast to living room" or "cast to multiroom", it would work so much better.
The idea of ubiquitous always-on voice control is cool in a sci-fi way, but also slightly worrying, as it will always be listening. At least the voice control on my phone is only active when it's unlocked and on the home screen.
Most cameras take full-size SD cards, which are available in 512GB now.
I guess you're using Gopros or similar "action cameras", though? Do they even support microSD cards with this much capacity?
That's strange, because there are a hell of a lot of extremely competent engineers here in Denmark, who disagree quite strongly with your "conclusion".
The best way to reduce birth rates and prevent overpopulation in third-world countries is to increase equality and average income.
You can cite as many technical papers and sources as you want, but reading whitepapers and studies will not actually tell you if MP3 is audibly transparent to you.
You hear with your ears, not with your eyes.
What are you afraid of? That your hearing is not as perfect as you thought? Why not just give it a go, do a couple of ABX tests and hear for yourself?
I can say from experience sweeping public roads that are temporarily used as a racetrack once a year, that there is definitely such a thing as road dust. As you would expect, it's black, so it's probably mostly tire particles. But they don't get whirled up, because they're much too large and heavy (compared to something like diesel exhaust particulates).
I hope you're not driving 100mph or even 100kph between city blocks.
I rented a BMW i3 a little while ago, and drove it right across Copenhagen, red lights and all, without touching the brake pedal. It's all about looking further ahead, anticipating traffic and making the most of the regen braking (which is significant on the i3 with full regen enabled). BMW calls it "one-pedal driving", and it really does work, even in stop-and-go traffic.
Maybe a tiny bit more, due to weight transfer to the front wheels. On the other hand, you also have weight transfer away from the rear wheels, so maybe it evens out.
If there was a significant loss of material from tires caused by simple driving around and braking normally, tires wouldn't last ~50,000 kilometers.
The source you provided was a link to Wikipedia, which has a particularly vague section on audio quality and mistakenly asserts that MP3 does not provide "critically transparent quality at any bitrate". If you had actually bothered to do a double-blind test yourself, you would know that this is blatantly false. High-bitrate MP3 can easily provide audibly transparent compression, which would become clear to you, if you would only bother to actually test it yourself, instead of blindly relying on second- or third-hand information from Wikipedia.
Yes, there are some non-musical problem samples that will trip up any MP3 encoder, but that's only of interest to the codec developers.
Like I said: Do an ABX test yourself, it can be done on your own PC using Foobar2000 and the ABX plugin. After you've done that, come join the discussion at http://hydrogenaud.io. Unless you're afraid of learning something new?
Nah, there are right-wingers and ULTRA-right-wingers.
Opposing this obvious skewing of news coverage does not make you any less liberal. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Corporate influence on elections is sickening, no matter which side it comes from.
+1 I agree, it's sickening no matter which side it's on.
No, it's pretty fucking obvious from the outside that the US right wing's end goal is a totalitarian Christian dictatorship.
I know of a bunch of virulent anti-muslim groups on the Danish part of Facebook. They've been operating for years, spreading hate and inciting violence against muslims. Somehow Facebook refuses to shut them down because "the page is not in violation of our terms of conduct", despite several posts and comments calling for all-out race war and vigilantism.
Absolutely, no doubt about it.
But some people seem to think HFCS is the literal devil, when it's only marginally worse than table sugar, if there even is a difference.
HFCS has pretty much the same glucose/fructose ratio as normal table sugar.
This is probably a stupid question, but how much exercise did you add to your weekly routine, alongside the diet?
I'm only asking because I had a hell of a time losing weight through a calorie deficit and good macronutrient ratios, but when I started exercising (crossfit and weightlifting), I started losing weight even though my diet suffered a bit. I'm still technically overweight at 5'11" and 210lbs and could stand to lose another 40-50lbs, but my body fat percentage is significantly lower now.
You don't have to go all-in gung-ho crossfit crazy, but the exercise must be strenuous to actually make a difference. You can probably lift a lot more than you think, once you get the technique down.
It's not the outright calorie burn that matters, it's the increase in muscle mass and metabolic rate that results from proper exercise.
Hence the saying I've heard among weightlifters: "You have to get bigger before you get smaller".
It is mostly a gimmick, but there are some legitimate use cases. Like for instance dictating text messages while you're driving, like if you're going to be a few minutes late. One could argue that you could just as easily call directly, but there are bound to be some cases where that's not practical.
I can also go "OK Google, play Iron Maiden on Google Play Music" (or Spotify or whichever service you use), and it's a bit faster than navigating through the app to find the artist in question to start a random mix. I wish it would let me add "and cast it to all rooms" to the end of that command. Hopefully that feature is on its way.
There is some real convenience to be had through speech recognition and voice commands, once it reaches a certain quality level. "Computer, play my favorite jazz songs from 1956 to 1974, primarily Afro-Cuban jazz" is something that would be a little annoying to input manually, but the voice command is quick and reasonably straight-forward.
In Europe Siri is close to useless anyway as it only works via the internet. And no one with a sane mind is using internet via a phone outside of his own country. It is just retardedly expensive.
That is going to change in mid-June 2017: https://eu2015.lv/news/media-r...
I'm still waiting for that bulletproof, iron-clad proof of the audibility of artifacts in high-bitrate MP3.
And yet you persist in doing just that. Astounding.
Where was that concrete proof of your amazing hearing ability, again?