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dist-epochtoday at 4:50 PM4 repliesview on HN

The whole audiophile industry is built on stuff which doesn't make any sense

My favourite: "audiophile-grade" audio players which allocate a single continuous buffer of RAM into which they load/decode the whole .WAV/.FLAC file, because supposedly the CPU "jumping" between "fragmented audio" causes audible "jitter".

Of course, they don't know that what looks like continuous memory to user-code is probably discontinuous in kernel/physical RAM.

Didn't check in many years, I wonder if they created kernel level players to account for that, to have "true continuous memory"


Replies

platinumradtoday at 5:04 PM

Don't forget: "most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."[1]

[1] https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/

lmctoday at 5:02 PM

> My favourite: "audiophile-grade" audio players which allocate a single contignuous buffer of RAM into which they load/decode the whole .WAV/.FLAC file, because supposedly the CPU "jumping" between "fragmented memory" causes audible "jitter".

Thanks for the laugh... this is absolutely bonkers. In case anyone is wondering, before sound hits our ears it has to go through a digital to analog conversion, which takes place on hardware independent of the CPU, operating with its own clock and buffers etc.

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billyjobobtoday at 5:21 PM

I can tell when my CPU usage spikes because it causes a hum through my speakers, so this does not seem that far-fetched.

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bellowsgulchtoday at 5:00 PM

The latter is probably true, but the former does actually happen, and it's easy to accidentally do--lossless or not.