alt Hacker NewsWhile I appreciate the effort and talent to pull this off, I find the results to be awful. I call this kind of overblown sound processing "Bose barf" since pretty much all Bose audio sounds like this, and it just grates on my nerves. Now TVs, Bluetooth speakers, headphones, etc. all seem to perform this kind of aggressive audio processing to overcome the limits of super cheap tiny drivers. It's getting hard to find devices which have a more neutral sound profile. All this audio processing makes music sound like it's coming out of a garden hose duct taped to a 1950's grade school hall speaker. I can't understand the appeal.
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Same here wrt to Bose. I respect their tech and science but then they add a bogus aesthetic layer on top.
I think it is meant to make jazz sound good. The eq-d bass and attenuated mids make a standup bass more apparent and the piano and vocals more present.
But it made me start to wonder if I started hating my favorite band: I was packing up to move this weekend and stumbled on my CD collection. Many Stereolab CDs. I played them in my basic acoustic waveguide radio. A slick bookshelf I inherited and rarely use.
45 minutes later I was telling myself "god this music sucks...just agonizing repetition." Turns out yes the motorik bass is repetitive...but the other key point of the band is the gentle singing and intricate delicate synth and organ melodies...all foreclosed on by some evil twin combo of an audio eng and marketer overindexing in mid low bass.
That is why I refurbished my Harman-Kardon amp from 1991 and listen CDs and LPs through it increasingly these days. It drives either some Revox speakers I be also bought at that time or a HifiMan Edition XS. That thing is outright amazing. The pinnacle of mixing was in the 80s as far as my collection is concerned. The 70s were much experimenting and the 90s already too compressed.
You’ll want to get something from Etymotic, they target the “precise and neutral” profile you’re after.
OP wants the `earwax` audio filter in ffmpeg.
100% agreed.
This fashion of cranking the base and the high end and removing the middle (simulating a subwoofer with some tiny speakers, basically) can't die fast enough.
I mean, fair play for the writer. If he wants it to sound that way he's of course free to do so. But this style is used a lot in concerts and open air amplification and I hate it.
My theory is that this style is popular with people playing their music too loud. If your ear feels 'blocked' after a while, your music is too loud.
One thing with this style is that, because it leaves the middle (speech) frequencies relatively empty, it feels less blocking. And the high base makes that it doesn't really sound tinny or harsh. But they high base cane easily damage your hearing still.
There's a subwoofer slider (around the icon) if the bass feels too heavy, and some songs require it to be toned down if it's already processed to be bass-boosted.
My Jabra headphones don't seem to apply any processing by default, and I prefer how they sound with the processing. If your headphones already boost bass or apply another effect, stacking the processing can be grating (which I've experienced when I record a video and play that through the daemon running).
I guess it's a matter of taste. I just like music sounding as though it's coming from a little farther away, and I suppose the bass-boost might be what you're finding unpleasant.