Monty Montgomery

One thing not really mentioned is in threads is...software. Every soundcard used to compete by trying to offer better 3d or better effects processing than the others. Game developes had a half dozen sound sdk's they could write their game audio for (EAX, Aureal... I dunno there's probably at least half a dozen). Cards competed on features. In the pro segments, literal megabytes of midi sample space & dsp coprocessors attracted audiences. Each of these tended to have one of any number of software toolkits... so you needed games or apps to all get onboard too. Many SDKs had software fallbacks so many users would even care that they didnt have Aureal3D support or whatever.

The actual advantages of doing things in hardware quickly faded, as cpus became ever more powerful. But just as much, the various apis didnt really ascend, or their technologies (head-related transfer function) got swallowed/mainstreamed. Namely DirectSound3D (1996), which grew various hardware offloads (EAX), and eventually because DirectX Audio. The pressure to compete deflated under thus mainstreamification... few people wanted to the extra 100 miles to support bespoken fancy hardware capabilities 0.01% of gamers might have, when they got 90% there using the common denominator.

I dont actually know what folks like gamedevs do now. Both Xbox & Playstation say they tick a lot of really good 3d audio boxes, they support an array of common 3d audio standards that I dont really know that much about. I'd love…

Steve Jobs was not a "hacker". [‡] He knew almost nothing about computer languages, computer architecture, and according to Neil Young, he listened to vinyl records at home [1] — which shows that he was ignorant of how audio quality works (see [2]). Steve did not contribute any original ideas or any important technological innovations. He claimed during his Stanford commencement speech that if Macintosh had not included eye pleasing typography, then computers would never have had typographically pleasing typefaces (because "Microsoft just copied Apple); this is ludicrous. In fact, Apple's software patents for digital typography added unnecessary difficulties. [3] Many people are unhappy about Apple culture of paranoia, litigation, and features that restrict user's freedoms that Steve created.

Steve is known for having a great sense of design, but it seems that he only had taste in choosing among the good designs of others. Just look at the yacht he designed without Jonathan Ive's collaboration. [4]

Many of you may say that I'm missing the point; that his ability to convince others of what was important and his "vision" is what made him great. My contention is that he appropriated other people's original ideas, and other people implemented his modifications. I'll admit that directing such efforts is not an easy thing to do, and most breakthroughs are improvements upon others' ideas. But it is very rare for the original creators to be alive and ignored while the modifier is…

I think Mozilla is right to tread carefully and not commit to yet another format for a minor improvement. In my opinion our web clients are bloated enough as is, and they're only getting bigger. Once you add support for a format and it gains mainstream traction on the web, it'll be really hard to remove, and we'll be stuck with software that has to support so many things for reasons that do not make sense in the near future.

As for the study, I have to admit I did not read it. But the first thing to note is that computed metrics (SSIM, PSNR) are not reliable approximations of perceived quality. Optimizing for either will produce a codec that pleases the computer, not the eye. This is why the tuning of image and video codecs for psychovisual effects is such a laborious, manual process -- you have to have a human viewer to assess the quality.

In the long term I think it would be good if a new still-image format was derived from the intra portion of some reasonably advanced video codec, as they all beat JPEG handily. This is essentially what WebP is, but if I recall correctly, Google didn't really give VP8 the love it needed when they acquired On2. Instead they rushed with a "release early, release often" mentality, presumably hoping the community would jump the boat first and do the grunt work for them later (this was during html5 video wars when some thought Theora sucks and others thought h.264 is too encumbered -- VP8 was Google's resolution). The details are…

CD may be 40 years old, but human ears didn't change at all in that time. If you can tell CD from other recordings, it is almost certainly because the mastering (which is not something intrinsic to the standard) was deliberately changed for CD because it could reproduce sound better, so no format-specific mastering hacks were needed to make it sound good. Face it, you don't have golden ears.

For example, if a studio today were to master something for cassette, it would dramatically turn up the high end to compensate and probably bypass some saturation or exciters because the format has its own. Similarly, any studio not tweaking their masters for the perfection of CD was probably doing the material a disservice. Heck, today, some tracks are deliberately mastered to sound good on iPhone earbuds.

(The usual article cited in these discussions is https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html, which happens to make this point briefly under "Different media, different master" and "Better masters". Edit: another fun article is https://www.soundguys.com/high-bitrate-audio-is-overkill-cd-quality-is-still-great-16518/, with the fantastic pull quote, "There is no safe listening level to hear the difference between these files".)

CD doesn't need to be the pinnacle of digital technology, because our ears don't know any different beyond it.

While personal anecdotes are not typically good for discussions, in this case it's important to compare your equipment against the reviewers: he's using $300 headphones in a quiet room, using well-sourced high-quality music. The original proposition for this device involved unleashing a world of 24bit, 192khz audio downloads, which is not worth it by a long shot [0]. I don't doubt that the engineering inside the Pono player is top notch, but it will require an ecosystem of other top-notch gear to take advantage of it -- including music that wasn't specifically engineered to be played out of a smartphone's earbuds (Mastered for iTunes, for example).

And if you're going to get all that gear together, you're going to want at least decent conditions for listening (quiet, mainly) or those details you paid $400 to get out of the music will be drowned out.

I guess the point I'm making is - who is this DAC meant for? It seems like its attempting to fill a space (or create one) that is already filled.

[0]http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

> Where oh where is the x60 of today?

It's an ordeal, but it's possible to have one. This[1] is my primary computer. It's an X61 chassis with a Core i7-5600U, 32GB of RAM, and 1TB SSD. The screen is a 12" 1400x1050 IPS LCD (matte, not glossy). It's my favorite laptop.

Putting it together took months. There's a group of enthusiasts in China called 51nb that make modern internals for old ThinkPad chassis[2]. I ordered a barebones chassis from them in March and received it in June. After that I replaced the LCD's ancient CCFL backlight with an LED conversion kit[3], improving battery life and brightness.

If you want to know more, I wrote a blog post detailing the whole experience[4].

1. https://geoff.greer.fm/photos/x62/DSC_2304.JPG

2. https://www.51nb.com/benzhanshiye/2017-06-08/83668.html

3. https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/thinkpad/led-backlight.shtml

4. https://geoff.greer.fm/2017/07/16/thinkpad-x62/