You can simulate a tube amp in software using VST plugins

You know who doesn't like that? Established businesses with investors to answer to

Even when someone links a Musk tweet from here you get this routine "Did he delete it?" "No you have to hit refresh a bunch of times before it loads"

At that level? Not since like 2013

The awkward fact is that right wing accounts get banned more than left wing accounts because they are objectively worse than left wing accounts and creating the perception of "balance" requires actively favoring them

Yeah honestly the whole thing is that once you have a ton of competing products at a price point that low it's natural for everyone to end up collecting a bunch of them as the "flavor of the month" changes, that's just how people work

That's honestly the whole reason you can call chi-fi IEMs a "hobby" and not just, you know, a product

>The other two dimensions of "3D audio", front/back and up/down, are illusory information your brain calculates via deduction, based on your personal HRTF -- clever little hacks based on stuff like the shell shape of your outer ear causing subtle changes in high treble frequencies depending on exactly where a sound is coming from (treble sounds coming from behind you get blocked while ones coming from in front get amplified) and making little judgments based on subtle 3D movements and rotations of your head

Yeah but all our senses include time

Like, frequency is how fast the magnitude of sound pressure changes, amplitude is how far up it goes before it goes back down, but both those numbers are just derived from one number that's going up and down over time

Failing to understand this is where a lot of audiophile woo sneaks in, like this is why "high-resolution" sound files just means files that can record higher frequency sounds, these two concepts are the same thing

This is the principle behind how a DSD file works and why it has a "bitrate of 1" -- at any given timestamp there's just a 1 or 0 telling you whether the magnitude is currently increasing or decreasing (as opposed to PCM, which directly encodes the 2D image of a waveform we look at, there's a 16 or 32 or 64 bit number telling you what the volume of sound pressure is at any given timestamp)

Frequency IS an increase in sound pressure, it's literally a measure of how fast sound pressure changes back and forth (a vibration)

I remember the story about Brian Wilson having them give his dad a fake mixing board with knobs and sliders that didn't really do anything to make him feel included in the production process

Buy an audio interface with an ADC like the Behringer U-Phoria for $40

I guess technically this makes hearing in one ear a "zero dimensional" sense -- all you hear is a presence or absence of varying intensity with no "position" data -- and stereo sound is "1D"

I.e. all you have is two eardrums that let you judge how far a sound source is to the right or left of you by whether it's louder in your right or left ear

The other two dimensions of "3D audio", front/back and up/down, are illusory information your brain calculates via deduction, based on your personal HRTF -- clever little hacks based on stuff like the shell shape of your outer ear causing subtle changes in high treble frequencies depending on exactly where a sound is coming from (treble sounds coming from behind you get blocked while ones coming from in front get amplified) and making little judgments based on subtle 3D movements and rotations of your head

Which is the whole reason binaural audio works even though it's just recorded with two mics and played with two speakers in your headphones, and why it's so much more instantly convincing when it includes head tracking the way AirPods do

It's also why, even though your ability to hear positional sound is very convincing to the brain, it cannot be relied on without vision backing it up and why the game of "Marco Polo" is surprisingly difficult

A lot of audiophile woo can be dismissed by fully internalizing that human hearing is a purely "one-dimensional" sense -- at any given moment the only thing an eardrum perceives is an increase or decrease in air pressure, a single number going up or down, and this one number going up or down over time is what makes the waveform whose varying frequency makes a sound

Yeah but they haven't "updated" it so you can't use the old ones anymore and have to buy a new model