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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 7th, 2023

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  • There’s a LOT of snake oil in the audio world. Especially home theater and home studio setups. I’m a professional audio technician, and some of the “audiophile” setups I have seen are just outright asinine.

    Use balanced signal for runs over ~3 feet. Use the cheapest star-quad cable you can get, and the most basic $4 Neutrik connectors. Why? Because that album you’re using to test your “hi-fi” sound system was recorded using exactly that: Cheap ¢30/foot cable and basic Neutrik connectors.

    It’s also what concert setups use. You think a concert with six combined miles of cabling is going to be paying $2000 per cable? Fuck no, they’re using the cheap shit (which was hand soldered in bulk at the warehouse workbench by their lowest paid shop tech), to run that million dollar audio system. Their money goes to the speakers, amps, and mixer; Not gold plated wire, robotic soldering, or triple insulated jackets. In double-blind tests, audiophiles can’t hear the difference between a $500 cable and a couple of plasti-dipped coat hangers twisted together.

    The people who complain about digital audio also can’t tell the difference in double-blind tests. Because modern audio hardware is able to perfectly emulate old analog gear. Google the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem for a breakdown of how we can perfectly capture and recreate analog audio with digital equipment. Vacuum tubes were groundbreaking when they were first used. But they had a lot of issues, and have very little relevance in today’s systems. They’re prone to burning out, notoriously fragile, and can be emulated perfectly.



  • Also, the “raise it to $15 per hour” minimum wage debate has been going on for so long that the $15 is now outdated. If the debate started again today, the number would realistically be closer to $25-$30 per hour.

    And if you just got upset because you’re making $30 per hour and don’t want to be equated with minimum wage, then maybe you need to consider how much you could be making if minimum wage were higher. Here’s a hint: You’d be making much more than $30 per hour.









  • Yeah, I have a piece of mission-critical gear that is controlled by a computer running Windows XP. Because the control program is written in Flash and modern systems won’t run it. Migrating to a modern system would require a complete rewrite in a new language, and would also likely kill a lot of functionality.


  • Yup, this. Cover your ass by putting shit in writing via email, (and bcc your personal email too, so they can’t just delete the emails off the mail server and pretend they never existed.) But besides that, if the boss wants to have a vulnerable system, then that’s their prerogative.






  • You can hide all of that on your sidebar customization settings, but yeah it’s annoying that it’s turned on by default. The Discover is occasionally useful, but I honestly use Overseerr for discoverability more than I use Plex’s built-in search.

    My biggest complaint with Plex is the lack of support for .m3u8 playlists. I want to be able to give it a list of livestreams, and then tune into those via Plex. Plex obviously already has live-streaming support built in via their Plex channels, but they have actively worked against custom livestream playlists, (it used to be supported via an extension, but they removed extension support.)