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fiona

I wonder if linux audiophiles are a thing.

"plain ALSA sounds warmer than pipewire"

"linux kernel compiled with ALSR makes for a more chaotic high end"

"ext2 sounds better than ext4"

139 comments
Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:
@vidister Well at least files becoming lossy on ext4 would be true :P
Ariel (999,999 ppm CNI)

@vidister there was a reddit post or something a whole back where someone was unironically arguing about how the audio driver using C sounded better or some such

ben

@vidister people claiming that alsa dmix is superior to everywhich sound server is literally a thing, yeah

wall-e / Daniel

@vidister miss me with that SSD shit, I like the warm quality of a spinning disk

noodle

@wall_e @vidister Nah man, gotta read it from punch card, then play it from core memory.

Gdlhà :estelada: :gnu: :emacs:

@f4grx
Coreaudio is the thing always overheating my colleague's Mac, even when they aren't using it. What does it do?
@noodle @wall_e @vidister

wall-e / Daniel

@pdh_sedlr @f4grx @noodle @vidister warm up those sweet sound waves for max audiophile listening pleasure of course.
It needs to get hot

lhp

@wall_e @vidister a spinning disk is basically just a record player, so of course it'll sound better! duh

Clemens aka data

@vidister there are, but they all end up in the JACK user groups ;)

datenwolf

@datacop @vidister ironically one could argue, that JACK cannot be audiophile, since it uses single precision floating point (IEEE754 32 bit) for samples, and will irrecoverably loose precision if somewhere along the signal chain the values exceed full scale.

Ages ago I one argued with the developer of JACK about the pros/cons of using float samples.

Thom, HP-UX™ evangelist

@vidister "if you really like music, you run Linux on POWER9"

Linh Pham

@thomholwerda @vidister Make sure you use Ampere processors in your audio pipeline 😅

Laurent Chemla 🍺

@vidister That's probably because they don't use special pipewire cables.

Skye

@vidister@chaos.social "I use a realtime kernel because otherwise stuff can in the way of my music player"

Sekhen

@vidister
Not really like that.
It's more about what dist...
"By the way, I run arch." is a common one.

laamaa

@vidister nothing like warm vintage OSS sound of 2.4 kernel

Windfisch

@laamaa @vidister if you are still fanboying linux 2.4 then you've never heard FreeBSD 8's OSS drivers *chef's kiss*

Patrick Perdue

@vidister How much, if any, is down to resampling at either the software or DAC level making the difference? None of that stuff should happen with straight up alsa.

Stephane L Rolland-Brabant ⁂⧖⏚

@vidister

I don't consider myself quite an #audiophile saying that:

- FIFO: First In First Out
- LIFO: Last In Last Out
- GIGO: Garbage In Garbage Out
- LINUX AUDIO without kernel PREEMPT_RT: Garbage Out Garbage Out

#linux #audio #mao #computermusic #recording #homestudio

(I think I read recently that switching PREEMPT_RT on the fly was in the work for a future kernel release, but I just skimmed the article)

thorcik

@stphrolland sooo, it only plays Garbage? Where do I sign in? 👉👈
@vidister

Stephane L Rolland-Brabant ⁂⧖⏚

@thorcik @vidister

;-) that's the default Linux settings NOT to have PREEMPT_RT stuffs enable. But that constrains heavily on Real-Time audio computing.

You have to recompile the kernel otherwise, or use a distro which is based on such a kernel (like Ubuntu Studio)

For playing Shirley Manson, you have to switch the Pink Hair flag in the BIOS and that's it ;-)

Walnut
@vidister @lunareclipse
alsa and pipewire introduce too many delays. I use jack for real time audio on my zoom calls
Dźwiedziu

@vidister You can imagine anything with enough confirmation bias ^_^J

fiona

act 1: shitposting about linux audiophiles

act 2: post is boosted by gargron, immediately blows up

act 3: people start arguing about audio stuff in my mentions

sometimes the mere act of joking about a hypothetical thing brings it into existence

Tuckers Nuts Resist! 😈

@vidister
🥥 Welcome to the 21st century, Fiona.
It's shit-posting all the way down.
Linux audio edition. 🥥
#Linux, #Audio, #ShitPosting, #TuckersBalls

48kRAM

@vidister I have to say im most amused by the fact that i cannot actually tell which replies are taking the piss and which are attempting a serious discussion 🤣🤣🤣

Bifurkatus 🎭

@vidister
> sometimes the mere act of joking about a hypothetical thing brings it into existence

all the time

Cody Krieger

@vidister can confirm from a previous job…they are a thing 😐

Ozzelot :anarchy: :linux:

@vidister Linux audiophiles? You mean there are people who actually got their audio working on Linux? Sorcery.

Dany

@ozzelot @vidister I've once made a MIDI keyboard work under Ubuntu. Took me 6 hours to have Pulse, Alsa and JackQtl play nicely together. I instantly understood why musicians prefer the it just works mantra of Apple.

Ozzelot :anarchy: :linux:

@Dany @vidister I trust Linux to record my hardware synths via a simple audio interface. Haven’t tried its sequencing prowess yet. Possibly never will, the Circuit Tracks makes an excellent brain if internal sequencers aren’t enough.

Super Aruban 35 🐀

@vidister the “ALSA sounds better than PulseAudio” definitely used to be a thing

Windfisch

@aruban35mm @vidister i mean, there's at least something to it: PA might do automatic resampling while ALSA when exclusively using the device does not. :D

Sander van Kasteel

@vidister@chaos.social

"PulseAudio sounds more analytical than Pipewire"

"Using VLC for flac files instead of Amberol definitely increases the soundstage and makes everything sounds more breathy"

"Using BTRFS on a Samsung disk opens up the mids way more than BTRFS on a Lexar drive".

nina

@vidister i've seen people argue that oss sounds better than alsa soooooo

(and i've seen audiophiles talk about sound differences with ssds and ethernet cables so...)

mia

@q66 @vidister the OSS thing might not even be wrong because some distros don't install libasound plugins so it'll do linear interpolation resampling instead of speexrate by default 🙃

nina

@hanscees @vidister audiophiles are so funny because you can make up literally whatever nonsense and still be sure some of them will unironically claim it's true

mia

@q66 @hanscees @vidister audiophile bs makes a lot more sense once you understand that it's all men going through a midlife crisis

Windfisch

@q66 @vidister well, back in my days™ OSS did definitely sound better because it actually played my music rather thab outputting some static distorted gibberish, but that was back then when windows had actually better driver support than linux (lol)

Breizh

@q66 @vidister My favorite is still the gold-plated Toslink cable.

Because it's become so mainstream that it's the only type of toslink cable available in some stores (I mean, stores that don't even target a particularly audiophile audience).

Gold plating is already rarely useful (if ever) for a digital connector, but Toslink is an optic fiber, often made out of plastic (and sometimes glass)! 🤣

Christof Damian 💙💛

@vidister
"Don't mix encoding and decoding between AMD and Intel"

"MP3s sound so much warmer than the clinical FLACs, especially with VBR"

"I have a collection of original IUMA recordings I like to play on my emulated WinAMP 0.20a"

"For extra cleanliness I like to use the original Frauenhofer decoder and pipe it to /dev/audio on a classic kernel"
@Gargron

Windfisch

@cdamian @vidister @Gargron to the hardware guys: has anyone built a mostly-analog MP3 decoder already? Surely there is a bit of digital frontend, but do we really have to all computations in cold digital realm and then put it through a digital-sounding DAC? it'd be much warmer to the ear if most of the decoding was already pure and fat analog!!

Ω 🌍 Gus Posey

@vidister *pushes blocks together until they say Clementine*

thunfisch

@vidister I only use gold-plated SATA connectors, they just sound better.

affine

@vidister

“ext2 sounds better than ext4”

cat /dev/sda1/ > /dev/audio moment.

Dominik Susmel

@vidister

"pulseaudio doesn't crash bluetooth as much anymore"

"yes, I can use high fidelity sink when using my microphone. Don't know what y'all issues are."

Wolfgang

@vidister "I use ZFS without zstd compression, so that my FLACs retain their crystal clear hi hats"

txt.file

@vidister I would be surprised if ext2 sounds different to ext4. Its the same driver.

Lucy 🧙🏼‍♀️🦇

@vidister I only hear music on old Mac. big endian just sounds cleaner

Bricky
@vidister Sadly, we exist. I am fortunate not to come from the land where cables make a difference or that certain C functions should be avoided for bit-perfect playback.
Jamie :saturn4ultra: :x1c: :a1mini: :M5sPro:

@vidister Definitely not an audiophile (those are delusional people), but old fashioned 4front oss sounded better than ALSA. Perhaps, all these centuries later it might not be true, but it was then.

Timo Zimmermann

@vidister I don’t see a difference to things regular “audiophiles” say tbh *scnr*

Eric

@vidister I know it's a joke post, but the fine system one could be real. I find btrfs makes VMs work more poorly than ext4

Antonia :renfe_galleta_1971:

@vidister it surely exists, but there isn't a huge industry propping it up, making tons of money off gullible people.

Eliza

@vidister

I love the smooth sound of
cat audio.wav > /dev/oss/sblive0/pcm0

zyxhere💭

@vidister The gaslighting in the replies oh my god 🤣

Mathias Panzenböck

@vidister I mean, the first thing that PulseAudio did was to add at least half a second latency. (Low latency sound server my a**.) Watching videos or playing games was impossible. But back then simply uninstalling PulseAudio was easy. Later it got too deeply integrated into the distributions that I used so when you uninstalled PulseAudio you had no sounds at all. Haven't tried PipeWire yet.

marlies :tblverified:

@vidister @siracusa I’m still running OpenSoundSystem because that’s how I remember these mp3s sounding

Sven222
I belief so, after I read a report about the sound quality of different Ethernet cables in a German audiophile magazine. And it was NOT the April edition.
Chris [list of emoji]

@vidister

I mean, I *did* once read (well, skimmed) an article comparing different brands of SSD for sound quality when playing lossless audio...

(Nobody--not me, not the link aggregator I found it on--could tell if it was satire or not.)

Stewart Russell

@suetanvil @vidister oh good, I get to link to the old but still excellent Wat HiFi? — wathifi.com/

It's not quite new enough to feature the audiophile SSDs with the system crystal replaced by a bulky Oven Controlled Crystal Oscillator, but still brings a tear to the eye

Warren McDonald

@vidister
Yes, because you need to get away from using USB to drive DACs and you need SBCs with I2S bus which run Linux.

Anything which reduces jitter will likely make audio sound better, but special hardware like streamer or DAC hats are the way to go.

Rue Mohr

@vidister I might be too close.

- I prefer direct ALSA because oh my god, how many layers can you freaking put on a sound system

- motherboard noise and audio crossover, ARG. <bzzt..... bzzt bzzt..............blip.......click....>

Harrison Totty

@vidister Oh 100%. My ears are shit but I swear plain ALSA just sounds fresher than pulseaudio

Neotheta

@vidister You made me think about the probability that something in my software isn't providing the best output my monitors could play... (and yes I use linux)

⚡Caroline-144p⚡

@vidister music from non-advanced format drives sounds better than from advanced format and shingled sounds worse than conventional. I can hear parts of the other music tracks on those (/j)

medium rare bird

@vidister there is a certain je ne sais quoi to the staccato click of pipewire xruns that you don't get with regular alsa

fraggle

@vidister this is what JACK is for

Linux audiophiles are obsessed with low latency rather than warmth or audio quality.
There used to be a set of low latency kernel patches that they'd use to get better low latency output.

The patches are dead now but some of them still compile their own custom kernels, eg. wiki.linuxaudio.org/wiki/syste

Badscrew

@vidister well, this curse is your fault now 😂

Art Delano

@vidister There are multiple Mac audio player apps marketed to audiophiles, including one fairly clever system hack that shadows iTunes, using it as a front-end while doing the actual file playing through its own superior whateveritis. And of course Windows audiophilia are legion.

So while I don't know whether Linux audiophiles are a thing, I'd be more surprised if there aren't any. It seems like the perfect intersection of people who want to think too much about how they use their computers and people who want to think too much about how they listen to sound.

And remember, never plug an audio device into a USB hub! It must plug directly into the computer itself! Otherwise there will be jitter! 😜

@vidister There are multiple Mac audio player apps marketed to audiophiles, including one fairly clever system hack that shadows iTunes, using it as a front-end while doing the actual file playing through its own superior whateveritis. And of course Windows audiophilia are legion.

So while I don't know whether Linux audiophiles are a thing, I'd be more surprised if there aren't any. It seems like the perfect intersection of people who want to think too much about how they use their computers and...

Bjoern Michaelsen

@vidister well, good music takes you on a journey, so ext4 has some clear advantages for that.

Bjoern Michaelsen

@vidister Traveling without a journal is admittedly more exciting admittedly.

Boris Smus

@vidister Linux audiophile be like “ooh I think I hear a sound” after seven hours of tinkering with alsaconf

Lucy ☎️ 6244

@vidister
"disabling IPv6 makes it sound cleaner!"

Christof Damian 💙💛

@vidister
I also have to confess that I might have owned this one. Mostly because of the RCA connectors.

M-Audio Audiophile 2496 Sound Card
ixbtlabs.com/articles/maudioau

/madonius

@vidister "btrfs just makes the overtones smoother and the bass fatter"

Faolan

@vidister yep, some of us out here 😂 Music does sound better on my Linux running empeg empeg.com

James

@vidister I've lived in that household and just the thought of it has triggered the twitching. But if I remember correctly: have a dedicated machine with no internet access, use a low-latency kernel, don't install X, don't use ALSA, pre-load your FLACs into memory to avoid jitter from the fs, buy a custom DAC, spend a fortune on cables, give up and develop a vinyl fetish instead.

Butterbee

@vidister I exclusively listen to hi-def flac files through zfs. None of this ext2/4 nonesense! I also actually prefer going back to pulseaudio over pipewire, to me it just sounds classic. Of course the sound is piped into the pc speaker for easy listening but that goes without saying.

turmoni

@vidister searches thread to see if anyone else has had this take

ALSA? God that's far too harsh, I maintain my own patch set of OSS/Commercial that I rebase against each new kernel as it comes out. I could go with a newer official release of OSS, but they don't have as wide a sound as the older ones

(...TIL OSS for Linux is still a thing that had an update as recently as 2019)

Fanny Matrice :trainsgender:

@vidister reminds me of the time I was doing a search on I can't remember what about PCIe and one of the first results was a thread on an audiophile forum where people were debating what was better between a SATA or NVMe ssd for audio quality.

Ian Douglas Scott

@vidister Linus must block merging Rust sound drivers into the kernel! Dynamic range is utter trash with drivers that use substructural type systems.

amber & foxtail

@vidister@chaos.social i've never thought or knew about this intersection of topics before until now. does audio sound better open source? /j

For I am CJ :screwattack: :black_sparkling_heart: :screwattack:

@vidister

Also is the best way to listen to Dubstep... because even when it (alsa) works correctly... You still get a slightly different remix of your music every single time you play it. 😉

Javier Henderson 🇦🇷 🇺🇸

@vidister Compiler optimizations for richer sound with more presence.

the vessel of morganna

@vidister probably, we definitely have people who think vectorised memcpy ruins the sound and they need to use a classic scalar memcpy for better soundstage. this is not a joke

Space Hobo

@vidister I have long argued that we should use the term "audiophile" in place of the (racist, ESR-promoted) term "cargo cult". The so-called "cargo cults" are full religions practised by informed 21st century members, and portraying them as mere ignorance and blind adherence to routine is offensive.

Space Hobo

@vidister My rationale for this is that the stuff we think of as audiophile quackery now looks not far off from the sort of thing that was necessary to get decent sound out of 1950s and 1960s stereo equipment. It's absurd these days because technology has rendered it all obsolete. It's as if electric car owners were still insisting on installing carburettors, and tuning them obsessively.

Markus Fritze

@vidister I’ve seen it over the years with our Logic Pro releases: “the new version sounds warmer, better, worse, quieter, etc.” despite that we tested that the digital output is identical for an identical song.

radioscout

@vidister I keep all my crime movies and crime radio plays on a ReiserFS hard disk. 😈

jnpn

@vidister cat sample.wav |
goldplated | aplay

WedgeStratos

@vidister the conversations below remind me that someone did make an ffmpegFS module. github.com/nschlia/ffmpegfs read-only FS in tandem with ffmoeg to dynamically transcode media.

Blue

@vidister@chaos.social monsieur @skobkin@lor.sh (with a stress on the "i") might enjoy this tread as much as I did

Mateusz Turczynowicz

@vidister LINEAR DC ONLY, do not use GbE, only 10Mbps! Compile own kernel, because you can download interferences from the Internet!

KasTas

@vidister yup, after switch to ext4, my spinning rust just started clicking :| Definitely, must be the cause of ext4!

Tram 日本 🐈‍ 🌸

@vidister after I read the Alda pipewire thing I thought to myself “what is this person trying to do?!?? cause a war?”

_L4NyrlfL1I0

@vidister "pulseaudio XRUNs have a nice warm saturated feel to them"

Mark Pauley

@vidister you joke but I have seen people post FFT’s of a tone sweep and it’s crazy how bad some internal sample rate conversions are in some audio subsystems. That causes aliasing which can sound “cold” or “digital”.

xinit ☕

@vidister I'm just happy when sound output works the same way twice.

Adderall girl grindset (Jes)

@vidister@chaos.social we all know btrfs compression sounds a bit bitcrushed compared to pure FAT32 which as we all know is the closest to a record player
/j

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