Internet Radio

appreciated by the local cats, dogs and bat population

In a locality frequented by thaumaturgical cats, dogs and bats…

when rotated 90 degrees (or 180, or a miniscule 2 degrees.

Missing )

only appreciated by the local cats, dogs and bat population

Best not having the very high frequencies. Compressed music can have weird harmonics, and you can’t hear them anyway.

Missing )

Misspelt minuscule, too, pedant! 8~)

Missing )

The proper word is “migrated” – wander down to the end of the footnote…

Misspelt minuscule, too, pedant! 8~)

Depends on the dictionary I think, but hey ho, it’s been another day of the New Year when people have realised that there are things they forgot to ask for before Xmas and now need now or last week.
Mix in suppliers changing the IP¹ that data should be sent to in December and only reveal that today. Brain like a wet tissue at present.

BTW. The need should be spoken in the same fashion as an upset 5-year-old demanding some expensive treat/present etc.

¹ What do you mean “use a FQDN” that would mean they need to exercise the cell and generate an idea. (Brains, trains, wheel nut if they are lucky)

Misspelt minuscule, too, pedant! 8~)

I’m a programmer. I don’t care about the odd spelink erreur. I do care about parse failures due to unmatched brackets. ;)

(special exemption for smilies)

The need should be spoken in the same fashion as an upset 5-year-old demanding some expensive treat/present etc.

Above your paygrade? Because I have a feeling the needy ought to be treated in the same fashion as one handles an upset five year old…
…but sadly, it’s usually manglement being obstreperous (because they’ve floated to the top ¹ so there’s nobody to smack a clue into them any more).

¹ Remind yourself what floats.

I do care about parse failures due to unmatched brackets

I believe the number of ( and ) match. Positioning is questionable, though.

Above your paygrade?

x cur use me?
I’ve argued with directors in the past, might have been further up the food chain if I hadn’t.

Nah, just think whiney voice child and you have the right mental model. There’s always plenty to fix as a reason for not responding to the whine with any real speed, still an irritating noise (or Teams message) though.

Producing a difference in sound only appreciated by the local cats, dogs and bat population.

I dunno… the “expensive” speaker cable I have on the downstairs system (Arcam / Monitor Audio) makes a difference. (Expensive is relative, I’m using Chord Rumour 4, 4-core bi-wire cable at £20/metre.) With 9ct gold plated banana plugs soldered to it, that’s one pair at the amp end and two pairs at the speaker end (bi-wired rather than bi-amped). Tried swapping between that and the Audioquest 14/4 (£6/metre for 4-core) and could hear a bit of a difference, with the Chord giving a more detailed top end. Not massive though.

Interestingly I tried running the Arcam (in stereo rather than surround mode) bi-amped into the Monitor Audios and heard no difference, whether on the Chord or Audioquest cables.

Tried it on the upstairs system (Yamaha / Gale) and couldn’t hear any difference between the Audioquest and Chord cables. However when I switched to bi-amped mode the Yamaha system sounded noticably better. Subtle but noticeable, particularly when playing music rather than movie soundtracks.

Best not having the very high frequencies. Compressed music can have weird harmonics, and you can’t hear them anyway.

Uncompressed or lossless music can also have weird harmonics. This is why “hi-res” music is such a bad idea. Nothing wrong with 16/44, but now record labels are trying to sell you overpriced downloads at 24/96 or even 24/192. ¹

Interestingly the LAME MP3 encoder switches in a brickwall low-pass filter when the bitrate is lower than 10x the Nyquist frequency (half the sample rate, if you remember sampling theory); ie at 128Kbit the filter switches in at 12.8kHz, 16kHz at 160Kbit, 19.2kHz at 192Kbit. However once the bitrate hits 224Kbit (at 44.1kHz sample rate) the filter switches out – giving a fairly dramatic improvement in quality.

I use options “-b32 -mj -q0 -V0” with LAME when encoding:

-b32 Allow bitrate to drop to 32Kbit for an individual frame
-mj Use joint stereo (encoder picks LR or MS encoding on a frame-by-frame basis)
-q0 Use highest quality but slowest psycho-acoustic model
-V0 Use variable bitrate at highest quality

This spits out files that are, on average, 270Kbit. The quality is indistinguishable from 320Kbit CBR and 20% smaller. They are also indistinguishable from the original WAV (or FLAC) file, at least when the file is a first-gen encode.

I also have, by default, the “—resample 44100” option set. This does nothing if the source file is 44.1kHz (LAME is smart enough to quietly ignore it) but will resample to 44.1kHz if required.

¹ Ironically with modern releases the hi-res versions do sound better as they’re less compressed (as in dynamic compression, not data compression). However any MP3 files made from the hi-res downloads are just as good. Higher sample rates are pointless at best, damaging at worst, but fortunately LAME’s resample option will solve that problem as well. An MP3 file made from a 24/96 or 24/192 source sounds just as good as the original FLAC or WAV, without the weird ultrasonics that do nothing for the sound.