I have a unproven suspicion that Rechargeable Energizer may actually be Panasonic cells. I tend to see them both marked as made in Japan and they both seem to be great quality.
Could be. I have no special insight into Energizer, but generally, the private-label product you buy today might not be the same six months from now. And even if they are Panasonic cells, they might not be identical to Eneloop, either.
The private-label guessing game cuts both ways, too: there are 2nd-tier alkaline manufacturers that swear they are a contract manufacturer for at least one of the major US brand names, with portions of their factory they can't show you because then you'd find out. Even if it's true, it doesn't mean the battery they sell you will be built to the same standards, with the same materials, or put through the same QA as the battery they make for someone in the battery business.
The starting voltage is lower and drops faster making them not ideal for some applications and just annoying for some others (ie. motors start slow and get slower quicker than Alkaline).
Charge speeds also suck unless you get some of the fancy expensive chargers.
I personally have had nightmarish results with Amazon Basics Alkaline. In my experience these batteries have a greater tendency than other brands to leak over time and have destroyed multiple electronic equipment that I have owned. It was a big mistake on my part because I bought a large package of them, installed them and then didn't realize that many of them leaked until it was too late and they have eaten away many terminals in the different devices I put them in.
According to this [1] the unemployment rate in LA is 9.9% vs Chicago 7.5% Is that really the difference between a thriving city and an unlivable hellhole?
What I am getting at is trying to figure out which city minimizes the types of "idiots" you are referring to and i'm finding that no city is really like that. Every city has these kinds of problems to some extent as well as positive aspects.
Maybe you just like a smaller city? ~2-3 vs ~12 million is a big difference.
Correct me if I am wrong but the choice of SoC was due to the open nature of it and not the origin. All of the other limitations stem from the choice of SoC it seems.
Is it actually more open than a typical SoC? Also asking for the PinePhone. Also, will it ever get firmware updates? Also, I’m not even sure we have source code for the existing firmwares.
Wow I kept picking the 128kbps MP3. Im using Sennheiser HD58X. I'm plugged into the headphone jack of my Desktop monitor which itself is getting audio via USB-C. Maybe the amp is bad in the monitor? Wonder if an external DAC would be any better.
If you keep picking the 128kbps track it does mean that you can hear a difference, and maybe that you subjectively prefer the more compressed audio.
That's why usually good audio tests use ABX where it's not about seeing if you can identify what is best, but rather if you can identify a difference at all. See for instance: http://abx.digitalfeed.net/
EDIT: I actually just tried the test and... ended up doing the same thing you did. On the Neil Young track I could hear a definite difference in the high pitched violin-like background, but I ended up selecting the 128kbps track as the "highest quality", maybe because the compression made it sound smoother.
The HD58X uses 150-ohm drivers. These can be used without an amplifier just fine, but detail will be lost and they'll be quieter. My general rule is anything 80ohm and over will want an amp... You DEFINITELY want an external DAC+amp for those 58X's.
The DAC chip in a monitor will be the absolute cheapest one they can source, and is probably receiving a lot of noise from the monitor itself as well. The good news is that you don't need to break the bank to get something decent; a budget of ~$100 will get you something a million times better than a screen could ever deliver.
I'm going to confine myself to DAC+ Amp devices here. The main trick to suss out audiophile-snakeoil is checking the specs to see what the Total Harmonic Distortion is when the volume is maxed out (ie, before the signal starts clipping). THD is easy to have low (<0.01) when there's little load. With amplifiers of all kinds, quality is determined by how low the THD is when it's turned up. If it's >1% then it's poo, if it's ~0.1% then it's okay, if it's 0.01% or less then it's pretty good.
The $400 Element II [1] from JDS Labs (makers of the legendary Objective-2, a DAC+Amp that was designed to give top-end performance at bottom-end prices) is very literally as good as it gets without snakeoil entering the equation. THD when under a 150-ohm load is 0.0008%. That's very good. This is what I'll be upgrading to if my setup at work ever dies.
My work rig is an Aune T1 [2] which retails for $250 but Massdrop does them for $100-$150 sometimes. Yeah it's a "tube" but that doesn't matter as much as myth would have you; today's tubes are pretty transparent unless you deliberately get something that isn't. THD is good however nowhere near JDS Labs-level of perfection.
The Fiio Q2 mk2 [3] can be found for as little as $100 and it's a solid performer, though I haven't personally used it, Fiio's reputation is impeccable.
When I was in the mark for a decent DAC last year, I settled on JDS Atom DAC. Cost $100 I believe and seems like their support is good. Though I don't have anything else to compare, it seems good so far.
I think in this case it's more like you've bought a truck but you put a lawnmower engine in it.
It's a big step between esoterics and "please don't use the cheap shitty DAC that was integrated into your monitor to satisfy a feature checklist".
The amp part will matter a lot the more impedance the cans have, and many of the better headphones are high(er)-impedance. Might as well spring for a headphone amp + DAC combo just to see how it sounds. It's not that expensive, FiiO has some for under 80 bucks, for example.
I do. I'm very pleased with the (relatively) flat response using powered studio monitors in my home theatre setup, which are (relatively) affordable compared to something with similar performance purchased from a hi-fi specialist.
I use an old iPod classic with a flash memory upgrade for offline audio listening and was considering this device because of perceived audio quality. From your description it sounds like this device is in the class of alibaba junk. It sounds like the software was an afterthought, fair enough. How does the audio quality compare to things like an iPhone/iPod etc?
The sound quality (via Sony MDR-7506) is comparable to an iPod. Detailed and clear. It can get very loud and drive much nicer headphones than mine. It loads and plays FLACs and other large files much faster than the iPod can because the iPod is 20 years old and doesn't have the horsepower.
The software, honestly, is not nearly as bad as "alibaba junk". It is just fine. The iPod's software is more thought-out and consistent. The Fiio software is much more user friendly than Rockbox though. It responds well and hardly ever crashes. It has all the settings you'd expect and then some. It will be annoying if you expect perfection, but it never skips tracks on its own, the buttons always do what you want, settings aren't reset on you. The M5 is more fiddly than the M3K but I usually use the M5 anyway. I'm willing to tolerate the less-than-perfect software.
From what I understand(I could be mistaken) BMW reused the i3 drivetrain in the Mini. While its impressive that they squeezed it into a smaller car, it shows their lack of seriousness that they reused 2013-ish technology in their newest EV. Given this, is it any surprise that the range, acceleration and other metrics are lacking compared to what else is on the market?
Seems like an opportunity to create a browser extension to have crowd sourced upvote/downvotes kind of like Reddit masstagger. Wonder if there is a way to ensure that upvote/downvotes are not tampered with on the server side.
Is there some service where I can easily create unlimited custom email addresses for a flat monthly fee? I want to use a unique email for each new website/service. That would go a long way to solving some data leak/privacy problems. The problem with custom domain is I have to maintain it right? I want a service which I don't have to maintain. I used to use new Yahoo accounts but they are a hassle and recently they disabled free auto-forwarding.
You can do this with any email provider that supports a catchall. I personally use fastmail and have been very happy with it.
You don't need to 'create' the accounts, you just set it up so that *@yourdomain.com goes to your catchall. When signing up for a new service, you pick a unique/random email. Then you know unambiguously where each email in your inbox came from.
I personally use the website as the email (example, if HN required an email it would be hn@mydomain.com) to make it easier to filter. But this can be gamed/guessed, to be more secure it is better to generate an actual random email for each site and store it in your password manager.
I also remember seeing one Show HN recently that offered similar functionality, but couldn't find it via search. The problem is that if the e-mail alias provider becomes popular enough, their subdomains are soon disqualified from being used when registering to sites.
Protonmail allows wildcard emails from 1 custom domain if you pay for the ~$5/mo plan. No maintaining a mail server, just point your MX records to their servers.
