There’s Something Wrong

May 14, 2023

The last three years have demonstrated that some of the humans can be overly credulous, believing anything as long as an authoritative-sounding voice says it. This unfortunate tendency to embrace what could reasonably be described as obvious abject nonsense has been around for quite some time, and recent events are seemingly a culmination thus far of a long-waged war against intelligence and free thought. It is possible however, to look back more than three years and see drivel be presented as fact. To demonstrate this, I present the following…

The Audio Asylum

This is a website that unironically refers to itself as an “asylum” and it’s contributors as “lunatics”. It is an “audiophile” website, and I think the references to the mentally ill and the places they are often institutionalised is intended to make the casual visitor think that they are just really, really, really enthusiastic and knowledgeable about all things audio. There is just one minor problem, which is that the moment you delve into any of the threads it becomes quite apparent, quite quickly, that most (#notall) of the people posting on this site are just actual lunatics.

As you might expect, there is the snobbery and aloofness that one might expect in an environment that has dedicated itself to being the summit of all human knowledge on the topic of sound, particularly the high fidelity electronic music reproduction and playback domain. This site’s users however seems to have taken their pontificating elitism and piped it through a system of amplifiers and megaphones. The effect is, well, quite unpleasant to be honest.

They also seem quite proud of the fact that the website looks like shit, with threads regularly extending horizontally off the screen making scrolling sideways a necessity to even see the links to replies. Luckily the site is advertised as being “optimised for 640×480” so presumably if you encounter this…

…then you must obviously have a screen resolution width less than 640 pixels. Get with the times already.

Incredibly though, the excruciating upper-crustness and condescension is eclipsed by the absolute nonsense peddled by members who, if you didn’t know better, sound like Smart People. Here is an example:

https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/

This is part of a thread titled “A revolution in audio rendering”, where the contributor posits the following…

found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy. the other thing I did was to close the file after reading into the buffer.

also most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better.

Soooo, playing audio from digital memory (referred to as “memory play”) is “digital sounding”? Thanks for that. The issue though, is not that it is sound stored and played from digital memory, it is the instruction “memcpy”, which as you might expect, performs the function of copying data to and from areas of memory. This apparently, is what is affecting the quality and making it sound “digital”.

He’s not finished though, as we’re informed that allocating memory with “new” instead of “malloc” will sound better. I just have one tiny question…

I think the humans need saving from themselves.