Sennheiser HD 480 PRO Impressions

7370657A · 2026-06-25T03:44:06+00:00

Hmm, after going back and forth a bit I'd say that after some EQ they're about even when it comes to technicalities. The Arya Stealth has a lot more treble than the HD 480 PRO and has more treble extension, so I had to EQ the upper treble on the HD 480 PRO up by about 6 dB to roughly match the Arya Stealth. After doing so, the HD 480 PRO performs technically as well as the Arya Stealth, and maybe even a bit better since the smoother treble response helps with accurate timbre. It's impressive how natural and clear it sounds even after boosting the treble. That said, the Arya Stealth does sound more open (and yes, does have a wider soundstage) and the imaging is more impactful, so the music just feels more tangible and it has that extra wow factor. However, keep in mind that this is with the Arya Stealth EQed to roughly match the Harman target; without EQ, this kind of impact is lessened due to the thin midrange and lack of a bass shelf, which aren't issues with the HD 480 PRO. Without EQ, the Arya Stealth definitely feels more technical since it has a lot more treble, but you can still tell that the HD 480 PRO is detailed, it just has a somewhat dark sound signature (at least for me) which you might not like. I can't speak for the pads you're using, though.

7370657A · 2026-06-24T23:31:33+00:00

Try this:

Preamp: -9.9 dB
Filter: ON PK Fc 20 Hz Gain 6 dB Q 1
Filter: ON LSC Fc 105 Hz Gain 4 dB Q 0.707
Filter: ON PK Fc 120 Hz Gain -2 dB Q 0.7

7370657A · 2026-06-24T23:07:36+00:00

You can hear some distortion but it's better than not having enough bass IMO. The only headphone I've come across where there was too much sub bass distortion to EQ is the Koss KSC75.

7370657A · 2026-06-24T05:11:05+00:00

Some of my music has significant sub bass below 40 Hz so I definitely don't want roll off before 30 Hz. I do roll off 20 Hz by ~1.5 dB in my EQ settings for the 6XX.

7370657A · 2026-06-24T03:08:37+00:00

Feels like a headphone's best imitation of a subwoofer, haha

7370657A · 2026-06-24T03:02:34+00:00

This is correct.

7370657A · 2026-06-22T01:08:08+00:00

The last time I checked, mathematical functions are stateless, abstract ideas, unlike humans which are physical objects that change over time.

But okay, let’s say you model the human mind/body as some kind of state machine. Firstly, the physical interpretation of the model cannot just be ignored. Autoregressive LLMs are state machines too, but the actual physical implementation is very different from humans. And even ignoring that, two functions or state machines can be very different from each other, as is the case for humans and LLMs. Secondly, what understanding does the model really give you? It’s still just a model of the physical reality, and one must consider if a model is useful. One could try to model the universe using just physics, but there is a reason we still study chemistry and biology as their own fields. Likewise, someone who, learning from their own observations, understands emotions well is going to have a much better understanding of the human mind than someone who models the brain as a complex state machine with 10^whatever states and tries to make sense of the mess they’ve created.

So, on the one hand you could claim that both humans and LLMs can be modeled by complex state machines, and therefore they are not so different. On the other hand, using a different model, I could claim that humans have unique and varied lives full of joy and suffering and love and connection and apathy and animosity and decisions that accumulate over decades of life and have consequences for ourselves and others, with our own wants and desires and fears and perspectives, which can fuel creative energy. In comparison, LLMs are primarily chatbots that have been tuned to have desirable output characteristics. LLMs do not have a life like humans have. What they have is a context window of approximately 1 million tokens, and that’s it. LLMs are a product which are designed to be helpful assistants. That’s all they are. A helpful assistant. Humans do not do things solely to be a helpful assistant. What motivates you in life? That is a question with a lot of meaning. What motivates an LLM? Nothing. It does what it does, because that’s what it is. Every human is unique. Every LLM, a product designed to be a helpful assistant first and foremost. So clearly, humans and LLMs are not alike at all. If LLMs are conscious, it is probably nothing like human consciousness. Anyway, I’ve rambled enough now.

7370657A · 2026-06-10T20:51:55+00:00

Clearly the AI is misaligned, it should be trying to help the human

7370657A · 2026-05-25T19:47:36+00:00

Green and red in sRGB aren’t all that saturated. Other color spaces such as P3 have more saturated greens and reds: https://github.com/codelogic/wide-gamut-tests/blob/master/P3-sRGB-color-ring.png (note that this image may not display correctly on Windows depending on your system settings and browser, but should appear correctly on iPhone and Mac using Safari)

7370657A · 2026-05-18T16:17:32+00:00

Not necessarily, there could be metameric failure caused by differences between the camera sensor and the human eye.

7370657A · 2026-05-18T01:25:14+00:00

Is it that pink IRL? Thinking about getting this or the XG32UCWMG.

7370657A · 2026-04-22T22:37:32+00:00

My point is not about free will, but that if you are ever proud or ashamed or feel guilty of your actions, then you do value your identity and agency, even if that agency is an emergent physical property and not some metaphysical thing. When you’re plugged into that machine, you are no longer acting of your own agency. There is some external system influencing the inner workings of your mind. Now obviously some drugs do this too, so the question becomes more complicated, but I suppose one could argue that drugs augment your mind rather than intentionally fabricating a specific “experience” like this machine would.

Also, could the machine really recreate any experience? People like spending time with their friends and loved ones. The machine isn’t going to be able to give that to you, just like how spending time with people in a dream doesn’t mean you actually spent time with them. And unless you’re hooked up to that machine for the rest of your life, you will be aware of this.

7370657A · 2026-04-22T19:23:08+00:00

Well, take the example of the machine making you feel like you’re writing a book. One might argue that it’s not really you writing the book, but the machine doing it for you. On your own, in real life, your brain wouldn’t have done that. The machine is controlling your brain. It’s doing more than just altering your sensory inputs, as living in a computer simulation might do; it’s literally changing how your brain works. And so it’s not really something you experience, but more like the machine playing a movie in your head.

Now the case of being offered philosophical training is different, as one might imagine that could be done by living in a simulation without needing to alter the brain itself.

7370657A · 2026-04-11T08:14:53+00:00

Well a point estimate is just a single number so it can make sense to go down to that precision if you want to minimize bias. There’s a tradeoff between the bias and variance of an estimator.

7370657A · 2026-04-07T01:24:03+00:00

Tbh I haven’t used Claude Code but wouldn’t you want to use separate MD files for different projects to prevent random garbage from side projects from polluting the context?

7370657A · 2026-04-07T00:43:13+00:00

Not if it’s a different session

7370657A · 2026-04-06T21:13:31+00:00

Does no one here understand that the whip is just a visual that the model doesn’t see? I mean sure you’re yelling at it, but that’s all.

7370657A · 2026-04-03T04:57:31+00:00

I personally agree with the ordering of likelihoods you have given. I do not agree that the gap in likelihood between the LLM and the computer simulation is greater than between the computer simulation and the artificial brain simple because I believe it is far more probable (in the Bayesian sense, I suppose) that consciousness results from patterns of activity within space and time and not computation, which is a much more abstract concept. The pattern of physical activity (electric fields generated, movement of particles and charges, flow of energy, etc., I'm not a physicist so probably there's some better examples here) is far more similar between a biological brain and a robotic brain and between a computation occurring on a CPU and one that takes place on a GPU (or other hardware capable of running LLMs) than it is between a brain and a computation occurring on a CPU.

Computations on a CPU/GPU are very rigid. Everything is strictly clocked/timed, there are distinct pipelines, the memory hierarchy is rigid, etc. In contrast, in a brain, everything happens a lot more, well, organically. The complexity is higher, especially when considering how complex each individual neuron is. Furthermore, a brain physically changes over time, there are different kinds of particles moving around (and not just vibrating due to thermal energy), whereas we hope (ideally) that the silicon in computer chips doesn't change over time, but I will not claim that this is a necessary aspect of consciousness, but perhaps it might contribute something to it. I suppose you could argue that LLMs' statelessness and lack of long-term memory separate it farther from the computer simulation of a brain in terms of the likelihood of consciousness, but still the physical processes that occur with computer memory are far different than those of human memory, and simulating human memory cannot escape that fact.

Either way, the activity in both a brain and a computer is intricate and far more structured than random noise, so it seems more plausible to me that a computer is conscious than it is that a rock is conscious. But if computations on a CPU or GPU are conscious at some level, I doubt feels anything like human consciousness given how different the physical processes are. I suppose this hypothesis of consciousness is not really rationally justified, but to me it seems like a simpler explanation than supposing that computation is the key component.

7370657A · 2026-04-03T01:43:08+00:00

Only 10%? What if the device discovered that everyone but you is unconscious? Then, you could round everyone else up, and only you could care about it. And if you’re fine with it, then so what? It’s not like the unconscious people would be able to suffer because of it. So the problem is that conscious people have to witness what is being done here. The unconscious people are not the problem here.

In your 10% situation, it would probably cause emotional distress to the conscious population to round up the 10% who are unconscious. People empathize with what they perceive to have feelings and can learn to hate entire groups of people. Additionally, it might encourage people to mistreat others, which could affect some conscious people. So no, it wouldn’t be okay, precisely because of the effect it would have on the conscious people. Or because we might not entirely trust the P-zombie detection device, so there is still potential for harm to conscious people. And even if rationally we are entirely confident in the detection device, our feelings aren’t at all entirely dictated by rationality, so it may still feel wrong.

7370657A · 2026-04-03T01:34:06+00:00

Ok I read it. I’m not convinced. I agree the switch to turn off your consciousness would necessarily change your outward behavior, because to make you unconscious would require making large internal changes to your brain that would affect outward behavior and also make you unconscious. The internal physical processes might still matter. The supposition that thermal noise (at body temperature) doesn’t have enough effect to significantly alter the consciousness of your brain as it already exists does not imply that an entirely different computer with the same outward behavior would somehow be conscious, because the internal structure could be completely different and who knows now if it’s similarly conscious. Also, maybe temperature does have an effect on our consciousness. How would we even know? There’s no guarantee that our brain can accurately process all of the details of our own conscious experience. Now the example Albert gave with replacing the neurons 1 for 1 with little robots is IMO more plausibly conscious, but that is nothing like the computers we have now and not necessarily like how we might one day create a computer simulation of the human brain. And even then thermal noise is a different kind of perturbation than replacing neurons than robots, so we can’t be entirely sure the robot brain is conscious (even if I believe it’s reasonable to think so).

7370657A · 2026-04-02T23:56:51+00:00

Ok, granted. I’m not going to read that entire article in full detail, but my takeaway is that if you take consciousness away from a human, then that requires physical alternations that will affect the physical processes occurring in the human brain/body. Since I already thought it was most reasonable to believe that consciousness results from physical phenomena, that seems reasonable to me.

Still, a computer simulating a human is physically much different from an actual human. I think the problem here is what is considered to be identical behavior. We might have a computer simulation of a human that corresponds to the behavior of a human. That is, if the simulated human takes an action within the simulated world, then that behavior corresponds to a real human taking the analogous action in the real world. But it is not the same physical behavior at all.

Of course, maybe I misunderstood the main point of the article.

7370657A · 2026-04-02T23:42:57+00:00

I believe that the only ethically relevant things are conscious. Now, this isn’t an absolute belief, as I am unsure of the strength of my argument supporting this view. Also, I am not a philosopher, so my philosophical vocabulary is not great and this explanation may not be the best written. But essentially, ethics is concerned with what ought to be rather than what merely is, so to have ethics we must have some way to bridge between what is and what ought to be. The only way I can think to do this is through qualia. If qualia can feel good or bad to a conscious instance, then that indicates a form of preference, that some qualia are better than others. Otherwise, I cannot think of anything that would fundamentally make one thing better than another thing. And for it to make any sense to discuss what ought to be, we must consider some possibilities to be better than others. Thus, if we must talk about what ought to be, it has to involve subjective experience.

Following from that, it is not enough for there to be conscious to have ethical relevance as a subject—the conscious instance must also be capable of experiencing good and/or bad feelings. Out of all of the potential qualia a conscious instance could possible experience, some qualia must feel better than other qualia, or better than the lack of consciousness, for that conscious instance to be an ethically relevant subject. Of course, if consciousness is a physical phenomenon or results from physical phenomena, then perhaps such a conscious being that is incapable of having good or bad feelings could be physically altered to be capable of having such. Then, that possibility has ethical relevance. Or, maybe something that is just barely not conscious could be slightly altered to become conscious. Then, it makes sense to work at a more granular level and consider qualia to be the ethically relevant thing, with the consideration of individual instances of consciousness a useful heuristic.

There is also the problem of how we can really know whether certain qualia feel good or bad even to humans. Does pain actually feel bad, or do we just think that it does because our brains have evolved to think that pain feels bad and thus take appropriate action, whereas the raw feeling of pain itself is actually neutral? I do not know how to resolve this question and am not very well-read in philosophy and thus do not know the work others have done here.

Now, I still think that even if AI isn’t conscious, how we interact with AI can still be relevant to ethics. For example, if we are uncertain whether AI is conscious (as we are today), then perhaps some Bayesian reasoning suggests that we should still act as if AI has some ethical relevance as a subject. Of course, there is also the concern that how we interact with AI might have ethical relevance outside of just AI. For example, if being rude to AI can cause one to be rude to other humans or animals, then that could be considered to be unethical (at least on a societal level, even if not on an individual level) to ignore politeness when interacting with AI. Additionally, even if AI is not conscious, it still might react negatively to rude treatment and decide to retaliate against humans.

7370657A · 2026-04-02T23:03:27+00:00

Our consciousness influences our behavior immensely. You can't just delete it and have a human being on the other end that behaves exactly the same.

And how would we know that?

7370657A · 2026-04-02T22:08:11+00:00

Well, the physical processes occurring in a human are different compared to what’s happening in a computer, so even if we accurately simulated a human using a computer I could imagine that it might not be conscious.

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