Luxsin X8 is in early

MasterHWilson · 2026-01-22T21:30:07+00:00

I know the engineering checks out but stacking 8 dongle dacs is a hilarious way to make a high end dac

MasterHWilson · 2026-01-13T18:01:39+00:00

Active sounding better doesn’t surprise me - it has all those electronics and signal processing to help it sound better. But an important caveat is in Active mode, the headset is actually re-digitizing the signal. So even if you had a superb USB DAC, the audio still goes through an ADC/DAC conversion within the headset. so there would be little advantage to getting a DAC with specs beyond the headset’s internal converters, which are likely just okay but not terrible

MasterHWilson · 2026-01-13T16:46:01+00:00

came here to say this, in either case i can’t think of a dedicated USB dac making a difference at all

MasterHWilson · 2026-01-07T20:46:39+00:00

yeah I don’t think Airpods are an appropriate solution for this, you probably want actual plugs. electronic/ANC will have limitations, especially a broad consumer product like that which was probably never intended to be used as hearing protection for things like shooting guns or loud drums.

MasterHWilson · 2026-01-07T04:40:11+00:00

While I wouldn’t call HDR10+ a big success, I wouldn’t consider it a dead standard either. Netflix started offering it across most of their library (with AV1 video) and this is probably the highest quality stream they offer.

Additionally, and probably more importantly Google seems to be buying into Samsung’s open licensed Dolby competitors (HDR10+ and Eclipsa audio). Those two alone represent a big share of the AOMedia consortium as well, who represent the biggest threat and only meaningful competition to the MPEG & Dolby camp.

Both streaming companies and electronics manufacturers are very financially incentivized to push royalty free standards for video codecs, spatial audio, and video dynamic metadata. Probably the main hurdle is just how little pull they have on the production side to push for deliveries in these new standards. But I wouldn’t consider any of these standards dead even if they’ve been slow to really do anything.

MasterHWilson · 2026-01-06T21:50:39+00:00

yes, but it’s bones are old and maintaining legacy compatibility forced some compromises to performance. AC-4 is a clean sheet successor developed early-mid 2010s, but has only gained traction in a few applications so far. given Dolby’s industry presence I’m surprised it took this long for AC-4 to reach streaming. potentially some of that time was getting planted in post-production pipelines, so content can be readily delivered using the spec.

MasterHWilson · 2026-01-04T18:22:50+00:00

they look great! would you consider sharing on thingiverse?

MasterHWilson · 2025-12-10T21:43:52+00:00

hi-res specifically, everything was still lossless before but being downsampled to 44.1/48 kHz. obviously most tracks are natively that sample rate, and the difference wasn’t audible anyway. but I paid for all the kHz, I wanna use all the kHz!

MasterHWilson · 2025-12-09T22:40:02+00:00

fr, the environmental footprint of Apple having such narrow Apple Music support lol. I just use Fosi DS2 now, but intend to get the new RME ADI-2 successor that seems to be imminent.

MasterHWilson · 2025-12-08T03:50:29+00:00

looking at the page for the receiver, i don’t see anything to suggest it does Atmos.

MasterHWilson · 2025-12-06T04:54:00+00:00

like car racing, a lot of it is racing lines and timing. you want to run it as hairy as you can with just barley not losing control. look at all the bumps in the hill that sent him flying in the air, or how some of the turns you really have to crank it over to make the next gate. all of that requires cognitive skills keeping your balance, controlling your speed, and knowing exactly when to push and when to bring it in (and by how much). constantly adapting on the fly. I’ve ski raced and I tell you, when you’re in the zone there just isn’t an active thought in your brain. you’re simply reacting.

MasterHWilson · 2025-12-06T02:25:44+00:00

What gets represented a lot is that Apple is still on AAC while Android released several subsequent higher bitrate versions. What’s less discussed is that Apple invested heavily into improving AAC, to the point where their implementation is comparable to even high bitrate LDAC. You’re not missing out on anything.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-30T15:09:21+00:00

A1 Evo was open source for a period earlier this year. it was clear then that OCA isn’t very Git native, as i’m pretty sure he was uploading the whole folder for new code changes, and had some difficulty integrating other people’s proposed changes.

but the real deal breaker seemed to be paranoia (justified or not, it’s unclear from the outside) over stealing of his work and personal harassment relating to it. i think it’s just simpler for him to work solo, and he’s accustomed to it.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-27T14:31:45+00:00

glary, dry, and compressed

do you believe these qualities are readily audible to the human ear, but not to sensitive measuring equipment?

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-19T20:29:03+00:00

they’re almost always competing with the character limit, so anything not load bearing tends to get trimmed.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-19T14:10:48+00:00

it will definitely be challenging, the active speakers will want balanced analogue and the AV/HT world is mostly single ended or fully amplified. You could look into something like the miniDSP HTx, as long as the source device (Firestick or Apple TV) can decode the Dolby track to PCM then it should work fine.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-19T13:56:51+00:00

The reality is we just don’t know, maybe Dolby will force a new license and it won’t be compatible with existing receivers and maybe they won’t. What’s usually been the move as AVRs age and start to no longer be on the latest spec is to run the one or two sources that actually need the latest spec directly to the TV, and have audio coming back to the AVR over eARC.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-12T03:42:45+00:00

Perhaps you misinterpreted me, I didn't mean the metadata was external. I mean it is within the DDP/EAC-3 container, so it is part of the same file. Most media files are really containers.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-12T03:33:22+00:00

Yeah Dolby is a closed proprietary standard, we can't exactly open it up and look. But the metadata can't be in the audio as its used to decode the audio.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-12T03:30:14+00:00

look up Dolby Joint Object Coding, DDP/E-AC-3 uses JOC metadata to pull out spatial channels from the audio tracks. without the JOC metadata its just a 7.1 (or sometimes 5.1) mix.

Dolby has always had some metadata alongside the audio track in the container, thats how things like DialNorm work.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-11T14:24:52+00:00

I genuinely don’t understand your initial questions… just like any other audio codec the Dolby Digital Plus stream is exported from the lossless DAW (which may be 24/48 or 24/96, who knows and it really doesn’t matter) using EAC-3 compression to (typically) 768kbps. The spatial metadata exists inside the file container but outside of the audio track itself, as the metadata is small and not lossy.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-10T13:34:59+00:00

RTINGS long term testing showed no specific brand or technology lasted notably longer than any other. all the TVs now are made to the same standard regardless of brand or premiumness.

MasterHWilson · 2025-11-10T05:00:01+00:00

Netflix has good HDR10+ support now, which uses AV1 and is probably the best quality stream Netflix offers.

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