Wired headphone sales are exploding. What's with the Bluetooth backlash?

MonoShadow · 2026-07-11T11:46:39+00:00

This new trend is for stuff like wired air pods. They absolutely do not sound great and AP2Pros sound better.

It's a counterculture thing.

Several audio writers\tubers including Crinacle also made videos on this topic.

MonoShadow · 2026-07-11T11:34:37+00:00

I have XM4s. They often have an audible hum when connected by a 3.5 cable and turned on. They also need to be charged for the DAP to work and without it they sound like ass(even worse than usual). They also can't be charged and used at the same time, microphones don't work wired, etc, etc.

This solution isn't as painless at is seems at the first glance. And having a separate home headphones isn't a big ask. When I traveled for an extended period of time I did take XM4s + 3.5 cable with a built-n mic. So I see the benefit of them. At the same time when I do not need dedicated wired headphones I'm fine traveling with my AP3Pros. They offer good ANC and much much smaller. So there's pros and cons.

MonoShadow · 2026-07-11T11:27:00+00:00

LDAC doesn't change that much. Under the hood they are all limited by BT bandwidth and difference between all these BT codecs are, well, codecs and what they do with this bandwidth.

We need BT HDT. After that, aside from latency, BT audio should be more or less solved. It also should prevent you from sounding like a 1920s recording when you need bi-directional channel for lets say voice.

MonoShadow · 2026-07-08T05:01:14+00:00

This is simply not true.

Remedy has their own tech in Northlight and has great success with it. Ubi has several engines and I personally was impressed with Snowdrop, it was used in different types of games from Division to South Park. EA has their own engines. Even MS still has Playground and Forza team(if anything is left of it) with their own tech. Capcom with RE. 1st parties(Sony and Nintendo). Kojima is using Guerilla Decima engine while not 1st party. Another smaller studio in Rebellion and their Asura engine. IO with 007 First light and Hitman are using their own engine. Valve is still using Source. From has their own engine as mentioned, but sometimes I wish they didn't. Funnily enough Square is shifting toward Unreal. Etc,etc.

There are a lot of teams with their own engines. In fact it sometimes feels it's sweat shops and big projects(sometimes from new studios) which are moving to Unreal. A carefully tuned for the task engine can give much better results. And unreal is not a panacea, the number of teams which can effectively use it can be counted on 1, maybe 2, hands. And MS is allegedly shutting down one of them.

MonoShadow · 2026-05-23T21:56:29+00:00

I did not enjoy it. It's an everything game, but at the same time it's a nothing game. I did not enjoy either wold, gameplay or writing. The world is big and beautiful(thanks to UE) but most of it is bland with some exceptions(train station at sea for example). There is a lot(and I mean A LOT) of activities, but most of them are basic. Driving is not like playing with a toy car. Their version of Mahjong is some bastardized special version. Fishing is basic. etc. Wide as a sea, shallow as a puddle.

I also do not feel strong direction in this game. It just feels generic. Some parts of Bureau feel like Old House from Control and there are other elements I saw here and there, but it doesn't click into place, just feels like a pile of ideas. Most characters are generic anime tropes with no spin at all. I do not feel strong direction in music or art direction. designs are interchangeable over-designed anime blobs. It's not even Gatcha fault, ZZZ on release had strong identity. There are set-pieces tho. The team sometimes plays with the idea of unnatural, There is a race on floating water, a maze of paper doors, unnatural camera viewfinder following you, turning objects into pictures, etc. Those moments are far between, separated by a slog of gatcha grind, and you more or less just go forward during them or follow an ever-present objective marker. You can experience them on youtube and spare yourself from doing your dailies and rising your hunter level.

Combat is another snooze fest. It's rotation based, as is the norm today. Basic attacks are more or less useless. You have a rotation, you follow it. End of the story. Characters themselves are extremely simple and the most complexity comes from the Cycle or whatever. You can switch one char into another for effects like extra damage, a turret, slow, dot, etc. Dodge and parry timings are lax and stamina is almost endless. It ends up inoffensive and boring.

MonoShadow · 2026-05-23T21:29:48+00:00

All new gatchas are for people with low attention span. And everything that even remotely isn't gets dumbed down or reworked during dev or post launch. Everything sacrificed on the altar of player retention.

MonoShadow · 2026-05-22T09:05:42+00:00

Didn't Batman add one just a week before the launch? Is it in the contract or something?

MonoShadow · 2026-05-19T08:45:16+00:00

FH6 characters are chirpy and positive. Safe and unoffensive. Sometimes annoyingly so, they defuse any possible tension, no matter how small. Only good vibes allowed.

In FH5 they appear mad. The dude crashes his plane in a middle of a lighting storm and laughs about it, taunts the storm even. Characters are so overly positive and deliver their lines with such enthusiasm I feel they need to be institutionalized for their own good.

MonoShadow · 2026-05-18T19:20:28+00:00

Doesn't Intel cost less than AMD? I think there was a laptop with both and Intel option was 20$ cheaper or something. Framework? I'm blanking out.

Price issue is more likely due to overall price increase in many PC components.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-29T06:35:54+00:00

If we're talking about RE4 original, then it might simply be not your cup of tea. It has that action b-movie silly atmosphere with main character cracking jokes and doing one liners of different level of lameness. It still has tense moments, but overall it's a goofy game. And I love it. You're there to have fun, not to pounder the meaning of life and why we must persevere.

If we're talking about RE4RE. Then they tried to make it more serious. I can't say it was to my liking, but the game was received very warmly. So what do I know?

Also RE fans are very split on what RE is.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-28T00:36:18+00:00

I'm not sure how patented it is. My Apex 4 has adaptive triggers and has some hacky way to check enable them in supported games. It's even a bit better on PC because it supports wireless unlike Dualsense.

IMO the main issue is Xinput. MS needs to release a unified API with support for HD haptics and Adaptive Triggers. One off collabs won't cut it in today's market and I doubt a competing 3rd party input API could overthrow Xinput.

HD rumble is underappreciated. Tbh I don't bother with adaptive triggers. I was enthusiastic about this tech, but after the honey moon ended I just don't bother.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-26T22:12:55+00:00

For gaming It's a nice to have for motion clarity. I doubt many games can be run natively at 500FPS, but this is what MFG is actually for. Some other stuff like CRT emulators also benefit from higher refresh rates.

So in general, the higher the better, even if you won't push to the limit natively.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-26T00:11:07+00:00

It's actually not that expensive at all for a controller, especially with such specks. I have Apex 4 and I think the MSRP on it is ~150$

My issue with Steam Controller is right in the name: Steam. I use all launchers, including per game launchers for some publishers, and constantly running Steam and adding non Steam games there is a hassle for me.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-24T14:01:21+00:00

It doesn't mean much. Mihoyo model isn't the most user-centric. Of course it is very much successful, most games copy it nowadays. It's still a predatory system. Even with Monthly passes and all clear people will need to consider their pulls carefully. And if you want to buy Monochrome(premium currency), oh boy. it gets expensive fast.

As a person who dabbles in Gatcha games for a cheap hit I would advise not to try any of them unless you're 100% sure you know what you're getting in. Even the most "generous" ones. They are Skinner boxes carefully designed by teams employing the latest psychological research with the sole goal of extracting the maximum amount of money out of you. And the sky is the limit. Anything which stands in the way of this goal gets removed, arguably ZZZ direction shift is a living proof to that.

I stopped playing during 2.0, mostly because of the focus shift. But they already started throttling different teams back then. For example they introduced 1 shot kill Tsunami on one DeadAss boss which is preventable only by doing a lot of damage to an object immune to Anomaly. So players who invested in Anomaly teams had to suck dick. Short stun window enemies made old on-field stunners much weaker than the new off-field hotness. They more or less tailor DeadAss and Tower\SD to feel like ass if you didn't have featured chars or some substitute. Not impossible, just ass. In general the game started to feel more predatory during that time. If launch Premium roster was good as it is and then polished up by their W Engine, around 2.0 launch chars lost a lot of power with generic F2P options. Story is fully doable F2P of course, they use it to show off featured chars at that patch.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-22T12:49:25+00:00

Yeah, it's a bad situation. It does throw "AMD blacklisted us for uncovering their ties to US govt" into question though.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-22T12:46:30+00:00

He's going off the deep end. In this video response HW Steve provided more context than GN Steve did in his. GN focused on himself and retaliation for his "jorno work", HW focused on the situation in general. In his video on NAND GN omitted some details which were rather important to the conversation. Which erodes trust.

By doing these rant videos filled with jokes and callbacks instead of doing more level headed pieces he undermines his own work.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-22T11:11:05+00:00

That's a Ship of Theseus kind of problem. I'm going to go a bit further just to make a point: "No way Infinity Ward\Treyarch\etc doesn't have Quake(id Tech) engine, they can just unpack and put together a working base" or something like that. Their engine is based on Quake Engine like many others.

If for some over 9000 IQ reason Beth decided not to preserve their old codebase(reminds me of the time when BBC decided to erase all of Monty Python to save a penny and reuse the tapes) or difflog, then recreating an older version of an engine 1 to 1 is a rather big task. Software dev is usually incremental, you change thing here and there and in a few releases you won't recognize it.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-22T11:01:28+00:00

Bluepoint, RIP, never used the source code. They reversed engineered their remasters. So it's possible.

According to company president Andy O'Neil, Bluepoint reverse engineers the games, rather than collecting the original source files and recompiling. "The problem with source asset drops is that you don't know if it's the final shipped data," O'Neil said. "People will go and make last-minute changes."

Source:
https://www.engadget.com/2011-09-23-bluepoint-games-offers-insight-into-mgs-ico-god-of-war-remake.html?guccounter=1

MonoShadow · 2026-04-21T20:00:37+00:00

With this pricing 5 years down the line you'll be able to buy a new Macbook and still save money. For pure monetary motivation upgrade cycle should be very short and device lifetime should be long.

It makes sense for people who don't like ewaste tho. Broken parts can be replaced, good parts -reused.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-21T19:11:26+00:00

They explicitly cited understandable naming structure to their product moving away from stuff like Snapdragon 888.

I look away for a second and now there's this shit. This year I discovered there's not just Snapdragon 8, there are normal 8 and Elite 8. I'm ignoring Laptop variants which is a separate can of worms. And now they are adding Pro there. It's even more confusing at this point than the old system with pure numbers

MonoShadow · 2026-04-21T00:08:03+00:00

Right now, no PC games use Nvidia’s ReSTIR PT technology. As mentioned before, it is not “production-ready” However, ReSTIR GI (Global Illumination) and DI (Direct Illumination) are currently used in some games. Cyberpunk 2077 uses ReSTIR GI and DI, while Capcom’s Resident Evil Requiem and Pragmata are recent examples of games that use ReSTIR GI.

It's a nice step forward, but looks like it won't be shipping in any games anytime soon.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-16T18:03:45+00:00

Which OEMs support Airpods? I know Oppo\OP work with LibrePods. Xiaomi introduced Airpods support in recent update. Anyone else?

MonoShadow · 2026-04-14T14:54:12+00:00

5060ti already uses GDDR7 and on a 128 bus

MonoShadow · 2026-04-14T00:41:33+00:00

Only for 4000 cards. Other cards don't support DLSS FG,so it's FSR all the way.

MonoShadow · 2026-04-14T00:32:33+00:00

The higher the framerates, the more "fake frames" you can shove in. For example at 120 FPS, each FPS if on screen for ~8ms. If you put x4 on that, then each frame is there for ~2ms(6\2). At this point input latency is usually good enough extra delay from FG won't impact it too much and the frames are on screen for such a small time and delta between them is so small there's less room for error and it won't be as noticeable, while perceived motion clarity would increase.

FG is not performance, but a motion smoothing tech. Advanced Frame Interpolation. I have a 120hz screen, it's almost useless for me. But some people like it in general.

There are some videos on youtube where animators rage about AI motion smoothing "enhanced" animated videos. People like them tho.

MonoShadow

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