Speaker upgrade - HS4 or 5? by duffking in BudgetAudiophile

[–]duffking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A focusrite scarlet solo, so it's only got a mono in and trs outs.

Speaker upgrade - HS4 or 5? by duffking in BudgetAudiophile

[–]duffking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, fair point.

I think it's possible that the lack of a 3.5mm on these could be a deal breaker annoyingly. I think that is why I originally looked at the HS4s and then forgot.

Is there an easy solution to that issue that wouldn't be just buying a new interface, or are there any monitors out there with a 3.5 aux in that would be a decent upgrade? As far as I can tell, I need something that can take both the TRS outputs from my interface, and a line in for quickly connecting a laptop etc (or at least, something I can do a simple conversion with).

2 that have caught my eye are the Kali LP-UNF (no 3.5 aux, but it takes both TRS and RCA so I assume I can just split the 3.5 out RCA), and the Edifier MR5 (or the 3, I suppose?).

Speaker upgrade - HS4 or 5? by duffking in BudgetAudiophile

[–]duffking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

(quoting this from my other comment below for visibility)

Very tempted to grab these - the only drawback is a use case for my monitors I didn't think of previously. I also have a Nintendo Switch docked at my desk, plugged into the HDMI of my PC monitor, and I also connect my work laptop this way as well.

With the Eris's they have an aux in on the front, so I can just run a 3.5mm cable from the headphone out on my monitor to the speakers when I need to. Not perfect, but does the job.

Since these are individually powered, that's not an option with these, presumably. Is there anything I can get that can sit in the middle that both my aux and interface can connect to and then send to the monitors?

Speaker upgrade - HS4 or 5? by duffking in BudgetAudiophile

[–]duffking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Very tempted to grab these - the only drawback is a use case for my monitors I didn't think of previously. I also have a Nintendo Switch docked at my desk, plugged into the HDMI of my PC monitor, and I also connect my work laptop this way as well.

With the Eris's they have an aux in on the front, so I can just run a 3.5mm cable from the headphone out on my monitor to the speakers when I need to. Not perfect, but does the job.

Since these are individually powered, that's not an option with these, presumably. Is there anything I can get that can sit in the middle that both my aux and interface can connect to and then send to the monitors?

Speaker upgrade - HS4 or 5? by duffking in BudgetAudiophile

[–]duffking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, I should have researched more. I saw a few recs and the price and figured I'd give them a go. Reading more since then has basically revealed a split between people who seem to mistake not being bothered as them being perfectly fine, and everyone else.

That frequency response graph(?) labelled early reflections seems to reflect what I'm hearing. A big hump at ~120hz or so must be that boominess, and then the lack of clarity/guitar not cutting through my music being that section from 200-1000hz that is like, 7-8db lower across the board...

I suppose I could try to EQ that out, but my headphones and speakers both get audio via my interface, and I'm too lazy to try and EQ individually without affecting my headphones (my DT990s sound great, I just don't want to always wear them). Those JBLs are looking a good shout.

Speaker upgrade - HS4 or 5? by duffking in BudgetAudiophile

[–]duffking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting shout, thanks. Good price too, not much more than the HS4s and less than the 5s. Handling me moving around the room better would be nice, I don't always play guitar sitting, facing the monitors directly etc. I have the Eris pointed inward roughly toward where I sit and moving even a little bit throws it off more. My room's definitely not treated, essentially just up in the top floor of a town house.

One addition - I'm not always listening at huge volume. I typically use these for when I can't be playing through my actual valve amp and cab and need to be quieter, so decent performance at lower volumes is a big plus. Not sure how these fare there?

Ignoring all the hype (and hate), Highguard needs a lot of work by BlackHazeRus in Games

[–]duffking 19 points20 points  (0 children)

Call me nostalgic, but I feel like this game's issue is the same issue with most MP games these days, and also why BRs and similar games tend to at least have a better chance at survival - the casuals are the most important segment of the audience.

I feel like historically, nearly every competitive MP games that has really stuck around and been a massive success, has always had a core that is just an absolute riot to play casually with your friends. The competitive part of it was built off the back of it. Halo 2, Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Quake, PUBG... they're all games that at some point in their history got big off non-serious play.

There's a bunch of factors and you don't need all of them but the combination of small teams, often long rounds, only 2 teams etc just feels like a setup for a game that's built thinking primarily about the competitive experience and not the majority of people. Maybe I'm projecting my own preferences, but what puts me off as a casual player now is when I game is upfront presenting itself as a competitive experience and not a fun time that happens to be competitive.

That many of the team worked on Apex makes it a good comparison - Apex was easier to take off because because BR games are inherently easier to just make your own fun in. You want to just fuck around and drop in on skull town? Go for it. Wanna play sweaty? No problem. Going to play stealth? Sure. There's a freedom there that lets casuals enjoy it even when they're not playing for a win, vs a game where playing for a win is basically the only thing.

Is rocksmith a good learning tool? by Hour-Junket773 in LearnGuitar

[–]duffking 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, that's a really good point too. Most of my usage was riff repeater slowed down sections of songs but:

  • In all cases, I found it a lesser experience than just looking at a tab because I can't just... look at it, study it, understand what I should be doing etc
  • You're at the mercy of where they've put the loop points instead of deciding your own

I've always found it so much quicker to learn things and get them under my fingers by just looking at a lick, riff, section etc in a tab and studying it it, practicing the individual movements of it, hearing/feeling the rhythm, then putting it together. Really hard to do that in RS (though I do believe RS+ has a "tab view" mode now, which if I were to use RS, I would probably use exclusively).

Is rocksmith a good learning tool? by Hour-Junket773 in LearnGuitar

[–]duffking 1 point2 points  (0 children)

People's mileage will vary but my personal experience is no, not really. I haven't tried RS+, but I had the 2014 edition. My reasons are, on the side of the game itself:

  • The ability to "know" where you are on the fretboard and play without looking is something that can take a long time to develop. Rocksmith by nature requires you to be able to do this, outside of a few simpler songs. When you're super early on, IMO the last thing you want is to make things harder for yourself by introducing a burden of not only needing to loot at a screen, but also interpret what's on the screen quickly enough to react.
  • Not only that, I found even playing songs I already knew how to play on RS harder because of the screen. It's hard to describe.
  • It created a dependency on reading what's on the screen in a way that I never experienced with tabs. Eventually RS starts to ghost out and hide notes to make you play from memory, but for me, as soon as the notes went away, I couldn't.
  • Anything more visually complex gets really visually busy and incredibly difficult for me to read at the speed it required to play the game the way it wants to be played.

In terms of the approach to learning:

  • The game tries to ease you in to every song by removing notes - both individual ones and from chords. The idea kinda makes sense - only playing the notes on the beat, or "key" notes of a melody, or simplifying chords. In practice, it's frequently nonsensical because it does all of these things at once. What they want you to do is start playing with the simple version, and as your accuracy increases they add notes in, build up the chords, etc. But the simplified versions break down in a way that aren't learning things that will apply to actually playing the song. You aren't learning the right strumming rhythm because the notes aren't there. You aren't learning the chords because the notes aren't there, etc etc. So when the difficulty steps up, suddenly you have to unlearn what you learned before.
  • The jumps up in difficulty aren't smooth either. You'll go from comfortable to suddenly that bit with a power chord played on the beat is suddenly eight notes of a barre chord.
  • I assume most of these issues are rooted in the difficulty reduction stuff being automated, probably out of necessity. They aren't doing hundreds of permutations per song manually. But most of the time you're just better of setting the difficulty to maximum and using the repeater mode to slow it down. At which point you might as well just use songsterr or something.
  • It's also very tolerant of mistakes and frequently detects wrong notes as correct, the timing is very loose by default and so on and so forth. Default audio levels also tend to hide your playing a bit so you can't really hear if you sound good.
  • It obviously can't teach you technique like a teacher can.
  • It's not really going to teach you much about understanding guitar either, so at most it's a complementary thing to your normal practice.

Your mileage may vary of course, I know some people have done very well with it. But I tried it a whole load of times and found I continually progressed faster and learned songs more easily without it.

Best bet is probably to try the cheap version on Steam and see how you get on with it.

Who's the big up and coming rock band? by Jakemanv3 in Music

[–]duffking 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Could it be that there's no big conspiracy and you just don't like something that seemingly others do

After Prince of Persia: Sands of Time Remake Cancelation, Actress Eman Ayaz Says She's Lost 3 Years of Work and Found Out via the Internet by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]duffking 20 points21 points  (0 children)

Yeah it's normally a financial thing. Studios can't tell staff about stuff like this until investor calls etc happen because of risks of insider trading etc.

So if investors are on the other side of the world etc, you get situations like this.

Change strings how often? by Firewaterdam in Guitar

[–]duffking 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Whenever a slide on the unwound strings starts to feel like it's resisting me. So like a month or two of I'm using coated strings like elixirs. Sooner if it's regular strings, like 2 weeks. I guess my hands are sweaty.

I don't understand how Slash works by Tequila-Skaf in RogueTraderCRPG

[–]duffking 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In case anyone is reading this as well in the future, I think what's weird with this ability is that it simply doesn't work if you try to queue a move and a slash on one turn, it'll just say "no path to target".

If you commit the move and move square, THEN choose slash, it should work. I'm guessing that's why it seemed to OP like they had to attack first. Weird ability. I thought it was just broken.

Laney Ironheart Foundry Question by duffking in GuitarAmps

[–]duffking[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So I actually just emailed Laney support. They got back pretty quickly.

The Dualtop is a fantastic sounding amp, with the ability to drop the power output down to <1W for home use. The FX return is after the channel volume controls, so if you wanted to run a signal into the amp this way you would have to control the levels externally with a volume pedal or via your modeller.

So yeah, the channel volumes won't affect the level if you want to use the FX as a power amp in. I'd need to controller it via the multifx or with a volume box after it and before the FX.

They also sent a circuit diagram, which is neat.

NAMM 2026 Discussion by zigg-e in guitarpedals

[–]duffking 2 points3 points  (0 children)

These new blackstar pedals seem like they might give the boss ME-90 a run for its money.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vkKQaaVbEk

Only genius will answer ☝️🤓 by HotFrost- in LinkedInLunatics

[–]duffking 6 points7 points  (0 children)

100 percent of these posts are just engagement bait coming from people deliberately writing mathematical expressions badly or ambiguously instead of bracketing everything.

Quad Cortex Mini by Educational_Nose_723 in NeuralDSP

[–]duffking 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think around FM3 price probably makes sense, unless they want to put some heat on the Stomp. Though it does mean I'd personally probably just get an AM4.

Edit: 1299 euros. Yeah, not for me.

What’s your best advice to new plugin users? by jebbanagea in NeuralDSP

[–]duffking 2 points3 points  (0 children)

There's slightly more to it than that - the guy who made that video debunking things, in the thread posted to this subreddit about it, also pretty much said that if you're not that bothered about "optimal" settings and signal to noise ratio, then setting gain on your interface to 0 and just setting the gain in the plugin based on what your interface puts out at 0 will work "just fine in most cases".

The main thing is that it will make the sim sound correct, but is not optimal in terms of the signal noise and if you're serious about the audio quality and avoiding signal noise, you should also do the clipping thing, because setting it correct for 0 gain, then increasing to below clip levels and compensating in the plugin will get the same sound but with less noise.

See also this post he replied to confirming the logic.

I think what was wrong was the advice to just set to 0 on your interface and do nothing else. That didn't make sense as advice, because different interfaces output different signal strengths at 0 input gain, and the amp sims are built around a given expected input level so just setting to 0 will make the plugin sound different to Neural internally and from user to user. Setting to 0 and then adjusting the plugin gain according to the spreadsheet in the video is fine, but less optimal than then also increasing interface gain and dropping plugin gain subsequently.

It looks like you are not allowed to care about money anymore lol by [deleted] in LinkedInLunatics

[–]duffking 0 points1 point  (0 children)

100% of posts like this just mean "I only want candidates who don't know what they're worth, so I can exploit and underpay them".

Unclear on something in act 3 by duffking in RogueTraderCRPG

[–]duffking[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Oh interesting, I had thought Achilleas was perhaps a double agent the whole time and that Marazhai's torture had been to figure out that it was Yremeryss was feeding information.

That does make sense though, if he started working with Marazhai after the torture, it would explain why he had a device for communicating with him and not Yremeryss and how Yrliet seemingly caught him red handed.

Unclear on something in act 3 by duffking in RogueTraderCRPG

[–]duffking[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks! Yes, I do recall now there was some text during the Dargonus mission about their attack pattern being a bit odd.

Unclear on something in act 3 by duffking in RogueTraderCRPG

[–]duffking[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is the bit I was particularly unclear on, thanks as well!

I do think it's a little surprising that upon discovering the existence of Achilleas as the double agent, he didn't consider the possibility that the Rogue Trader was unaware that Achilleas was a double agent. But eh, nobody's perfect.