social.noyu.me

i’ve been hit by this cursed problem so many times over the years, on multiple different MacBooks, and it can drive you insane because it’s not the earphones, it’s not the power supply, it’s not the specific laptop… surely it’s not a software issue? haha. hahahaha. it was.

16-bit quantisation noise is real and it can hurt you 😭

if anyone ever tells you that undithered 16-bit is not gonna be noticeably bad… maybe if you’re mastering a CD, but if you’re using in-ear earphones on a laptop, you might have the output volume set to less than 5%, and aaaaaa it’s horrible. it is hell. it’s Very audible

oh god the noise is back. (checks settings) huh, it’s reset itself. what. why did that happen

@hikari the source was 24-bit?

@athanasios the music I’m listening to is almost always lossily compressed, so I’m not sure if it has an inherent bit depth

@athanasios perhaps the decoder produces 32-bit float output, which it then converts to the final output sample rate but doesn’t bother to dither properly. who knows. all i know is it’s hell

@athanasios I also wouldn’t be surprised if the source is actually 16-bit and perfectly dithered, but quantisation noise gets introduced when doing a gain reduction

@hikari makes sense, thanks

@hikari holy crap, either you have great ears or that's several layers of bad

@flippac oh I assure you I don’t have great ears, the reason it’s audible is that with in-ear earphones, your max output volume is like 10% at most, often 5% or less, so relatively “quiet” noise becomes quite noticeable

@flippac and yeah it’s worrying this is a thing. it happens with multiple different apps so it makes me worry it’s the OS itself that’s introducing the quantisation noise ;_;

@hikari If all the mixing's digital that... still shouldn't be much of a thing? You're losing maybe the top 3-4 bits off the dynamic range and if it's propagating control signal all the way down then mixing up again the effect of dithering should be below what a 16-bit DAC + analogue mixer circuit would consider its noise floor...

@flippac well, I’m assuming the problem comes from the absence of dithering

@flippac if there was dithering then there’s no doubt in my mind it’d sound fine

@hikari Could be that, could be the equivalent of running through more than one amp stage: that would also show up as noise and it'd be a bit louder too

@flippac fwiw the character of the noise was very quantisation-noise-y, nothing like tape hiss

@hikari @fanf yeah, this has been the solution for audio distortion Facetime calls for months now. C