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aaaaaaaaa my suffering is finally over
if you’re a Mac user and you suddenly find you’re getting horrible crunchy noise that’s shaped by, but usually quieter than, the music you’re listening to… go into the “Audio MIDI Setup” and change output sample depth from 16-bit to 24-bit
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 😭
@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