Through work I once got into conversation with the guy who did the re-mastering into 96kHz of the ABBA back catalogue. Up until that point CD re-releases of their material was apparently all converted from the cassette masters where they'd massively exaggerated the HF to compensate for the fact that cassette had a notoriously terrible HF response...
A few years back I had the sudden realization that I'd upgraded all my video equipment to HD and then 4k, but hadn't really done anything with my audio. So I went out and got nice equipment (Nice DAC, Headphones, Speakers, Etc).
One of the first things I learned once I could hear music properly was that I had favorite "versions" of different albums. They truly are NOT created equally, but it's not something you can really appreciate on a crummy Bluetooth headset either. Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
> Once you can you really start to appreciate the work that folks like your friend do.
That can be a real double edged sword.
When you realise how good things can be it means many of the everyday/average things can become intolerable.
I'm happy that I've got slightly dodgy eyesight in that I don't really care whether something is in HD or 4K (I can still tell if my wife has selected the SD version of a TV channel, and I'm still way above the minimum standard to be able to drive).
I'm also happy I didn't inherit my father's audiophile hearing. I can do blind listening tests of different bits of audio equipment and barely hear the difference between them whilst my father (even in his 80's) can provide a whole list of things that are wrong/better/different about each of them (and he's not just making stuff up).
The biggest test is that I can also drink most supermarket instant coffee without complaint. I've got some friends that walk 25 minutes each way to their favourite coffee vendor multiple times a day as "everything closer is awful", but then that's more about them having a nice routine to get them away from their desk.
> The biggest test is that I can also drink most supermarket instant coffee without complaint.
I was the same way for years and appreciated it but unfortunately I did start to treat myself more and it's hard to go back, but my financial situation is also much better. I think it's valuable to stick with the lowest sufferable quality of something until you have the ability to meaningfully upgrade or improve upon it.
I also spent quite a bit of time with some quite well known mastering engineers in a former career - many of them talked about the pressure to produce "loud" masters for CD, but how they were given much more creative freedom for vinyl releases.
Hearing the two masters side by side on some incredible speakers really gave me an appreciation for how different 'versions' of an album can transform the experience of the music.
Tangent as you mentioned boosted high frequencies on tapes...
It's possible (likely) that those prerecorded cassettes had boosted high frequencies because they were intended to be played on a deck that supports Dolby B noise reduction, and will do the reverse operation to get the level back to where it's supposed to be.
Dolby B noise reduction didn't actually reduce noise at the source. Instead:
- During recording: Boost the volume of high frequencies (where tape hiss is most audible)
- During playback: Apply the inverse.
When you reduce the treble during playback, you're reducing the hiss along with it, but the original signal (which was boosted before) ends up at the intended level. This improves the signal-to-noise ratio in the high frequencies.
This is similar to the RIAA equalization curve used for vinyl records.
- During mastering: Reduce bass, boost treble.
- During playback:The RIAA phono preamp applies the inverse curve—boosting bass and reducing treble.
IIRC the reasons for the RIAA curve aren't just about improving signal-to-noise ratio, but something about the physical limits of vinyl.
I’ve been using on a personal side project - but found that LLMs seem to be permanently confused over how to interact with pocketbase - to the point where I’ve even tried creating a Claude Skill to try and reduce the confusion.
Wondering if anyone else has had a similar experience?
> If you don't have the time to at least skim through the documentation and you plan to solely rely on some AI tool, then please do NOT use PocketBase!
It's a niche little product that's alpha-level quality and changes frequently, I don't know why you would expect LLMs to be good at it.
I tried to use LLMs to help me with server-side pb coding, but it was mostly a flop. LLMs don't have an up-to-date state of pb's API. 2 out of 3 times the LLM would give at least a hint how to go about something and the rest is me manually editing the code, reading the docs or looking at pb's source code. All in all, I consider it a nice "pair-programming" type of experience but one can't rely on LLMs to do the pb work for you.
This is what worked for me… clone the pb repo and stick reference to it in my agents.md. I put additional notes in my own addendum.md in the line cloned repo. ChatGPT-codex variants handle it nearly flawlessly and no issues with being out of date. I use the same pattern for all “niche” libraries
Not with Pocketbase - as I haven't found I've needed to look into the docs too much. But I have come across a whole bunch of areas LLM's seem to always answer incorrectly for. For example, ChatGPT has almost never corrected told me how to use the UI in Davinci Resolve.
On the music side, the current trend for vinyl has been a really great thing for my teenage kids. My eldest (who according to Spotify listens to about 130k mins of music a year) has really discovered an appreciation for the arc of an album when he has to spend the time loading up a disc.
I sadly didn’t share that experience - I fed it my goodreads most recent - but it largely picked up on 2 or 3 series I’ve been slowly working my way through so that most of the recommendation list was ALL the other books in the series (and the spin-off series) so I didn’t really get anything useful…
Anecdata point - I’ve been running for around 3-4 hours this morning constantly using Haiku and it hasn’t hit the limit - currently at 74% and it resets in 1.5 hours. I think it’s safe to say you get a fair bit more usage over Sonnet.
Still trying to judge the performance though - first impression is that it seems to make sudden approach changes for no real reason. For example - after compacting, the next task I gave it, it suddenly started trying to git commit after each task completion, did that for a while, then stopped again.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c98jr0145rgo
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