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comment by elizabeth
elizabeth  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: April 12, 2017

Audiophiles are dicks.

We started this new project, building up this vinyl record related website. Posted a video we made on our facebook page, and here's a comment we got:

"You should maybe look up who I am and what I've done for 40 years and if you don't know that the arm needs to be angled by a few degrees instead of parallel to the plinth with some cartridges like Ortofon than you shouldn't be teaching people anything"

Ignoring the fact he's actually wrong according to Ortofon's official website, how much of a self-absorbed dick do you have to be to talk this way about yourself? But I guess it's the flip-side to the fact we could potentially sell 10 000$ cables to these kind of people...

The video actually did pretty well and is being shared around :) Happy about that! But I really have to figure out this lighting situation in my living room. Switching to LED lighbulbs made it look better, but the flicker actually got worse, especially if I move my camera around. Don't know if it's something in my camera settings I should fix, or if there's some better lightbulbs i should buy.





am_Unition  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    But I guess it's the flip-side to the fact we could potentially sell 10 000$ cables to these kind of people.

"Honestly, when the electrons pass through some of the more inhomogeneous parts of the atomic lattice on the way to my ears, my blood pressure just shoots right up."

Devac  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"All I'm asking for is that it's doped with 1part per quadrillion Titanium, Devac, it just does.. something absolutely magical... to the sound. It's only a 31-step electrolysis process anyway."

Devac  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

No, THAT's just one tip from my _NEW_ book on doping for Listening pleasure, "Hole-istic Hearing". You won't BELIEVE the olfactory engagement you can get with the technique listed on page 319! YOU CAN HEAR IT IN YOUR NOSE!!

Devac  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Don't just do all this research for yourself, Devac. Do it Fermi.

Devac  ·  2541 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  2541 days ago  ·  link  ·  

^^ Major turnoff, not even sure what we're integrating over. It's a joke of a joke!

It might be funny if mathematicians were sexy, but here we are, Devac.

Devac  ·  2540 days ago  ·  link  ·  
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am_Unition  ·  2539 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That guy sounds like my brand of asshole.

kleinbl00  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Audiophiles are dicks.

Preach.

    Switching to LED lighbulbs made it look better, but the flicker actually got worse, especially if I move my camera around.

Yeah you don't wanna do that. The clock speed on your CMOS is not slaved to anything unless you're shooting on something with a timecode input and the clock speed on your LEDs is not slaved to anything unless they say Kino Flo on the side. It might work sometimes? But the times it doesn't work it's going to not work really hard.

elizabeth  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

hahah i think i showed this writeup to all my audio-enclined friends. It's hilarious!

urgh, i guess it's back to regular incandescent lightbulbs for me then, i think i'll find less yellowy ones and more powerful this time. Really trying to figure out this whole lighting situation without shelling out on a proper studio set up. There must be something i can screw into my chandelier that doesn't flicker and look like shit on video :(

kleinbl00  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There's nothing wrong with incandescents. If they look yellow that means you need to color balance. Shoot a white card and set that as your white point and suddenly everything will look fine.

If you're trying to do this with practical lighting, those heinous yellowy torchiere bulb work lights will do just fine. You just need to set the color balance to match.

elizabeth  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

for sure - maybe it's asking too much but i don't want to color correct everything, i'd like to live in a space that's just always video-ready in case i want to film a 3 minute thing. my camera does a good job at white balancing most of the time too - i think the problem with my previous incandescents was that they just weren't bright enough. footage looked like shit even after all my efforts to color correct (but i'm no pro either). And they did produce some weird bands if I was at 24fps.

kleinbl00  ·  2541 days ago  ·  link  ·  

C'mon now. Color-balancing should be the first thing you do when you whip out the camera. It should take you under 30 seconds. And you should be color-balancing your productions the minute you're done with the edit. You know better to assume that you're going to get consistent lighting out of anything but an isolated studio environment.

I work on a soundstage where the lights have literally been hung for eleven years. We still calibrate everything every month and color-balance the cameras every time we turn them on. Don't be lazy.

rjw  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I feel like the fact that acoustics is an area that has some science behind it gives a certain kind of person the confidence to make bold and unwanted assertions regardless of whether they are actually welcome (or correct). Computing has its fair share of them too :|

goobster  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ah. I see. There is some prerequisite amount of bullshit you need to know before you can have any ideas.

What a helpful gentleman! (And we all know he was a "he" simply because of his wording.)

The world is full of asshole commenters, and only a handful of content creators. So there will always be asshole comments on EVERY bit of content. It's just numbers.

Keep doing what you are doing, and NEVER respond to ANY comment like that. No matter how much you want to... it is what they live for. So JUST DON'T.

elizabeth  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I did respond (very diplomatically), only for that sweet facebook engagement algorithm. Some guy down the line commented "why not try being a bit kinder and less aggressive? Would you rather be right or kind?"

I consider it a win ;)

WanderingEng  ·  2542 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Audiophiles are dicks.

True! Audiophiles seem to be unique among enthusiasts of subjective things in their insistence on assigning them what they insist are objective ratings.

And anyone who says "You should maybe look up who I am" isn't as important as they wish they were.

You seem totally in control of all things video you do, but if there's anything vinyl or vintage vacuum tube (which some will call audiophile but being realistic isn't) I might be able to help with, let me know. My vinyl expertise is mostly limited to "these are the records I have and this is the turntable I have."

user-inactivated  ·  2541 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Audiophiles seem to be unique among enthusiasts of subjective things in their insistence on assigning them what they insist are objective ratings.

You've just described every extreme part of an enthusiast community.