New Sound Drivers Coming In Linux 4.16 Kernel

[starshipeleven]

Our environments now are littered with constant meaningless noises, if anything, evolution will just degrade our hearing.

evolution is just an effect of natural selection. Natural selection happens when individuals with "bad" traits that can't reproduce because of some reason (die sooner, disliked by the opposite sex, whatever).
So unless people with worse hearing will somehow manage to make more children than those with normal hearing, this won't happen.

What is happening is that people with "bad" traits like genetic illnesses (mild or even very bad) or whatever now can still live fine because of modern technology and medicine, so the gene pool is getting more and more individuals with "bad" traits than back in the day. Back in the "golden days" when men were men, women were women and children were exploited in mines and factories, these individuals would die off or not reproduce as well as the ones with "good" traits.

But this has nothing to do with being in a very noisy environment or not.

[pgoetz]

Human ear gains more resolution as a result of human gene evolution. Your parents might have been happy with C cassettes (SNR around 70 dB), but now people desire continuous upgrades.

This comment hurt my brain in so many ways. A while back someone conducted a double blind study with a group of self-professed audiophiles who listened to CD quality FLAC clips as well as 256K mp3 and were asked to decide which of the clips were CD quality and which were mp3's. The outcome was worse than random; i.e. they identified the mp3's as being CD quality more than 50% of the time. Evolution works on a time scale of millions of years, not the decades that separate different levels of audio technology.

[pmorph]

Our environments now are littered with constant meaningless noises, if anything, evolution will just degrade our hearing.
E: if there are new audio chip manufacturers, I suspect it's just because they think they can do it cheaper than others.

[zvober]

It's a big pain that "Lenovo Y700-17ISK subwoofer problem" hasn't been solved for almost two years now:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/alsa-driver/+bug/1553685

[aht0]

Human ear gains more resolution as a result of human gene evolution. Your parents might have been happy with C cassettes (SNR around 70 dB), but now people desire continuous upgrades. 130 dB SNR was good 5 years ago, but now most people expect 135. One more decibel per year. Same thing with DAC capabilities. 24bit audio was good back in the SACD/DVD-Audio days, but now new phone chips already have 32, which is quite natural evolution since audio professionals can easily spot the difference. https://www.androidauthority.com/sna...in-970-820651/

Human ear is killed off early-on these days. Majority does not realize that noise damage is a permanent damage.

My left ear is -35dB 3...5kHz range, from shooting without ear mufflers, when I was younger. By the time issue was discovered in a routine check, it was already late.

Now I literally shudder each time I happen to see some dude or gal listening music so loud through their headsets that I can actually clearly hear it from 2 meters away. Happens multiple times a day, usually it's people from pre-teens to 20+. Or idiot car-fags from 18 to 40 with seemingly 1kW bass in their cars booming through half the city.. Deaf as stone wall before hitting 50.

[caligula]

Agreed 100%. Saying that improved hearing in one or two generations is possible in evolution is ludicrous. This sales trick is similar to the "speaker performance" BS with audio vs electrical Watts.

P.M.P.O Watts died already. Nobody uses them anymore. The thing with audio hardware is, the numbers will continue to grow and they're actually real. A 32 bit DAC indeed has 32 bit slots for input. A 140 dB SNR in a DAC really is 140 dB. That old 10000W PMPO amplifier OTOH was just a 5W DIN A-weighted amplifier. People think that their ears are golden, when they really aren't. But that doesn't matter, it's business. How businesses work, they need to generate revenue and not only a constant stream, but also annual growth, e.g. 8%.

[ids1024]

arrg, still have not sent my M$ Surface ALSA patch upstream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1YkPtfC4LI guess after Takashi's holiday then ;-)

Nice video. It looks like I submitted my first kernel patch to the sound subsystem just in time for it to end up in this pull request.

https://iandouglasscott.com/2018/01/14/reverse-engineering-creative-sound-blaster-e1/

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/tiwai/sound.git/commit/?id=388fdb8f882af67ff8394d9420c1e0e42ba35619

[Almindor]

No that is not how biology works. This is purely a numbers game to sell more units and have nothing to do with actual performance. There is no golden ears in the world that can distinguish between a 24-bit and 32-bit DAC in a proper ABX test unless they alter the sound on them deliberately (and this shit happens).

Agreed 100%. Saying that improved hearing in one or two generations is possible in evolution is ludicrous. This sales trick is similar to the "speaker performance" BS with audio vs electrical Watts.

[starshipeleven]

Great to see Linux getting drivers for all these chips. Kind of amazes me how many sound chips are newly pushed on the market, as this seems to be so "done technology", I mean seriously, is there anything relevant those chips can do that the last generation couldn't?

Bulk are for embedded. Either for media players or they are the DAC integrated in a SoC.

So yeah, the ones integrated in the SoCs are mostly pointless reinventing of the wheel, the high quality ones are just competing for being used in embedded market.

[F.Ultra]

Human ear gains more resolution as a result of human gene evolution. Your parents might have been happy with C cassettes (SNR around 70 dB), but now people desire continuous upgrades. 130 dB SNR was good 5 years ago, but now most people expect 135. One more decibel per year. Same thing with DAC capabilities. 24bit audio was good back in the SACD/DVD-Audio days, but now new phone chips already have 32, which is quite natural evolution since audio professionals can easily spot the difference. https://www.androidauthority.com/sna...in-970-820651/

No that is not how biology works. This is purely a numbers game to sell more units and have nothing to do with actual performance. There is no golden ears in the world that can distinguish between a 24-bit and 32-bit DAC in a proper ABX test unless they alter the sound on them deliberately (and this shit happens).