Speaking of smart speakers, I'm moving to a new flat and I'm looking for some good old dumb speaker setup. The smartest that I'd let it get would be a Bleutooth dongle.
As a recovering Audiophile, I'm gonna stay away from r/audiophile lest they temp me to sell my kidney to afford that extra 5% in "acoustic fidelity." Seriously, I'm happy with the 95%.
Now, how do I go about putting together that sound system? Or in Audiophile terms, what is the DT 770 Pro of home stereo setups?
In my home office I have a little Onkyo (CR-N575) desktop receiver and it sounds okay at best. I keep wondering if replacing the default speakers would make much of a difference? I'm doubtful because the amp itself isn't great.
I clearly don't know much about amplifiers, but the specs say "RMS output power: 20W+20W (1 kHz, 10% THD 6 ohm)" which is terrible, right?
20W per channel at 10% distortion is pretty bad. The $350 powered speaker mentioned elsewhere in this subthread claims < 0.05% amplifier THD at 100W total power, and total distortion including the speaker of < 0.5% at 85dB SPL, which is an uncomfortably loud output.
Difficult to answer the question without knowing the OP's budget, but I agree on the Genelec line. $700 for a pair of their smallest powered speakers, and they sound great. What you are getting from these little speakers would have been considered quite exotic a few decades ago: individually-driven speakers with active crossovers and equalizers. For a couple thousand dollars you can put together a system that would have cost more than a house 25 years ago.
I can vouch for the JBL 305Ps sounding pretty damn good. If you aren’t keen on spending that amount, though, the Presonus Eris line looks decent, as well.
Probably something active like the Q Acoustics M20, Triangle AIO Twin, JBL 305P, or Kali Audio In-5 (though the last two are monitors so you’d need a dac/preamp of some sort).
Theatre.js can definitely drive this type of animation. It’s an animation library that you can hook up to your diagramming library. And it gives you a visual interface for keyframing and tweeting, etc.
At Theatre.js [0] we are enabling artists and engineers to create intricate interactive experiences. We are also empowering people to craft their own creative environments. Our mission is to blur the line between designer and developer, author and consumer, artist and scientist.
Our mission is inspired by the work of Ivan Sutherland, Seymour Papert, Bret Victor, and others.
We recently announced $4.5M in seed funding [1] and have two spots left on the core team.
Your main job as a full-stack engineer is to implement the multiplayer collaboration infrastructure. Think real-time editing like Google Docs, and branching/merging like Git (without conflicts), and component-level versioning like SelfLang. This is a big challenge in terms of performance and ergonomics, and we're pretty sure it hasn't been tried before.
If you're up for the challenge, write us a cover letter at join@theatrejs.com. We know a good engineer when we see one, so there won't be a lot of interviews to go through.
At Theatre.js [0] we are enabling artists and engineers to create great interactive experiences. We are also empowering people to craft their own creative environments. Our mission is to blur the line between designer and developer, author and consumer, artist and scientist.
We recently announced $4.5M in seed funding [1] and are assembling a small core team, with autonomy and a great deal of creative freedom for our teammates.
Positions:
- Founding Designer - Senior
* The focus is on product design, including UI/interaction design
* Apply if you have an eye for bold visual design and cinematics
- Founding Software Engineers - Senior
* These are three positions, each focusing on one or more of:
* Frontend/UI engineering
* Design enginering
* Platform and framework
* History and multiplayer collaboration
* 3D graphics (WebGL)
* Our tech stack is TypeScript and React
Theatre.js is an open-source motion graphics editor for the web. It is our first step towards building a collaborative medium for dynamic systems (microsites, apps, generative art, explorable explanations). We aim to blur the line between designer/developer, author/consumer, and artist/scientist.
Our inspiration comes from the work of Ivan Sutherland, Seymour Papert, Bret Victor, and others.
We launched in September [0], and have just started hiring the core team [1] with four positions open. Join us as Founding Engineers (senior-level or higher), Founding HCI Researcher, or Founding Designer (owning design from branding to UX). Your agency and comp will match your Founding X title.
Iranian dev here. I can tell you if a company goes the extra mile to provide services to us, the reason is almost always that they just care. It's not a marketing tactic. You have to care if you go through all that trouble. And there is very little publicity to these acts. No one is going to notice it but us. They only do it out of the goodness of their hearts.
They also went the extra-mile to block Iranian developers, they didn't have to do so much police, and probably tried to buy their redemption. For example, in theory Hackernews should block Iranians, but they will probably pretend not to be aware and won't actively chase them.
Compliance with US export controls and sanctions isn't optional. That some companies are less diligent about it than others doesn't change the compliance requirements, and people can and do regularly go to prison for willful violations.
And if GitHub did not block Iranian developers _before_ it obtained the exemption, it would be in violation of sanctions, which carries both criminal and pretty much unlimited financial charges.
I don't know whether HN violates sanctions, but comparing to GitHub HN is very, very small fish. The chances that GitHub would swim under the radar were pretty slim.
Really, "this company obeys the law, so it is evil" is lame.
> They also went the extra-mile to block Iranian developers, they didn't have to do so much police, and probably tried to buy their redemption.
US sanctions, even the threat thereof, are serious business. To this day, US nationals or US tax persons are having a really hard time finding a bank in Europe that is willing to deal with them because many banks don't want any exposure to the US FATCA they can avoid.
I had an ex-girlfriend who was born in Germany to US and Greek parents. Quite the shitshow with paperwork.
I'm curious how they discover this if they are trying to stay so distant from US authorities. If you have EU citizenship which is what I assume here then presenting the Greek passport and supporting local documents isn't enough? Or, is it the case that something local like a missing local tax number, or even an accent telegraphed the situation.
With the US, it feels like everything is much more uniform with the tie back to a federal social security number. The SSN is universally requested for many types of financial and insurance setups.
Every bank I've opened an account with in recent years has asked multiple specific questions about any ties to the US during the account opening process. One even asked if I'd ever had a US telephone number or mailing address.
In some places the family name tips them off. Like here in Thailand a Thai woman who is married to a westerner and has his last name will have to fill out a form stating whether or not they are a US person.
Lying to your bank is typically not a good strategy when it comes to compliance. You can get asked on a form and if you lie, they have a very good case later on to close your account.
That works exactly as long as such an US-aligned company doesn't enter the spotlight in some sanctioned entity related trouble.
Had friends working export compliance for a larger US IT company, and they once (temporarily) blocked a larger shipment to the (British) Royal Air Force because some bozo abbreviated them as "RAF" - which, obviously!, refers to the (German) Red Army Faction, a left-extremist terrorist cell that wasn't relevant for more than 10 years at that point (and wouldn't know what to do with high performance computers, anyway).
Better safe than sorry, otherwise you mess up one day, come back to the HQ on the next and all that's left is a brand new parking lot.
Hacker News probably falls under the general license for personal communications, etc. Github is not really personal communications, so caution is warranted, at least a bit. Rsync.net doesn't really provide personal communications either, IMHO, and it seems reasonable for them to not do business with people in Iran unless rsync.net obtains a specific license or finds a different general license they fit into.
I call Theatre.js a hackable animation tool. It helps you to:
- craft detailed motion for JS values,
- route those values to actual visual objects, like DOM nodes, THREE.js objects, or your homemade libraries, (someone even did a lightshow with Arduino and Theatre.js)
As a recovering Audiophile, I'm gonna stay away from r/audiophile lest they temp me to sell my kidney to afford that extra 5% in "acoustic fidelity." Seriously, I'm happy with the 95%.
Now, how do I go about putting together that sound system? Or in Audiophile terms, what is the DT 770 Pro of home stereo setups?