Rant: loudness war, style over functionality, etc.

Just a rant about random things that could be much better

Every now and then I bump into things that I find highly annoying. To make 2022 a better year, I decided to flush the buffer of annoying things right away. So here goes, a rant about various things.

Loudness war and remasters

I am an audiophile. My hearing is very sensitive, and I love to hear the slightest of dynamics and sounds. It's great that high-fidelity audio is nowadays so affordable and easily reachable by the ordinary consumer. And then you have the modern recordings that have been mastered to ear-raping levels of clipping and dynamic ranges of just a few decibels.

The Wikipedia article on loudness war has good examples of what's been happening during the past twenty years or so. And it still hasn't stopped apparently.

Recently I re-discovered Perfume, the J-Pop band. They have some cool songs (thanks to Yasutaka Nakata, the producer/composer behind the scenes) and they had released an interesting sounding album some years ago. So I went and bought the album. After ReplayGain scanning it, I was disappointed to discover the album gain was over -10 dB. This is also immediately clear when listening to it. Everything just sounds flat. The sounds of Cosmic Explorer would be so nice to hear in their full dynamic range. There could be some cool synth sounds and epic drums, but as of now it instead just leaves the listener waiting for at least something to pop out.

I bought the album from a streaming service, but had to dubiously download a CD rip just to check if the CD version was just as bad. (It was.) I've read that sometimes the audio available at digital stores is not original, but in worst case it might be re-encoded from a lossy source. For the consumer there's no way to know for sure.

A similar thing happened when I bought Yellow Magic Orchestra's album Solid State Survivor. This time it was a physical CD. Turns out it was a 1999 remaster (the original is from 1979) and didn't sound that good. So, into the gray areas of Internet I went and got myself a rip of the original release. There was a whopping 10 dB difference between the loudness levels between the two releases.

I recently also bought the album King of Everything by Jinjer. Even if the genre is heavy metal, it would still benefit from better dynamics as the music, drumming and everything are quite interesting. Again the album ReplayGain value was around -10 dB. Nuances are lost and the music just doesn't strike that hard as it could - which is a shame especially for heavy metal.

This loudness war and especially the surprise remasters is very wrong for the consumer, for they don't really know what they are getting when buying. Whenever I buy music nowadays I try to find the original physical CD release. But it's sometimes really hard. It's good that there are services such as Discogs where you can at least check what's available - in theory. In practice, finding a good release might be impossible, and you have no idea if the newer releases have been mastered to have only little dynamics. Take for example Jean Michel Jarre's Equinoxe: there are at least 316 versions of it. I managed to get my hands on the 1983 Polydor/Disques Dreyfus version released in Germany, and it sounds awesome. And the album ReplayGain value? -1.60 dB, with a peak of 1.0.

systemd

I've always disliked systemd, as it has brought me nothing but trouble. I see it as unnecessary complexity for the most part. That's one of the reasons I still use Gentoo on my main rig: it just works, and it uses OpenRC to start things up. It does things according to the Unix philosophy. I'm not a purist at all, but when things don't work it does help if you can actually do something about it to fix the broken part. I don't see this being similarly possible with systemd.

What doesn't work with systemd then? Well, quite a lot of things depending on the lunar phase, but mostly network-related stuff in my experience. I use Xubuntu on two of my laptops: my old personal one and my work laptop. Completely different hardware, but both quite fine per se. Both have gone through three LTS versions already. With both I have had trouble with DNS lookup not working correctly. The good old resolv.conf is now handled by systemd-resolvd, whose config simply hasn't worked according to documentation, and it's sometimes been a pain in the ass to get a working network.

In the 18.04 LTS release, the hostname systemd service was broken so that it hanged up the computer each time on boot for 90 seconds. I eventually had to overwrite the whole service with dummy files as it seemed to be impossible to get rid of the buggy thing otherwise - again, because systemd assumed things are working and I couldn't just rip one part out of it.

Then there are the weird shutdown issues, where randomly some services seem to hang for no reason at all. There doesn't seem to be any consistency to it, either. Obviously, it might be that "it's not systemd but the service". However, I haven't had any such problems with OpenRC, and I would think there'd be a way to force everything to just die on command. But nope. On the current 20.04 LTS release, both my computers seem to finally be in working order, although I don't even remember anymore if I've made some hacks regarding systemd to keep them from hanging up randomly.

In the top position of DistroWatch.com's page hit ranking list is a distro called MX Linux. I haven't tried it myself, but it seems to be Debian-based and supports not only systemd, but SysV init and OpenRC also. If you're having trouble with various things (*cough*snap*cough*) using newer Ubuntus or other systemd-based distros, maybe give that one a try if Gentoo seems too hardcore or time-consuming. For a (possibly biased) comparison between OpenRC and systemd, see this Slant article.

Style over functionality

In my Asus laptop review I already discussed this issue. If styling actually starts to really hurt performance and ergonomics, it doesn't look stylistic anymore. At least for me, it merely reminds me of the vanity and silliness of people.

Huge mobile phones with curved display and no audio jack

My work mobile phone contract ended this autumn and I had to find a new phone. I eventually ended up keeping the old one because I just couldn't find anything reasonable. A lot of times I've checked out the marked for what kind of phones are available. Usually there are four problems I encounter:

• The phone is huge. There are practically no Android phones with sub-5" display available.
• There's no audio jack. Seriously, the phones are huge, but there isn't space for a tiny jack that'd be immensely practical? I do have my FiiO BTR3, but I don't carry it all the time and it does eventually run out of battery sometimes.
• The hardware is underpowered. Especially if there happens to be a sub-5" phone, it usually has like 1 GB of RAM or something.
• It has a curved display. Meaning, the edges of the display are curved.

The huge phones I can somewhat understand, a big display obviously has its advantages. The lack of audio jack I can somewhat understand, because surely it takes up some space (even if very little) and presents some dust-proofing challenges. The underpowered hardware goes hand in hand with the phone size, because apparently marketing people still think that bigger is better, always. But the curved display. That I cannot understand.

A curved display distords the image. It screws up the colors completely. It introduces distracting reflections from every possible angle. It doesn't even look that good in my opinion. Some say it also makes the phone structurally weaker. But the worst thing is, it makes it impossible to hold the damn huge phone with just one hand. Remember when you could just take your phone from your pocket, check out that message your friend sent you, and message them back, all while carrying a bag in your other hand? Yeah, that's not possible with a huge curved display phone anymore. You can barely hold the damn brick with one hand anymore, but if you try to type anything with it, it receives touches all over the display edges and probably ends up sending nudes to your mother accidentally.

Whoever came up with the curved display idea should probably quit their job. I just don't understand why we still have so many phones with that "feature". Luckily the Samsung S10e is still quite a capable phone. It's far from perfect, but it's ludicrously ahead of all the other models available. And it doesn't have a crippled curvy display.

2018 MacBook Pro keyboard

Whoever designed the 2018 MacBook Pro keyboard should probably quit their job. No, really, the keyboard is atrocious. For a year I worked on a project where I had to make sure the application compiled on macOS, and it also had to have a macOS installer. Creating the installer required a Mac computer. I got a 2018 MacBook Pro for that. And I hated every minute of working with the it. The operating system itself sucks so much especially in usability, but combine that with the keyboard and it was just horror. The touch screen display function key row was bad, but that wasn't my biggest problem - not even as a Vim user. The physical keyboard just had the worst tactile feedback I've ever witnessed anywhere.

From what I've read, I'm not the only one, and on newer Macs apparently not only has the funky function key row been ditched, but also the keyboard doesn't feel like typing against a hard surface anymore.

Conclusion

From the re-designed MacBook keyboards one might think if enough people complain, maybe someone listens, after all. When it comes to mobile phone and audio recording market, it's hard to vote with your money, though. If only bad options are available and nobody is interested in hearing feedback about the purchases, how could they even know something needs to be fixed? It's also way too easy to jump into opposite conclusions: "this sells, therefore it must be good". Take for example the overpriced small apartments in Helsinki, the capital city of Finland. People can't afford any bigger apartments than the absolute minimum, so everyone is seeking for the cheapest one. The conclusion according to those having any say on the prices (it's not a completely free market here): "people are interested in getting a small apartment". The absurdity in the conclusions is sometimes mind-boggling.

I'm just dreaming of a world where for every purchase there would be a feedback channel about the purchase. Maybe then we could have an actually working free market. I keep dreaming of it but I'm not holding my breath for it. Maybe in a hundred years. In the meantime, try to vote with your wallet if you just can!