Lucie / minuteJan 4
overly in-depth (i love it) explanation of why usb-c audio dongles/headsets hit USB-FS bandwidth limits https://epenguin.imalone.co.uk/2025/06/audio-dongles-and-ghost-of-usb-1.html
Audio dongles and the ghost of USB 1

USB dongles with not enough bandwidth

Show thread~nJan 4

@mntmn dafuq! I mean… I love me some oversampling just like the next dude but… sorry for repeating myself… DAFUQ!?

Sidenote: In my quest to eliminate analog audio at home right until the speakers (digital monitors from Neumann, KH-120D) I tried out various USB-C -> Toslink cables (yes, cable, not box, this is something that exits) and there are some violent differences here too. from "no volume control" to "the cable itself talks and says 'USB AUDIO!' when plugged in". Wild stuff.

Show threadLucie / minuteJan 4
@nblr yeah, it's bizarre how audio is still so hard and buggy when it's supposed to have only a fraction of the bandwidth of video, which works much better nowadays (although, almost no-one is doing video output over usb, for reasons)
Show thread~nJan 4
@mntmn well, at least it is somewhat standardized and "driverless", but on phones? I'd have expected them to just include a "well known left/right/button/mike" pin option. plus passive adapters - otoh… that would mean a probably "rarely used anyway" dac as extra electronics in every phone plus inviting another layer of complexity in the already complex usb-c plug pinout zoo. so… i can see why, but…
Show threadDaniel Gibson

@nblr @mntmn
To me the main WTFs were:
- Why don't they at least use HS?!
- Why do super-cheap adapters that don't even talk USB2/HS use 96 or even 192kHz and 24bit? 48kHz and 16bit sound pretty good

An entirely different weird thing in this article: In at least two places it mentions illustrations that aren't there?! Is this a text-only copy of an article published elsewhere? (It doesn't mention anything like that)

Jan 4 at 1:11pmWeb
Show threadLucie / minuteJan 4
@Doomed_Daniel @nblr illustrations are there for me
Show threadDaniel GibsonJan 4

@mntmn @nblr
Weird, here it didn't, neither in Firefox nor Chromium. The image link is something in googleusercontent.com/docsz/ and the Firefox inspector said "Could not load the image"

But after reloading (with "shift" so it really reloads, normal reload didn't help) the images are finally there

Show threadKraftwerk-Das Model CollapseJan 4
@Doomed_Daniel @mntmn googleusercontent.com seems to have capacity issues - open image in new tab got me a "bandwidth exceeded" which was fixed by hitting reload few times
Show threadDaniel GibsonJan 5

@dngrs @mntmn
That explains things!

Google having capacity issues for serving static content is... err.. unexpected.

Show threadMaxJan 5
@Doomed_Daniel @dngrs @mntmn I'm sure there is nothing to worry about 
Show threadKraftwerk-Das Model CollapseJan 5
@korenchkin @Doomed_Daniel @mntmn poetic justice if they got DDoS'd by some LLM scraper farm
Show threadD GuthrieJan 4
@Doomed_Daniel @nblr @mntmn They support those speeds because whatever DAC IC they use supports them. It's often a Realtek IC. Higher quality DACs and interfaces have better hardware (like discrete ICs for each channel, clever routing to reduce noise), not necessarily higher-resolution sample rates presented to the computer.