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This blog is about “Trumpcare”, the fact that CDs give perfect sound, and more about my DEH-X1900UB car stereo.

==The defeat of Trumpcare==

I do not consider the defeat of Trumpcare a defeat of conservative values. I consider the defeat of Trumpcare and the continuation of Obamacare a victory for conservative family values. It was, after all, Republicans who had the power to abolish Obamacare, and conservative Republicans who ultimately decided that a bill that would have killed 24,000 people a year was not a good idea.

Hopefully, this debacle will help the Republican party return to truly conservative values.

==CD: Perfect sound forever==

Here is one good article showing that CDs sound perfect and here is another article making the same point.

Now, every now and there there appears a paper that claims people can hear the difference between CD quality and high resolution audio in a blind listening test. Every time one of those comes up, I get skeptical; extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and there are a lot of ways sound can vary if a test is not properly calibrated. For example:

• Was the volume level between the CD quality audio and the high resolution audio calibrated to be exactly the same?
• Was the process of converting the high resolution audio to CD quality audio done the same way it would be done in the real world, or was it intentionally crippled? (The second paper I link to from 2014, the “Meridian paper” crippled the CD audio by using “rectangular dither.”)
• Does the amplifier, speakers, or headphones suffer from inter-modulation distortion, where frequencies too high for humans to hear are converted in to lower frequency sounds?
• Was the study a true double blind study, where neither the listener nor the person conducting the study knew which sound was the high resolution sound?

== DEH-X1900UB redux ==

Now that I have had my DEH-X1900UB car stereo for over a couple of months, some more thoughts:

• “Random”, by default, will randomly play any song anywhere on the mp3 CD/USB stick, which makes little sense to me. It’s possible to shuffle a single album by selecting both “Repeat folder” and “random” at the same time, but this is buggy: When the folder is changed, repeat is disabled but random is not disabled, causing the next track to be from any folder unless I remember to either turn on “repeat folder” or turn off “random” when changing albums.
• It’s possible to attach a 128 gigabyte USB memory to the unit, as long as the unit is formatted with the FAT32 filesystem (I need to point out here that Windows can format arbitrarily large filesystems as FAT32 without any third party utilities). The issue is that it’s difficult to navigate more than 50 folders or so because the DEH-X1900UB only has two buttons to change folders.

I next disucss the DEH-X1900UB car stereo in a 2021 blog entry.

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