I just had a conversation about common confrontation-averse social norms/behaviours which are considered generally polite or courteous, and how damaging they can be to relationships between people. This is a good example of that.

It might be considered polite or courteous to say nothing, but in doing so you’d be enabling your friend to unwittingly annoy you repeatedly by sharing a non-mutual interest, which only erodes the net positivity of your friendship little by little. I’d bet that your friend is sharing these garbage amalgamations of sound morphed into something resembling a musical arrangement (like a freshly birthed greasy unit of bologna, haphazardly moulded into a lumpy homogeneous sculpture vaguely resembling a six-fingered mutation of Michelangelo’s David) simply because it’s something that brings them enjoyment, and they just want to share that enjoyment with you.

If you break the pattern of toxic courtesy by just being honest and letting them know that you aren’t interested in hearing any of it, you’d be saving yourself from allowing your friend to (again, unwittingly) annoy you several more times, potentially lowering your overall perception of the friendship to a point that creates distance between you.

TL;DR be honest and tell your friend that you don’t like AI-generated audiobominations. But of course keep in mind that there’s a fine line between being honest and just being an asshole.

I feel like it’s not fair to use data measured strictly in price per terabyte, I think a better representation to make your point would need to take into account how much total RAM was used by an average person’s devices each year, and track that price over time, no? Because the issue is that people are becoming unable to afford to upgrade their devices due to price hikes, and I wouldn’t exactly say that’s dismissable by the fact that the price of RAM now is less per Terabyte than it was going back over half a century ago.

Simply put, both protect against certain types of interference in different ways, and each is effective in ways that the other is not.

Mesh shielding is going to help prevent electrical interference from being introduced via the wire itself from an external source. Like other cables carrying signal and running very near/parallel, or electromagnetic fields generated from other devices, certain electrical components, household appliances, etc.

The ferrite beads protect against radio-frequency interference (RFI) via induction, acting like low-pass filters which attenuate specific bandwidths of very high frequency signals. Essentially, they intercept and absorb high-frequency electrical noise, and convert that energy into a small amount of heat instead of letting it pass through further down the signal path. This kind of interference can be from an external source, or generated internally from the various electronics/components in the signal path (which mesh shielding would do nothing to protect against). They also help dissipate any RFI that the mesh shielding itself may be carrying, so you often see both ferrite beads and mesh/foil shielding, like on laptop chargers or USB cables for example.

Yeah, but the comment you replied to was making a point that the conductor doesn’t really matter if there isn’t any noise present. What makes a good cable has much more to do with proper shielding, because electromagnetic interference is what will muck up your signal, not a lack of gold plated connectors

He’s talking about the electromagnetic shielding in a cable, not the contact-points. Usually a copper mesh sheath housed underneath the outer-most rubbery layer and runs around and along the entire length of the signal-carrying wires inside the cable. Works like a Faraday cage, helps prevent electromagnetic interference from large power sources, other unshielded cables running parallel, or anything else that can generate an electromagnetic field near the cable.

Very important to protect signal integrity, widely used even outside the audiophile world (although there are of course plenty of audiophile gimmicks related to shielding).

Basically, if you have a bunch of live unshielded cables bundled and zip-tied together along with your speaker wire, you’ll definitely hear it. Run the signal through an oscilloscope, and you’ll even see it