Snakeoil OS: The Blog

Designed By Us, Defined By You. Snakeoil OS Is Music, Your Way!

Another Milestone: Snakeoil Web Migrated To VPS

Posted by Agent Kith on 28 Jun 2018 in Snakeoil
Another Milestone: Snakeoil Web Migrated To VPS

Today mark another milestone in the Snakeoil project. The Snakeoil Squad have moved all the web contents (blog, forums, bugtracker, demo, updates, etc) from a shared web hoesting server to a VPS.

This is a humble VPS:

  1. Duo Core 3.5 GHz CPU
  2. 40 GB SSD
  3. 2 GB RAM
  4. Dedicated IP
  5. 100 MB up and down

While humble, it’s still heaps better than the shared hosting I had before. Already I can feel the improvement in speed. This upgrade paved the way for growth and expansion for Snakeoil. Big thank you for the people who have donated their time and money on this project. All this wouldn’t happen without you guys!

'Experts' Doing More Harm Than Good

Posted by Agent Kith on 03 Jun 2018 in Under The Sun
'Experts' Doing More Harm Than Good

Here’s an interesting article that turned up in my inbox a few weeks back. Excerpts follow:

“It was no surprise, then, that in 1983, the magazine jumped at the opportunity to conduct a double-blind listening test, which editor-in-chief Bill Livingston and his colleagues hoped would reveal, scientifically, that high-end cables were indeed a hoax and provided no higher performance than the everyday lamp cord in common use at the time.”

“The resulting article created a firestorm. As you’ll read, the panel identified, to a statistically significant degree, the 24-gauge from the other two contenders with pink noise as the source. More critically, they also identified, again with statistical significance, the Monster Cable from the 16-gauge with pink noise. But the latter results didn’t hold when choral music was used, and none of the Monster versus 16-gauge results passed the higher threshold of a 75 percent or greater detection rate said to be psychoacoustically significant.”

“SR’s editors, however, rewrote the ending to create something akin to a blanket condemnation of the category and pressured Greenhill to accept the changes, a decision he later regretted.”

“Today, 35 years later, the debate over audiophile cables remains as active as ever.".

In other words. Folks have heard a difference between speaker cables. The article way back in 1983 should have settled this there and then. But something got into the way of the truth. You can read the Sound & Vision article in full here, and here is the article “The Horse’s Mouth” mentioned in the S&V article.

Read more »

My Stereo Setup (As Of 29 May 2018)

Posted by Agent Kith on 29 May 2018 in Under The Sun

Taking video is really not my forte. This is something I hope to improve on. And I’m beginning my path to self improvement by getting this - a RØDE Stereo VideoMic Pro.

My Stereo Setup (As Of 29 May 2018)


Recording bass on my mobile phones (Android XiaoMi Mix2 or Apple) seems impossible. The bass is simply not picked up by phones’ microphones at all. The sound quality is also poor with very little spatial information.

Can the RØDE SVM Pro do one better? Why not take a video and find out?

Read more »

Using Audyssey MultEQ Editor On The Marantz AV8805

Posted by Agent Kith on 27 May 2018 in Reviews

For better or worse, it seems D+M have moved away from the Audyssey Pro Kit and is moving towards a more generic solution to Audyssey tweaking. This is their latest creation, the Audyssey MultEQ Editor. Available on Android and iOS.

Using Audyssey MultEQ Editor On The Marantz AV8805

At AUD$30.99 it’s one of the more expensive Android Apps out there. This app allows you to:

  • View the speaker detection results, to check correct installation
  • View before and after results of the Audyssey calibration, making it easy to identify room problems.
  • Edit the Audyssey target curve for each channel pair to suit your tastes
  • Adjust the overall EQ frequency roll off for each channel pair
  • Switch between 2 high frequency roll off target curves
  • Enable/Disable midrange compensation to make the sound brighter or smoother
  • Save and load calibration results

At time of writing, this app has a rating of 2.8 on Google Play (Based on 175 reviews). There are 59 1 star reviews. Should you get this APP given the price and the reviews? Read on to find my take.

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