Snakeoil Release History
Every Snakeoil OS release has a code name. For now each code name is a well known/established snakeoil audiophile product. This chapter logs the history and release of each Snakeoil OS release.
Come walk with us down the Snakeoil memory lane, in reverse chronological order. Click on the version number to expand the information.
1.4.x (High End)
1.4.x (High End)
The period between the release of Measurements and High End was a terrible time for me. Professionally I have spent 2 years of my life constantly fixing and addressing other people's mistakes.
Professionally I am going around in circles trying everything in my power not to fail. Including becoming very vocal, which is something I never do. But ultimately failure still came but I still firmly believe I tried my best to keep everybody afloat.
Because of this drama I just do not have the time to dedicate any spare time to work on Measurements.
With High End I have dropped the shell installer and moved to Debian packages.
Why High End
The more money you spend, the better audio experience you'll get is a myth. There are of course always exception to the norm but you should not focus on the price when you decide on which audio equipment to upgrade to (or from).
Buy something right, and spend time learning everything you can about it. Example, when you buy a DAC, spend a lot of time listening and try to get to know it's characteristics. Is it warm or cold? Can I change the signature by swapping power cables or inter-connects?
I am of this belief when you buy something new, you're only realising 20 to 30% of it's potential. The more you know (understand) your equipment, the better you are at extracting it's maximum potential.
This is why I hardly change my audio equipment. The joy I get from my hobby is by improving the sound of my existing equipment, not buying new ones.
1.3.x (Measurements)
1.3.x (Measurements)
The change is more on the infrastructure side of things where Snakeoil development is mainly done off cloud servers now.
Why Measurements
You cannot hear a difference if you cannot measure a difference
While there is a certain truth in that, following this mantra can be detrimental to the audiophile hobby. As an audiophile, you should be dictated by the emotions you get from listening to music, not the emotions you get from measuring equipment. At the end of the day, measurements are irrelevant if you like what you're hearing.
Take this video analysis as an example:
The objective analysis of the audio clip is Laurel with a mixture of high frequencies that tricked some of your brain into hearing the word Yanny (priming or not). The thing is, if you're hearing Yanny, you'll never hear Laurel no matter what you try 🤞.
Measuring the source and equipment is pointless because your brains is not constrained by these measurements. Focusing on measurements is only going to get in the way.
1.2.x (Gear Isolation)
1.2.x (Gear Isolation)
From this release Snakeoil has foregone the ISO live-CD and moved to a shell installer instead. There are pros and cons of a LiveCD - OS is highly optimised, tweaked and tuned to sound great on the get go. There is a big downside though, the custom kernel is stripped of a lot of drivers, and will not work on some hardware configuration.
The ISO solution as it was designed simply cannot keep pace with the rapid pace. With just a single developer, there is just not enough resource to keep pace - Snakeoil cannot even keep pace with Ubuntu LTS.
Audio Benefits Of Gear Isolation
The theory behind Gear Isolation is to decouple the equipment from the room. The equipment can be pre-amplifier, power-amplifier, turn table, computer, even speakers. The best isolation device I have tried so far is carbon. Like the one pictured before.
Isolation can bring benefits to solid state equipment as well. I'm using carbon feet under all my solid state gear (amplifier, pre-amplifier and power CD-player) and do feel there is a sonic improvement - better clarity.
I'm still looking for these exact carbon isolators. Please contact me If you have them and would like to donate these to me!
Release History
1.1.x (Blind Testing)
1.1.x (Blind Testing)
This version is dedicated to my friend Antonio, who sadly passed from lung cancer. Refer to this blog for a walk through. The biggest benefit of this release is the addition of CPU Set. Where we can partition processes to individual CPUs.
Why is still a mystery, but applying CPU Set does appear to alter the music in a favourable way.
Why Blind Testing
Keyboard warriors want to instill Blind Testing as some sort of "litmus test" for audiophiles. That is another piece of 🐮💩. There is nothing you can gleam from any audio blind tests . Absolutely none.
Blind Testing is useless and I'm confident one will never attain a world class sound system easily if he believes in this nonsense. Of course it is still possible to do so - via blind luck. Which is essentially what Blind Testing is. More on this here.
Release History
1.0.x (Golden Ears)
1.0.x (Golden Ears)
development took approximately 5 months (including 2 months of testing) and is a complete re-write from the ground up. This is a big change as we have dropped the amateurish PHP code to a full stack framework with cpprestsdk and Angular.
This is the first serious effort of a rewrite as more and more people are paying attention to Snakeoil now and the old hacky web interface is just too embarrassing.🤦♂️
Why Golden Ears
Golden ears is a derogatory, sarcastic and put down term by keyboard warriors to denigrate audiophiles.
Oh you must have golden ears because I cannot hear what you're hearing!🙄
This is complete and utter 🐮💩. Listening is a skill and requires training.
Release Page
First announced here: Link
0.1.5 (Power Cable)
0.1.5 (Power Cable)
Major update with alot of infrastructure changes.
Why Power Cables
Power cables do (or do not) make a difference. This topic has been debated between audiophiles and wannabes for decades. All I can say is if you are not really enjoying the audiophile hobby if you do not at least experiment with power cables😈.
Release Page
Release page (Archived): Link
0.1.4 (Cryo Treatment)
0.1.4 (Cryo Treatment)
Previous Snakeoil versions are 32 bits only. 0.1.4 now introduces 64 bit support so audiophiles can get a choice of using 32 bits OS or 64 bit OS. Advance users can even run a 64 bit kernel on a 32 bit OS.
Still using the tired old HTML 1.0 web pages, but at least there's theming support 🙄!
Why Cryo Treatment
Cryogenic hardening is a process that uses cryogenic temperatures - temperatures below −150 °C (−238 °F ) to strengthen and enhance the grain structure of a metal. Some common audiophile equipments that cryogenically treated include RCA/XLR connectors and cables. It's kind of a buzzword in high end equipment and to be honest, I'm not heard anything that's cryo treated that really blew me away.
The Snakeoil Reference system is using a cryo treated GPO from Sineworld.
You can read more about it in this thread.
==Link To Release Page==
Release page: Link
0.1.3 (Cable Lifter)
0.1.3 (Cable Lifter)
The third major installment of Snakeoil OS. As usual, a ton of bug fixes and updates. But still with the dodgy user interface. Interest starts to pick up at this stage, not huge by any means.
But a small camp is starting to look at this project seriously.
Why Cable Lifter
Cable lifters is one example of an audiophile tweak that seem to do nothing, until it works! Cable lifters are simply devices that "hold" your cables (usually speaker cables) away from the floor.
Not entirely sure why this works, but doing this ''may'' improve the sound you get.
- Better focus and pin point imaging
- Better clarity, micro details.
Link To Release Page
Release page: Link
0.1.2 (Ethernet)
0.1.2 (Ethernet)
Released: 23rd March 2016.
There is nothing much to this release, this is just a minor release that fixes some of the bugs from 'Schumann Resonance'.
At the time I was thinking every release (even the minor versions) should have a Audiophile Snakeoil product. Seemed like a good idea then.
One of the more popular audiophile clickbait around that time was about the AudioQuest $10,000 Ethernet cables (late Dec 2015). Never mind that the cable do not actually cost $10 k, never mind those who do not have anything good to say about it actually own a good enough audio system to really comment. But discussion of that topic is getting traction all around the world, and no doubt generate a fair bit of ad revenues for all those involved 😈.
Why Ethernet
The Snakeoil Squad have never personally tested the above cable.
However, yours truly have tested all the Ethernet cables I have in my bin and do use the ones that just appear to sound better than the rest. There really shouldn't be any audible difference between Ethernet cables of the same length. There really shouldn't, and yet there is 🙉.
Once again like the Schumann Resonator, the Ethernet cable is one of just many mystery devices that may well cause a difference. And like almost every thing in audio, we have no idea why.
Link To Release Page
Release page: Link
0.1.0 (Schumann Resonance)
0.1.0 Schumann Resonance
Released: 29th Feb 2016.
This day marks the first release of Snakeoil OS.
This image is based on the setup and configuration of the computer I'm running at the time. To ease the early users into the Ubuntu/Linux ecosystem, A simple PHP web interface on top to ease people into the Ubuntu/Linux ecosystem. The timing for this release is no accident, it's February 29th, and the next Snakeoil birthday is always 4 years apart! With a quirky name of Snakeoil, the birthday has to be on the leap day. This release also marks the first time I have registered for a domain (snakeoil-os.net), as well as paying for my first virtual host. After 40 years, I've finally created something to put on "the cloud"!
Here're the software players available:
ALSA Configuration:
Remember this is the year 2016, o-m-g.
Based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS (Trust Tahr), the Snakeoil OS WebApp runs entirely on PHP off a lighttpd server. It was something I cobbled together to make it easier for some people I know then to run music player off a Linux platform. Not the best looking piece of software, but hey it sort of works.
Why Schumann Resonance
According to Wikipedia:
The Schumann resonances (SR) are a set of spectrum peaks in the extremely low frequency (ELF) portion of the Earth's electromagnetic field spectrum. Schumann resonances are global electromagnetic resonances, generated and excited by lightning discharges in the cavity formed by the Earth's surface and the ionosphere.
Apparently these SR are bad for us, so a Schumann Resonator is a device that can allegedly counteract the negative effects of SR. My dad gave me an Accuoustic Revive unit to try.
This sums up my reaction when it's powered on the first time. What on earth? How, Why, Impossible!
Link To Release Page
You can find the release page here: link
Add new comment