I just miraculously received some AKG Q701 headphones. I never tried really high end headphones before those. I was used to my Sennheiser HD555, which I thought were quite good already.
I always thought there was not much difference between let's say a $100 headphone and a $500 one, and that only real audiophiles would be able notice the difference: people like Jake who can distinguish artefacts in 320kbps mp3, but not people like me. I was wrong. Those headphones make a real difference, everything seems very clear, and it doesn't feel like listening music through headphones at all, it is much closer to a good hi-fi stereo sound on the ear.
Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Best Headphones Ever?
I just miraculously received some AKG Q701 headphones. I never tried really high end headphones before those. I was used to my Sennheiser HD555, which I thought were quite good already.
I always thought there was not much difference between let's say a $100 headphone and a $500 one, and that only real audiophiles would be able notice the difference: people like Jake who can distinguish artefacts in 320kbps mp3, but not people like me. I was wrong. Those headphones make a real difference, everything seems very clear, and it doesn't feel like listening music through headphones at all, it is much closer to a good hi-fi stereo sound on the ear.
I always thought there was not much difference between let's say a $100 headphone and a $500 one, and that only real audiophiles would be able notice the difference: people like Jake who can distinguish artefacts in 320kbps mp3, but not people like me. I was wrong. Those headphones make a real difference, everything seems very clear, and it doesn't feel like listening music through headphones at all, it is much closer to a good hi-fi stereo sound on the ear.
Saturday, February 05, 2011
SIMD and Mersenne-Twister
Since 2007, there is a new kind of Mersenne-Twister (MT) that exploits SIMD architecture, the SFMT. The Mersenne-Twister has set quite a standard in random number generation for Monte-Carlo simulations, even though it has flaws.
I was wondering if SFMT improved the performance over MT for a Java implementation. There is actually on the same page a decent Java port of the original algorithm. When I ran it, it ended up slower by more than 20% than the classical Mersenne-Twister (32-bit) on a 64-bit JDK 1.6.0.23 for Windows.
This kind of result is not too unsurprising as the code is more complex. But this shows that Java is unable to use SIMD instructions properly, which is still a bit disappointing.
I was wondering if SFMT improved the performance over MT for a Java implementation. There is actually on the same page a decent Java port of the original algorithm. When I ran it, it ended up slower by more than 20% than the classical Mersenne-Twister (32-bit) on a 64-bit JDK 1.6.0.23 for Windows.
This kind of result is not too unsurprising as the code is more complex. But this shows that Java is unable to use SIMD instructions properly, which is still a bit disappointing.
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