I have just realised that MiniDisc transfer speeds wouldn't be enough to listen to CD quality (44kHz/16bit) audio without pre-buffering

Even when using FLAC, MD's 1.25Mbps speed would barely be enough. My dream of re-creating the early 2000s music listening aesthetics is ruined by another imperfection.

@newt
Wat is wrong with buffering? Without it you're fucked in a lot of cases: network delays, physical media spun down on detecting vibrations to prevent damage, physical media having to be re-read due to errors, etc…
And 1.25 seems to be just right to be reading FLACs on average — studio recordings are often heavily compressed/filtered and use even lower bandwidth.

@m0xee buffering is gay and lame. Buffering is one of two main reasons why Bluetooth audio is garbage.

@newt
You obviously have no experience using low processing power machines, which use USB (an utter garbage of interface 😏) for audio, networking AND storage.
Dropouts are gay and lame and whatever, buffering is amazing!

@m0xee we talked about this. Gay and lame hardware from 20 years ago isn't really relevant, and neither are ugly hacks to make it work.

@newt
Sure, everyone knows that you need modern desktop-class hardware to play audio 😂

@m0xee still better than half-rotten museum artifacts

@newt
Of course it is better! Might even allow you to implement audio decompression in JS — computing power well spent 😜

@m0xee yeah, good luck adding hotpluggable PCIe with DMA to small ARM SoCs.

@newt
No need to! Buffering can defeat the deficiencies even of such a sorry ass of interface as USB. But of course that wouldn't even be necessary were superior DMA-capable hardware used.

@m0xee funny, but I have no buffering issues with USB audio whatsoever. What's more, in both my rig and my laptop audio connected via internal USB.

But we have this discussion before. You lost that time and I'm not going to indulge your weird fetishistic DMA fantasies again.