Do I really need to get out the soldering-iron again?
I have a pair of powered studio monitors (Mackie MR5), and I completely relate to this problem. Many PCs and phones will emit an audible hissing noise while plugged in. I&#x27;ve tested on a dozen different devices, with integrated and external DACs, five hundred dollar sound cards, massively shielded cables, practically every modern OS you can name, tweaking every audio setting exposed to me. The only devices that work perfectly are (1) my TV output, and (2) every single Apple product.<p>I&#x27;m wholly convinced that the computing world is, in general, regressing. Audio has been a huge loser in this fight. Today, many modern phones don&#x27;t ship with 3.5mm jacks. If you want lossless audio, you literally can&#x27;t find it, even though there&#x27;s zero reason companies like Spotify couldn&#x27;t stream it when available (even if it costs extra) (Spotify literally asks artists to upload the masters when they publish, they have that data and then throw it away). Many artists don&#x27;t even publish physical CDs anymore, so its a game of luck if they have a website where I can buy the FLACs&#x2F;ALACs. And if you want the actual files to, you know, live your life in a completely legal way, those are gone.<p>Its more than just audio. Watching movies sucks; you now pay full price to effectively indefinitely rent movies, and have them taken away at any time. eBooks are the same and always have been; the world&#x27;s oldest technology has been coopted by companies like Amazon to increase revenue, and there&#x27;s practically zero competition. Applications suck; we&#x27;re puking web and electron everywhere, eating up every conceivable megabyte of memory available literally only because developers are lazy, and now you&#x27;re consistently asked to pay a monthly fee to access this functionality literally only because companies are lazy. Modern operating systems suck; restricting filesystem access, exposing proprietary application APIs which fundamentally make applications unportable and thus contributing to the rise of Electron&#x2F;RN.<p>Somehow we took systems and workflows that were amazing throughout the 90s-00s and, in the course of a decade, completely ruined them.