That is just to condition you to get accustomed to eventually having to buy it first before they let you know the price.
Which again is just to condition you to accept the fact that next they will be able to increase the price on your existing completed purchase each month for rest of your life.
It’s only in the best interest of the consumer, it’s not an evil tactic.
I’m pretty sure that’s illegal in a lot of places. I know some stores have the “if you have to ask you can’t afford it, boutique” vibe going on, but they do actually have to put the prices somewhere.
As a hobbyist musician, the more you externalise these sorts of things, the more latency you create. A discreet, internal, soundcard is probably going to trump external DACs for a long time to come.
External DACs totally have their place, music playback, movies/shows. But for doing audio work, internal is the way to go.
As a professional musician and someone who works for a prominent Japanese electronic musical instrument company, I’m going to have to disagree.
Thunderbolt provides all the low latency of a PCIe interface with none of the drawbacks. I use an Antelope Zen Tour in my home studio and it is just amazing.
The systems I designed for work though use RME PCIe cards, but those systems aren’t in the hobbyist space.
I absolutely notice when a game defaults to a resolution with 60hz refresh rate. It’s not even so much a stutter or stall as it just feels “off” and then feels “normal” if I adjust the settings to 144hz.
Though I don’t notice this when playing a game that has fps capped to 60, as long as the monitor is refreshing at 144hz still.
I’ve also had a few ms of latency adjustment make the difference between frequently missing notes and being able to sustain long combos in guitar hero or similar rhythm games.
It’s subtle to the point where it’s difficult to measure objectively (if it’s even possible to measure something where subjectivity is built in like sensory processing), but based on those I think our temporal resolution is higher than 60 fps in certain cases.
Edit: Though I’m not sure I agree that the latency difference between an internal and external sound card will be very noticeable. I used a USB dual pre for gaming for years and never noticed anything off with it. I might try breaking it out again to see if it makes a difference in rhythm games.
I would not buy PCI audio stuff. Lots of power goes through the motherboard, which makes these prone to RF interference, especially if you have a rig that has high power draw.
Best to buy a external USB dac/amp. Either make sure that your mobo has a separate USB hub from the main ones (which some mobos might label them DAC), or a USB cable that isn’t rated for high voltage.
I have a Fiio DAC and i have no complaints.
But i dont have golden ears that can hear the difference between good dacs, excellent dacs etc.
Above a certain level, its good enough for me
I got a EK10 bc my old MSI motherboard had noticeably worse audio quality than my android phone/MacBook. The EK10 is totally fine for my usage (mostly just driving ATH-M50X’s)
I have a K7.
My only con with it is that the headphone jack doesnt cut the line outputs. So, i had to make an inline switch to mute my speakers for headphones only.
I am now wishing it also had XLR outputs, but Im sure i can pick up a nice transformer balancing box from somewhere.
USB 5V power can be equally noisy, even from a powered hub, so that argument doesn’t make any sense. PCIe has a high current 12V rail available that has much more margin than USB for filtering with an LDO and run your signal chain well above the noise floor of the components.
Besides, Asus Xonar as in the picture can take 12V from a drive connector to bypass the motherboard PCIe 12V “just in case”.
Some of them have poor stability. I gave up on a Sound Blaster Audigy RX after it caused random crashes on two different Socket AM4 mainboards. I just got a 10 metre optical cable and a cheap DAC next to my reciever.
I suspect the industry is in a tailspin; the last players standing really don’t have to give a **** because the alternatives are onboard sudio or $$$$ pro cards.
It means that there is a MAP (minimum advertised price) from the manufacturer. It is not an Amazon thing. Never mind, i see changing browsing mode allows it to appear.
Without giving Amazon too much of the benefit of the doubt here, I've noticed they love to offer you "coupons", generally with a midnight expiry.
I expect it's 100% a tactic to get you to commit to something you've looked at a couple of times but might be on the fence about buying.
I get the same as OP's logged-out price (nothing hidden) while logged in, perhaps if they are offering a coupon it would take it below the minimum advertised price.
Definitely stupid, but it's the only way I can see of arriving at this situation.
If it’s #2, I tend to scoop (with a plastic dog bag, I don’t use one of those ) pretty much right away, tie it off & put it in the trash. I’m with @iamericandre, changing to wood cut down on smell quite a bit. I change it out once a week now.
Yeah it’s #2 I have the problem with. If I’m not there when it happens the smell diffuses out into the house and lingers even once the source is disposed of. I think half the problem is my cats make no attempt to bury it with the pellets where before with the litter they would entirely cover it. I’m surprised to hear people had problems with smell with clay litter, never noticed it myself. It was the dust that drove me to switch (plus cost and environmental stuff, but if I’m being honest the dust is what finally got me to research alternatives)
You might find that switching to a different food helps with the smell. According to my vet, corn, wheat, soy, fish, beef, and lamb are ingredients likely to cause digestive issues in cats, so switching to a food with less/none of those ingredients might help. My friend's cat had terribly stinky (but solid) poos and when she tried a different food, the smell became much more tolerable.
Im proud I still never bought anything from Amazon (except indirectly their stock … which just as bad, but super hard/expensive to avoid - at last until they dont give it a dogshit ESG score).
Don’t feel bad about owning their stock, as you say they’re basically in every big ETF, and the price discovery mechanisms for ETFs are lousy anyway so you never affected their shareholder value in any case.
Yeah, its weird, I was kinda tech oriented anyway, but now just by market weight a few stocks with pretty stellar few years of growth hold kinda a lot of concentration risk. Especially funny, bcs eg nVidia isn’t as widely known relatively to how big it has gotten (market cap).
Sometimes there are vendors or distribution rules that require that they don’t post discounts publicly so people can’t price match or other retailers can’t demand a discount to match.
It’s not too uncommon for PC equipment. Back when Newegg was a good company, before they were bought out over a decade ago, there would be quite a few items on there that were like this.
This is super common with niche hobby products I buy. Doesn’t make any fucking sense. Vendors will send out an email saying “hey we have a sale but we can’t tell you the dollar amount just the percentage until you put it into your cart.” I think it’s also common with some lines of luxury goods. You’ll find a few different reasons online if you Google “luxury brands hide price.”
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