Passionately Promoting A More Perfect World

reasonableapproximation:

sinesalvatorem:

TIL that it’s possible for earphones to be misconnected such that they’re playing the instrumental to a song without playing the lyrics?

This is super weird, but I assume it has to do with how the audio encoding works. I assume different tracks are layered over each other such that the singing is a different stream of bits from the instrumental? Or something? IDEK.

I learned this because I was listening to Kartel song after Kartel song, becoming more and more distressed by the idea that the worlboss had decided to only upload instrumentals from now on. It’s only on a whim that I thought to pull out my headphone jack.

I believe sometimes tracks are set to have lyrics in one ear and music in the other, so if only one side of the headphones is working you could get that effect.

I’m not confident this is what’s happening, but I have no other immediate guesses.

Nah, both ears were working. Even to the point where instrumental effects that used one ear or the other worked fine. However, even though the lyrics were supposed to play through both ears, I heard none of them.