101–110 of 301 posts
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What is with these asterisk posts recently? have I missed a memo
What are you on about?
Edit: I just tried opening this reply itself in a private window, and it shows up as three asterisks. I presume it's some kind of placeholder for posts that have not been cached/processed somehow
Edit 2: Now it loads properly, 3 minutes later.
Off topic: it's such a breath of fresh air to read this content without 1) having to close half a dozen popups and 2) all in a single post and not painfully spread out across multiple messages.
Doesn't do targeted ads, so doesn't have to have an EU cookie popup. Doesn't have an app, so doesn't have to try to make you install the app. Doesn't do registered users growth hacking, doesn't have to have sign-up dialog. The problem is, if and when they decide to monetise this thing they will have to have all of these because the money people and the analytics will tell them they have to. Everything is much more fu…
It does have an app. See https://joinmastodon.org/apps for not only the official app, but also literally dozens of third-party apps.
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Different people are going to have very, very different standards for what sounds good in speakers. For me, the MacBook Pro speakers sound great. My HomePod mini sounds fantastic. Because a) they're literally the best speakers I have ever owned, and b) I have never made Getting The Very Best Sound a priority; it just doesn't matter that much to me. Most of the time, I listen on AirPods. For other people, music and hi…
I am going to be less generous and suggest that some people just want to hate on macs for the sake of hating on macs. Sticking it to the “man”. I’m a bit obsessed with audio.. and I never expect my laptop speakers to match the quality of my fancy headphone setup that probably nets for about $4K. They are no high-end speaker, but compared to any other laptop speaker I have heard they are amazing.
Except they don't? I hate the speaker sound on the Mac I use for work. Unless "so good" in the title means "not as awful as other shitty laptop speakers", but even that is a poor statement, when the text in the link makes only mentions some vaguely interesting technical musings, without comparing it to anything else. The way the title is written makes it sound just like any other inane data point of people gushing ov…
The speakers are amazing on my M1. I'm constantly surprised how beefy bass and clean sound they can produce. Don't recall them being so great on my previous MacBooks though.
I mean, it is a speaker. Good enough for simple sound feedback on most applications. Music on it sounds bad.
Interesting the author says “other manufacturers don’t bother”. Unsurprisingly the real reason is “Apple was granted a patent on this over a decade ago and no one is risking an Apple patent infringement lawsuit over laptop speakers”. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898 EDIT: I say granted because that’s how most people understand patents and when they take effect. What really matters on the timeline here…
For example, the Apple/Samsung saga, the notch, and I'm sure there are others
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That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile shows up to give some thoughts..
An audiophile opinion: there are so many good cheap systems out there, why would you mistreat poor hardware this way? - Any number of excellent in-ear monitors under $100 - Truthear Zero ($50) - Quite a few good-to-excellent headphones under $200, and under $50 if you can run a convolver equalizer for them - Superlux 668B ($35) - Several excellent powered monitor speakers regularly on sale under $450/pair (JBL 305, 3…
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MacBooks have margin so there is room for engineering time. Also, companies like Lenovo care about their primary customer - enterprise. Apple designs for the end user first.
Is there anything that’s made better for the enterprise market? Network switches and wifi access points come to mind, and that’s it?
With two Phillips screwdrivers, you can disassemble and replace most parts within 15m.
When I did this work, the other key thing was OEMs would guarantee image/driver compatibility for 4 years. I don’t think they do that anymore, but the hardware is very stable - consumer PC hardware will often have variance based on cost and supply chain.
Enterprise doesn’t want surprises and cares about total cost. So keeping it boring and predictable rules the day. Depending on scale, repairs are important because at some point it’s much cheaper pay for service by the drink vs warranty.
I wonder how they model the energy output of the speakers. In principle you could have a function that calculates the energy of the spectrum and integrate that over time. If you put out too much energy, what do you do? Reduce the overall volume, apply a frequency cutoff, or a low-pass-filter? I feel there are so many variables here, and it is going to be hard to replicate what Apple does. I know the Asahi-Linux peopl…
That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile shows up to give some thoughts..
> And a completely unreleated thought, maybe it is
> possible to remove the safetly limits on speakers
> of other brands and apply the same strategy to get
> better sound?
That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile
shows up to give some thoughts..
However, as an audiophile hobbyist, getting good sound from bad hardware (or excellent sound from good hardware) via DSP is definitely a thing! In fact, it's essentially the reason why anything sounds any good at all these days, and why things like tiny laptop speakers and tiny portable Bluetooth speakers can sound halfway decent. Even inexpensive factory car audio can sound great these days, because you can throw a cheap DSP chip in front of not-very-special speakers.
I would suspect that many laptop manufacturers are doing some hardware/firmware/software magic already, in order to get decent sound from their hardware.
Hobbyists can do this as well. You can buy e.g. cheap speakers, measure their output with a microphone, and create a DSP profile to fix much of what they're doing wrong. The underlying principle here is that "good" sound is absolutely measurable, and it essentially is nothing more low-distortion playback that is tonally correct. The results can sound excellent. Here's an example of the process: http://noaudiophile.com/Micca_Club_3/
However, there are some physical limitations to this. Much of the sound we hear is reflected, not direct, and therefore part of a speaker sounding "good" is that it is emitting "correct" sound in a wide enough angle. If a speaker is shooting correct sound directly at you, but various and incorrect sound off at various angles, the result will not sound great because what actually reaches your ears is going to be a mixture of good (the direct sound) and bad (the indirect, reflected) sound. If a speaker is bad at this, that is not something that can really be fixed by DSP, so you need to get some elements of the physical design correct in the first place.
The software power management aspects of Apple's secret sauce ("you can dump more than max power into the speakers for x milliseconds, but after that, back off") are also beyond the limits of simple DSP solutions. There would presumably need to be some kind of stateful solution there like Asahi is doing.
There are also other things that Apple does in hardware. Their 16-inch laptops actually have six drivers. Two tweeters, and two pairs of dual-opposed woofers. Dual-opposed woofers give you twice the sound pressure and drastically reduce distortion caused via vibration. This of course takes more room, more hardware engineering, more expense, and isn't something we can software our way around. You actually don't see this in commercial subwoofers until you get up around the $2000 price level, though you could also build one yourself for much less if you don't mind DIY work. https://us.kef.com/products/kf92-subwoofer