I Killed my speakers on Dell Latitude 6330 when increase the volume to 200% (i got them replaced cause its my work laptop)
Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
111–120 of 224 posts
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#112As the main developer of VLC, we know about this story since a long time, and this is just Dell putting crap components on their machine and blaming others. Any discussion was impossible with them. So let me explain a bit... In this case, VLC just uses the Windows APIs (DirectSound), and sends signed integers of 16bits (s16) to the Windows Kernel. VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded…
Someone should upload video to YouTube with high gain and call it: "This video will void your Dell laptop speaker warranty" :)
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude. This is why distorting the amplifiers (especially digital clipping) is so much worse for speakers than overpowering the speakers. This is a very well known fact in audio circles. Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume. Yes, Dell is putting on shitty speakers on their laptops…
>A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude. 1.41 x >Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume. The output of the amplifier really ought to be bandwidth limited either as a natural consequence of the components used or explicitly with a filter. It is silly to spend power on things that can't be heard.
>> A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude.
> 1.41 x
Yes, for a voltage of x, but remember that the speaker is a resistance, for which the power varies as x^2/r (Ohm's law: p = e^2/r), So the original claim is correct.
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#114Not speaking of Dell's behavior but VLC should maybe add a warning to the settings when the user goes over 100% if it damages the speakers.
Whether it can damage the speakers depends on whether your sound system is defective. Dell deliberately ships defective speakers and doesn't cover the defects in its warranty. But it's not like the speakers will notify VLC of this fact, though.
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#115Yeah, my speakers have blown up too... damn Dell and their cheap shit.
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude. This is why distorting the amplifiers (especially digital clipping) is so much worse for speakers than overpowering the speakers. This is a very well known fact in audio circles. Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume. Yes, Dell is putting on shitty speakers on their laptops…
> but VLC should be amplifying the output using level-limiting (hard-limiting), which would effectively bring all the quiet parts to be just as loud as the loud parts, instead of just digitally clipping the output. That's compression, not hard-limiting. Hard limiting would leave the quiet parts quiet relative to the loud parts. It would only crush them if they were not enough dynamics in the first place.
So would compression. The implication is that after you hard limit, you also increase the overall volume, such that the limit threshold of -Xdb is now 0db. Otherwise, there is no point to hard limit.
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Low quality speakers and a poor hardware design. It isn't even a challenge to match amplifier output to speakers in such a way that the amplifier can't break the speaker. There are easily a dozen cheap ways to make this work properly that don't rely upon a probably non-existent WMP based solution. >VLC does not, and cannot modify the OUTPUT volume to destroy the speakers. That would be remarkable. >And as VLC is pres…
Dell may be using poor quality parts. VLC can also make the sound louder than any other media player that I've used while generating destructive square clipping. The problem is it's too easy to set the volume above 100%. I've done so with the mouse wheel. And I now have a $2000 out-of-warranty laptop with blown speakers. Fixes could include: * Not remember settings above 100% between sessions unless an advanced optio…
Audio is generally handed over to the OS via a format called Pulse Code Modulation. This is a series of audio "samples", which in the Windows case are individual signed 16-bit integers. Typically each second of audio is broken into about 44,100 of these integers. Each integer represents the sound amplitude during a particular 1/44,100th of a second, with a large negative number (-32,768) being a small amplitude and a large positive number (32,767) being a big amplitude.
You can view PCM sample amplitude as telling the sound card how much power to apply to the circuit driving the speaker. A large amplitude means the speaker cone should move a lot, and small amplitude means it should stay nearly at rest.
So that means that the sound card has to interpret each of the signed 16-bit values and determine what kind of electrical signal it should output to the speakers to get the desired effect (sound). A sample with the highest signed 16-bit value (32,767) tells the sound card to produce its most powerful signal.
Now, in a laptop, the sound card and speakers are chosen by the manufacturer. Different sound cards can produce varying amounts of output power, and different speakers can handle varying amounts of input power. Obviously the speakers need to be chosen such that the sound card cannot produce more power than the speakers are rated to handle. (It sounds like Dell made a design error here.)
If the sound card and speaker choice is such that the speakers cannot handle the sound card's output power, then any audio software that produces signed 16 bit samples above some threshold (let's say 32,000) could damage the speakers.
So what audio software could produce such large amplitudes? ANY SOFTWARE AT ALL. Not just VLC. I could create a .wav file that was just a bunch of loud noise with amplitudes above 32,000, and it would destroy your speakers.
In fact, most well-mixed sound files will have at least one sample at the maximum amplitude. This is called normalization -- to provide the highest fidelity sound, you want to use the entire dynamic range of the PCM sound format, and thus ideally the loudest bit of the track should be exactly at 32,767. Lots of modern music uses a technique called compression ("dynamic compression," not to be confused with data compression) to make good use of the full dynamic range of PCM, which results in LOTS of samples at or near the maximum level.
On a correctly designed audio system, this is great! You get to hear audio with the fullest dynamic range that your equipment can produce. If your system has been designed incorrectly, though, you'll blow out your speakers. But that could happen due to ANY SOFTWARE AT ALL, not just VLC.
If you really want to buy crappy Dell hardware and not blow out the incorrectly designed audio system, you should permanently decrease your global Windows volume level. That will put a hard cap on the PCM amplitude levels sent to the sound card, and thus will cap how much power is sent to the speakers.
Blame Dell. VLC has exactly nothing to do with your problems. The "volume above 100%" feature is not dangerous on a properly designed audio system (like 99.99% of computers out there).
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#118That kind of amplitude abuse is the equivalent of pounding very hard on the keyboard for long periods of time - it will break sooner than it would normally have, and can rightfully be considered abuse. However, voiding the warranty simply because of VLC installed is, again, the equivalent of voiding the keyboard warranty simply because you are a bodybuilder. Ok enough metaphors.
If the card could not overdrive the speakers (i.e., if the system were designed properly) it could not be a problem.
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
Speakers are built to be able to withstand short peaks with high power to reflect the dynamic in the music or your movie. This is what is abused to be able to play loud sounds continuously. You could take the possibility to do that away, but then you would of course also remove some of the dynamics out of the music. But of course, the people that burn their speakers this way don't care about dynamics or evidently abo…
Not sure if you've ever owned a Dell laptop, but I'll never buy one again. On a couple of occasions I have tried to play DVD's on them and cannot hear people talking with the volume up. Put headphones on and its too loud. Dell speakers are junk.
I've owned two. Both "died" shortly (very shortly) after the warranty expired. On both, the connector from the mobo to the power input cracked right off (I never yanked, dropped, or otherwise abused them. Just normal use.) I could fix it, but it was a pain, and the stress points didn't change, so it just happened again.
On the second, the screen began to go at 14 months. I would never by consumer electronics from Dell again.
Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty
#120As the main developer of VLC, we know about this story since a long time, and this is just Dell putting crap components on their machine and blaming others. Any discussion was impossible with them. So let me explain a bit... In this case, VLC just uses the Windows APIs (DirectSound), and sends signed integers of 16bits (s16) to the Windows Kernel. VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded…
thanks for clarifying !
well I guess their support people are not engineers, only technicians, hope this blows back into DELL PR instead...