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A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

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Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#121

Post by hgsgm »

hn92726819 wrote: post #107
kkielhofner wrote: post #82

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…

I don't know much about patents. Can you explain why this patent is avoided by other manufacturers, but other apple patents seem to be happily copied? For example, the Apple/Samsung saga, the notch, and I'm sure there are others

Samsung and notch are maybe copies Apple's ridiculous design (and some functional software) patents that they reasonably believed would never hold up in court.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#122

Post by hgsgm »

bluedino wrote: post #74

This becomes apparent when people join calls with others who are using MacBooks and iPads. Why does everyone else sound better? Why is my company-issued Dell/HP laptop equipped with terrible speakers and microphone? This can be fixed by giving them a headset. It sounds dumb but one thing that keeps me from dropping my Mac for a Lenovo 100% is the speaker quality. It's nice enough to play music at a moderate level on…

Until you plug in an external monitor and the MacBook Pro overheats and fans up so you have to close the lid which muffles the mic.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#123

Post by zopa »

mrtksn wrote: post #93
makapuf wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing a static HTML page content does not need a VC. Nginx on an RPI on my home connection does provide sufficient level of performance and availability. If I need more because my content is way popular, I guess a monetization scheme (asking for a tip) might cover it ?

If you are not getting paid for your servers you are the VC/Angel.

A bit of a difference in motivation between a hobbyist and a VC.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#124

Post by povik »

captainmuon wrote: post #32

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…

Hi, I wrote the Linux kernel drivers for speaker output on the new ARM64 Macs, so I can shed some light on this.

> I wonder how they model the energy output of the speakers.

Simple. The speaker codecs (special made for Apple, but e.g. compatible to https://www.ti.com/product/TAS2764) give you current/voltage measurements you can calculate the power from. It's what they call I/V sense.

> In principle you could have a function that calculates the energy of the spectrum and integrate that over time.

Right. You don't want to do the calculation in frequency domain since that would be wasteful. You can integrate the power of the samples straight away (here by multiplying the instantaneous voltage and current, if we didn't have that, we could at least estimate it by assuming a constant resistance of the speaker coils).

> If you put out too much energy, what do you do? Reduce the overall volume, apply a frequency cutoff, or a low-pass-filter?

You model the coil's temperature. If it comes near a dangerous level, you reduce the volume on the particular speaker. You don't need to worry too much about this since usually you don't hit the limits, you are merely guarding against especially nasty sound input.

> I feel there are so many variables here, and it is going to be hard to replicate what Apple does.

We don't need to replicate what Apple does. Though we are stealing the parameters for the coil temperature model Apple is using (at least for some machines).

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#125

Post by tiborsaas »

I've given this 3 reads and I still don't understand what he wants to say and I'm producing music since 2001, not a professional level, but still :) Is it a software or a hardware trick by Apple? I'm totally confused :)

I've assumed that Macbook Pros sound great because Apple put decent speakers into it and the alu-body picks up resonances much better than plastic ones.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#126

Post by hgsgm »

captainmuon wrote: post #32

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…

You can run some empirical tests to find a safe limit.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#127

Post by kkielhofner »

hgsgm wrote: post #121
hn92726819 wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about patents. Can you explain why this patent is avoided by other manufacturers, but other apple patents seem to be happily copied? For example, the Apple/Samsung saga, the notch, and I'm sure there are others

Samsung and notch are maybe copies Apple's ridiculous design (and some functional software) patents that they reasonably believed would never hold up in court.

This is another excellent point. The standard (traced back to Thomas Jefferson and in The Constitution) is that patents are intended to be granted on "inventions" that are "novel and non-obvious"[0]. Obviously, as shown in cases like this, that's highly subjective and as I've been educated, this all comes down to a jury (with the games of jury selection and all) - a bunch of random people off the street with no background or understanding of any of this - and that's just how the attorneys want it.

In modern times "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts"[1] usually ends up having the opposite effect. Literally in The Constitution (a document from 1787) - Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

[0] - https://ipwatchdog.com/2021/03/05/balancing-innovation-compe...

[1] - https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C8-1/...

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#128

Post by danaris »

alright_scowl wrote: post #104
fsociety wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

Thanks for proving his point.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#129

Post by JohnBooty »

shrx wrote: post #118
JohnBooty wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.. Probably want an audio engineer instead of an audiophile hobbyist, for a more proper and informed opinion. =) However, as an audiophile hobbyist, getting good…

Total audio noob here: are you talking about hardware or software DSP? If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC, how would I go about "tuning" the speakers?

    are you talking about hardware or software DSP?
You could do it either way. Hardware solution like a MiniDSP, although it appears they have unfortunately discontinued their more affordable products. Or a software solution like EqualizerAPO (Windows) or SoundSource (Mac).

    If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC
Quick summary.

1. You need a calibrated microphone like the uMik from MiniDSP or one from Dayton Audio. That's about $100, though, so that sort of kills the value equation in a lot of situations.[1]

2. You then measure the speaker's output with something such as a free tool called Room EQ Wizard: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/

3. REQ can then output the necessary DSP configuration files, that can be then be used by a MiniDSP, EqualizerAPO, etc. Or it can just tell you the necessary corrections that can then be manually typed into anything that supports parametric EQ settings.

Here's a video fully demonstrating all of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1aYsjPc2m4&t=2s

____

[1] There are community efforts to take these kinds of measurements and open source them so everybody can benefit. The largest I'm aware of is these open-sourced headphone measurements (which require a different sort of measurement rig) and corrections: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...

For speakers, there are the measurements and EQ corrections published by places like AudioScienceReview.com and NoAudiophile.com

If you do software EQ and use other peoples' measurements you can do this for $0, without the grunt work of measurements.

Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

#130

Post by amelius »

bob1029 wrote: post #76

I have always noted this when listening to music on my M1 MBP. "There is NO way my tweeters aren't about to explode!" I recall how quickly the speakers in my Microsoft surface laptop self-destructed... In my experience, the #1 prerequisite to driving a speaker this aggressively without destroying it is having a clean source of power. Hard distortion and clipping are what break voice coils in direct, physical terms. T…

We're talking about laptop speakers here, where power consumption is important.
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