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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

#141

Post by erdewit »

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?

> If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC, how would I go about "tuning" the speakers?

Blatant plug: https://github.com/erdewit/HiFiScan

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

#142

Post by bob1029 »

amelius wrote: post #130
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.

In a laptop's energy budget, power spent driving the loudspeakers is probably one of the last concerns.

If you integrate the actual power consumed over the playback duration of typical program material, you would find figures that are essentially irrelevant compared to the cost of running the backlight or WiFi radios.

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

#143

Post by theshrike79 »

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

The Apple/Samsung saga was about design patents, which are a completely different beast.

Things like the shape of the Coca-Cola bottle are under design patents and that's why Pepsi can't just 1:1 copy it without an expensive lawsuit.

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

#145

Post by lathiat »

KeplerBoy wrote: post #31
lynguist wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That part also grabbed my attention. How would I do the core dump? (How do I attach gdb to Firefox? Doesn’t it need debug data from the compiler like what you get with gcc -Og?)

You can attach gdb to any process. Debug information is not needed unless you want nice things like knowing which lines of code you are stepping through.

You can use 'gcore' (from gdb) to dump the process memory (on Linux) - it tries to create a core file as if it crashed, without crashing it. It's not 100% reliable it sometimes fails - not entirely sure why - but often works.

Then as above you dont really need to understand the memory or variables with debug symbols (though on Linux they generally are available.. and increasingly on the newest distros will automatically be downloaded by debuginfod). You can jsut grep for the text you are looking for and likely it's roughly together in memory.

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

#146

Post by [deleted] »

hgsgm wrote: post #122
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.

[deleted]

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

#147

Post by eropple »

JohnBooty wrote: post #116
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…

Also, one of the hilarious things about this hobby & engineering science is that 98% of that insane hardware & software engineering work is only necessary because we're trying to cheat the laws of physics in order to deliver decent sound from tinier and tinier speakers. If you're willing to go in the other direction, and tolerate bigger speakers, you can have very very enjoyable sound from the sorts of dumb big-box s…

I've got room for the big boxes. Does anyone sell reasonably affordable ones these days?

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

#148

Post by alright_scowl »

danaris wrote: post #128
alright_scowl wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Thanks for proving his point.

Except, you're proving mine.

In a thread full of people gushing on Mac speakers, me saying it's an okay but overpriced machine is considered "hating for the sake of hating"

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

#149

Post by bob1029 »

mjb wrote: post #136
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…

If your lights are dimming, you've wrecked your THD+N by feeding your amp AC for the period the power supply filtering caps are empty. (It's even worse than AC, transiently, because of the effect of trying to refill the caps while driving the amp). Also, the tweeter killing effect is because of the harmonic effects of clipping, so if you're hitting the rail voltages with any topology you're going to have a bad time.

You are implying that there are 2 discrete states: fully charged and fully discharged. In reality, this is an infinite spectrum.

You will know when the capacitors are actually empty. When you flip on a 2-4kW pro audio amp, you can hear the electromagnetic forces for about a second. If you have a UPS on the same circuit, it will likely trip. That is empty. During normal use, there is no such thing as empty.

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

#150

Post by zamadatix »

kkielhofner wrote: post #137
sbaiddn wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Power engineers have been doing this for decades (a century?); estimating the temperature of a transformer or motor from a simple ODE to see if the relays need to trip. The parameters are derived from the electrical parameters of the transformer. Aside from applying it to speakers, whats novel?

I'm not arguing the merits of this patent (see my other comments). I'm attempting to provide some background on how this messed up system "functions". That said, this process is not "estimating" anything. It's taking high resolution direct measurements[0] of driver temperature with awareness of the frequency and amplitude of the audio signal (also factoring in crossover frequency) and doing a bunch of stuff (this is…

The "bunch of stuff" is precisely the part where estimation comes in. There is no direct temperature sensor to measure from, the only thing available is the voltage levels on the speaker. As the patent says it's a 2 level estimate: estimate of impedance from voltages -> estimate of temperature from modelling the speaker's physical parametrs as a function of the driving signal and impedance estimate.

With patents it's not the general idea that's being patented. The patent itself cites many earlier patents which operate around the same general idea just with slightly different implementations on how the control process is fed and how it reacts.

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