I've noticed that my M1 MBP provides a seemingly implausible degree of stereo width (the left and right channel sound as if they are at a physically more extreme angle relative to your head than they actually are) but only if you are in the right place relative to the laptop. Also, if you play a pure R tone, you will hear it in the L speaker (wlog). This leads me to suspect they are doing some phasing tricks to increase the perception of stereo (again, assuming you're in the right place relative to the laptop).
A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
161–170 of 301 posts
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#162I keep trying out Android phones and Windows laptops but the hardware are always inferior to Apple products. The competition has caught up and even surpassed Apple in Software but Apple has a big lead in chips, speakers, build quality.
Only in laptop speakers do I think Apple is the very best. I'm sure their audio company acquisition helped them with that, I don't think any other laptop manufacturers have gone out of their way to buy audio companies just for their laptops. Apple's trackpad is also pretty good, but I prefer Lenovo's myself. Better hardware exists in every range (cheaper, faster, less power hungry), but Apple manages to put a lot of…
Curious what beats the M2 CPU for a lower price?
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#163I still don't get it why, because they drive them past the nominal volume limit? MacBooks definitely sound much better than anything else I've tried. Just bought a new ThinkPad P14s and despite featuring the Dolby logo, speakers there are just unusable - I can barely understand words in YouTube videos sometimes, and it's not related to volume. (Still using T430 for bedtime YouTube.)
> why, because they drive them past the nominal volume limit?
Yes. For almost everyone almost all of the time, louder=better (until you get clipping or you hit uncomfortable levels of dB at the ear). In this case, there's a safety system that prevents the speakers overheating and self-destructing, which allows them to be louder most of the time.
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
They were paying for the costs? Then they were the VC. Some of them actually grew to be huge and wealthy.
me paying $5 to wordpress: i'm a venture capitalist now mom (seriously, this is a very silly way of using terms to cover extremely small amounts of capital)
The size of the capital doesn't change the reality of the financial structure.
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Yes and no, depending on our definitions of "big" and "affordable." What's our version of big and affordable?
If we say "affordable" is about $500-$1000, all in...
For amplification you can get a factory refurbished Denon or similar 5.1 receiver for under $200. This is what I usually recommend because it will give tremendous flexibility over the long haul and honestly, receivers/amplifiers all sound very similar if not identical.
As far as widely available brands, Sony and Polk sell some nice affordable tower speakers for a few hundred dollars. Those put out enough bass to be fun on their own without a subwoofer, depending on what you're looking for.
I actually tend to not love these quite as much as some of the old 80s style "monkey coffin" speakers but that's probably nostalgia talking. There aren't many of those around any more, affordable or otherwise. The cheapest are the BIC EV-15s, which have ridiculous 15" red woofers, but sound pretty nice and the grill covers do a good job of hiding the red woofers.
There are also a lot of great bookshelf style speakers and Wirecutter does a great job maintaining a leaderboard of sorts. Compared to what most people want these days, maybe these are considered "big." https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bookshelf-sp...
So...
You can have a nice, simple 2-channel stereo system with a receiver and two tower speakers for as little as $500. It will sound great with nearly zero complexity and you can stop there. That is enough to be happy until the end of your days!
You can substitute bookshelves for towers, but practically speaking you'll probably need to buy speaker stands as well and at that point you've spent as much as towers would have cost.
If you're willing to spend a little more and add a subwoofer or two and tolerate more complexity, you can have something extremely good and full-range for $500-$1000 total.
There are options such as DIY that can deliver much greater price/performance, and are a lot of fun if you're into that and don't mind buying up half of the wood clamps at your local Harbor Freight. Very roughly speaking the DIY flat pack kits will give you about 2-3x the price/performance of commercial speakers.
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Appreciate the clarification - like I said this is well outside my area of expertise and my eyes glazed over pretty quickly in reading but at this point we're borderline in semantics.
Exactly. In this case it's a "process". Generally speaking my take is there's almost never entirely new process (or design or anything else) in any "invention" - humans have been at this for hundreds of years and there's almost nothing that's entirely new.
I don't think I've ever seen a filing without tons of references.
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#167Is this post part of a longer one? Because after reading it I still don't understand a thing. Did they mean it's done in software (i.e. not hardware)?
Software, surprisingly: https://github.com/chadmed/speakersafetyd/blob/main/src/type... I'm aware of hardware solutions that do the same thing.
Isn't it for Linux? I thought Macs use MacOS.
Again I feel like I'm reading something out of context.
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thanks a lot, will look into EqualizerAPO. > You need a calibrated microphone Ah, of course, it's a chicken and egg problem... :) edit: typos
The way I got started was using the measurements + corrections from NoAudiophile.com -- so I cheated and sidestepped the chicken/egg. =)
His corrections for cheap Micca speakers were my gateway into hi-fi. For under $100 I had true hi-fi sound at my desk. However, he's not active any more, and most of the speakers he's measured are no longer available.
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.. Probably want an audio engineer instead of an audiophile hobbyist, for a more proper and informed opinion. =) However, as an audiophile hobbyist, getting good…
> as an audiophile hobbyist, getting good sound from bad hardware (or excellent sound from good hardware) via DSP is definitely a thing!
Acknowledging this lifts you out of the category of "audiophile" into "person who actually knows about audio" ;) There's a lot of what I can only describe as outdated prejudice about what can be achieved with class D systems. Your explanations in this thread are excellent.
> I would suspect that many laptop manufacturers are doing some hardware/firmware/software magic already, in order to get decent sound from their hardware.
Correct, especially in mobile phones. My employer has some products in this area, e.g. https://www.cirrus.com/products/cs35l41/ , which has exactly the sort of speaker protection under discussion done by on-chip DSP.
Re: A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Software, surprisingly: https://github.com/chadmed/speakersafetyd/blob/main/src/type... I'm aware of hardware solutions that do the same thing.
Isn't it for Linux? I thought Macs use MacOS. Again I feel like I'm reading something out of context.
Some people like to run Linux on their Apple hardware because they like the quality of the hardware but don't like Apple's software decisions.