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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

#21

Post by thefz »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #15
thefz wrote: post #9

IDK, it pales in comparison to any decent monitor speaker. Even the cheapest. Laptops unfortunately always sounds "from inside a cardboard box".

I think your experience might be outdated. My M1 Mac's screen broke recently and I'm forced to use it with the lid closed and an external screen until I get a replacement. I'm using the cheapest external screen I can get because I don't like using external screens and am just bridging the gap until I get a new laptop. The monitor speakers are absolutely horrible, frankly I don't understand why they even added them. I…

Bought an M1 for my SO two years ago. You can tell she's playing sound through it from another room, even the TV built-in speakers sound better. I am not dissing Apple devices in particular, but rather all laptops. With speakers so small, there's only that much one can do.

But then again, criticizing Apple hardware is a downvote bonanza every time, because Apple users need to feel like a particular demographic.

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

#23

Post by golergka »

capableweb wrote: post #18
golergka wrote: post #8

> during the dubstep parts of the song, the snares sound nice and crisp. At those points, the tweeters are probably putting out 2-4x the amount of power they could handle without melting - briefly. But then when the nasty clipped lead comes in, that overloads them a lot more and the safety daemon clamps down on the tweeter volume. That's called compression.

Or it's just a limiter.

Limiter is merely a very fast brickwall compressor.

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

#24

Post by Spooky23 »

blackhaz wrote: post #13

I 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.)

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.

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

#25

Post by sarabob »

tomashubelbauer wrote: post #15
thefz wrote: post #9

IDK, it pales in comparison to any decent monitor speaker. Even the cheapest. Laptops unfortunately always sounds "from inside a cardboard box".

I think your experience might be outdated. My M1 Mac's screen broke recently and I'm forced to use it with the lid closed and an external screen until I get a replacement. I'm using the cheapest external screen I can get because I don't like using external screens and am just bridging the gap until I get a new laptop. The monitor speakers are absolutely horrible, frankly I don't understand why they even added them. I…

Studio monitor speaker (speaker for monitoring what you're creating, eg https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-best-studio-monitors-and...), not speaker-in-a-monitor

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

#26

Post by scrlk »

blackhaz wrote: post #13

I 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.)

Are you using Windows or Linux on your P14s? Lenovo relies a lot on software processing to make ThinkPad speakers sound reasonable; without the drivers + configuration UI installed, they sound tinny and horrible.

On Windows, the EQ settings can be tweaked if you have the Lenovo audio drivers installed along with the "Dolby Access" UWP app.

Not sure if something equivalent exists on Linux.

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

#27

Post by supriyo-biswas »

thefz wrote: post #21
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your experience might be outdated. My M1 Mac's screen broke recently and I'm forced to use it with the lid closed and an external screen until I get a replacement. I'm using the cheapest external screen I can get because I don't like using external screens and am just bridging the gap until I get a new laptop. The monitor speakers are absolutely horrible, frankly I don't understand why they even added them. I…

Bought an M1 for my SO two years ago. You can tell she's playing sound through it from another room, even the TV built-in speakers sound better. I am not dissing Apple devices in particular, but rather all laptops. With speakers so small, there's only that much one can do. But then again, criticizing Apple hardware is a downvote bonanza every time, because Apple users need to feel like a particular demographic .

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community.

> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.

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

#28

Post by tomashubelbauer »

sarabob wrote: post #25
tomashubelbauer wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think your experience might be outdated. My M1 Mac's screen broke recently and I'm forced to use it with the lid closed and an external screen until I get a replacement. I'm using the cheapest external screen I can get because I don't like using external screens and am just bridging the gap until I get a new laptop. The monitor speakers are absolutely horrible, frankly I don't understand why they even added them. I…

Studio monitor speaker (speaker for monitoring what you're creating, eg https://www.musicradar.com/news/the-best-studio-monitors-and... ), not speaker-in-a-monitor

Oooooh, whoosh. Sorry! Yeah in that comparison of course laptop speakers pale in comparison. My girlfriend has a home studio and I wouldn't dream of comparing the sound of her monitors to my laptop speakers. But I wouldn't expect them to be comparable. In the context of the post talking about laptop speakers I think you're better off using the built in M1 speakers over almost any other kind of a built in speakers like a TV or external monitor speaker or a cheap set of external speakers not meant for audio production.

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

#29

Post by odiroot »

blackhaz wrote: post #13

I 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.)

I don't think this is always the case. My old T460p had crappy speakers that were facing downwards (leveraging flat surfaces). My newer T14 G1 and X1C G9 have great speakers. I usually have them at ~55%, never more than 75%.

In the end, these are just laptop speakers. I wouldn't listen to music on them anyway.

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