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A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

social.treehouse.systems

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

#291

Post by sbaiddn »

kkielhofner wrote: post #166
zamadatix wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"there's almost never entirely new process"

I agree, but in this case the only innovation I see is applying a known solution to protect large inductor coils (transformers, motors) to protect smaller, inductor coils (speaker drivers).

Apple can patent their actual model all they want (for example by adding the driven air as a cooling term), but the idea, generally, of building a model to estimate the temperature is prior art.

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

#292

Post by sbaiddn »

analog31 wrote: post #178
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?

Speaker engineers have been doing this for decades too. Not necessarily by the specific method chosen by Apple (didn't read the patent), or with laptop speakers, but dynamic control of signals to achieve greater loudness within a specific power rating has been a thing for a long time AFAIK. Here's an example: https://testing.eminence.com/d-fend/

Cool. The HiFi community has done such neat things.

Never underestimate a smart community driven by love (and dash psychoacoustic delusion ;) )

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

#293

Post by dym_sh »

mathgorges wrote: post #277
mrtksn wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size of the capital doesn't change the reality of the financial structure.

I don’t think I understand the argument that you’re making. Are you saying that anyone that pays for anything is a venture capitalist? That doesn’t seem like a very useful definition, so I think I’ve misunderstood you ’:-)

> «if you use money — you are a capitalist»

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

#294

Post by lukas099 »

matthew-wegner wrote: post #287
lukas099 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does the laptop have knowledge of the screen angle, or does its calculations just assume an 'average' angle? Or does it not matter too much (it seems like it would to me)?

They do, and it's also used for Desk View when you use an iPhone as your laptop's webcam. This undoes the perspective of whatever is in front of your laptop, basically like an overhead projector: https://www.macworld.com/article/1371720/continuity-camera-m...

Pretty cool that speakers are driven in part by software that knows the screen angle. Add in the position of your head and you'll be able to do amazing things with those speakers. Sad that you can't get studio monitors that are integrated enough to do this on the fly (or can you???)

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

#295

Post by saagarjha »

kalleboo wrote: post #101
switch007 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are you on about?

Occasionally a post will show up that is just three asterisks: "* * *". I assume it's some bug in the HN software. Edit: I just tried opening this reply itself in a private window, and it shows up as three asterisks. I presume it's some kind of placeholder for posts that have not been cached/processed somehow Edit 2: Now it loads properly, 3 minutes later.

It's posts from people who have a delay set, I believe.

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

#296

Post by Doxin »

andrewmcwatters wrote: post #177

Patents are interesting. IIRC, Apple has a patent on a method of creating a fast Gaussian blur by combining multiple low-radius blurs to create a large radius blur in real-time. I remember looking into this because I was so confused how Apple could create a fast real-time Gaussian blur with a large radius with no latency. Even game developers fail to do this, utilizing other blurs like box blurs instead to create the…

Another good way to speed up a gaussian blur is to first run a 1xRadius kernel and then a RadiusX1 kernel. This changes it from O(Radius^2) to O(Radius*2) more or less.

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

#297

Post by kkielhofner »

shagie wrote: post #243
Nextgrid wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, why would they not want to select someone who's a subject-matter expert? Is it regulatory capture or is there a more innocent reason?

People with expert knowledge on the jury bring additional information into the jury room that isn't presented in the court proceedings. ... Years ago, when I was on the jury for a OWI case one of the questions to the jury was "do you speak Spanish." I don't, I answered "no." I don't speak and haven't studied any languages derived from Spanish. Part of the case was about a defendant from Puerto Rico who wasn't respond…

Exactly. Attorneys from each side generally want to control the narrative/merits of their case as much as possible. When you're a subject matter expect juror they already have one juror who is less susceptible to their argument. When that SME gets in the jury deliberation room and is free to (essentially) present whatever they want/think/know with no monitoring, countering, argument, etc that's a "very bad thing" in the eyes of the attorneys. I have to imagine jurors are also much more likely to trust a fellow juror at face value than the attorneys and expert witness testimony that has an obvious slant to their side. A big part of their case usually comes down to "who's expert does the jury trust more".

Interesting with your "bubbler map" - in my childhood I moved from "outside the green in that map" to "inside the green in that map". Dialects are fascinating - the first time I heard bubbler to refer to a water/drinking fountain I had no idea what they were talking about. However, the inverse wasn't true - I said water/drinking fountain and they knew exactly what I was talking about.

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

#298

Post by kkielhofner »

rendaw wrote: post #274
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…

The author replied in mastodon: > "Nobody else does it because Apple patented it" - except non-Apple phones do do it. I'm pretty sure Apple didn't invent this, even if they got a patent. Apple have a lot of BS patents. Other comments here: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/109925910155970064

In that discussion the author references that Apple only starting implementing this circa 2014/2016 - which happens to line up perfectly with when the patent was working it's way through the USPTO and granted. Generally speaking you can get early confidence on whether or not the patent is likely to be granted. Lexis Nexus and others actually offer specialized services to IP firms where they have the background and historical performance (office actions, grant rates, etc) of the random patent reviewer human at the USPTO that was assigned to review your application.

This data, in conjunction with any early "office actions" sent by your reviewer, can give you a really good idea of whether or not the patent will be issued pretty early on in the process.

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

#299

Post by shagie »

kkielhofner wrote: post #297
shagie wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People with expert knowledge on the jury bring additional information into the jury room that isn't presented in the court proceedings. ... Years ago, when I was on the jury for a OWI case one of the questions to the jury was "do you speak Spanish." I don't, I answered "no." I don't speak and haven't studied any languages derived from Spanish. Part of the case was about a defendant from Puerto Rico who wasn't respond…

Exactly. Attorneys from each side generally want to control the narrative/merits of their case as much as possible. When you're a subject matter expect juror they already have one juror who is less susceptible to their argument. When that SME gets in the jury deliberation room and is free to (essentially) present whatever they want/think/know with no monitoring, countering, argument, etc that's a "very bad thing" in…

The bubbler map is one of those most pronounced examples of a dialect in Wisconsin.

There's a radio program (incidentally from Wisconsin) on some NPR stations - A Way With Words. Upon looking it up, I'm pleased that it's still going.

https://www.waywordradio.org/

On the flip side of "I'm pleased its still going" is "way too many search results"

(think... search... ah ha! There's an episode I remember that had the book in question https://www.waywordradio.org/johnny-on-the-spot/ )

Dictionary of American Regional English - https://dare.wisc.edu

There are some maps that make Indiana look like polkadots for certain words. ... And remembering again...

https://www.daredictionary.com/search?rcode=region.IN

https://www.waywordradio.org/regional-term-pitch-in/ (in particular https://soundcloud.com/waywordradio/1322-callersabrina-pitch... )

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

#300

Post by Terretta »

krono wrote: post #89
viraptor wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds like something a warranty repair should cover.

It's so frustrating even pursuing that with Apple for these very common issues. They'll gaslight you with the friendliest of words and nicest of smiles until you just give up and bugger off for good.

On the contrary, in my experience the Genius bar has a test device that does a sound sweep and any failure at all they hand you a replacement on the spot.
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