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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

#41

Post by blackhaz »

scrlk wrote: post #26
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.

Actually, FreeBSD. This makes sense. :-D

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

#42

Post by bottled_poe »

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…

That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile shows up to give some thoughts..

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

#45

Post by jdiez17 »

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…

> I'd be tempted to just throw the Apple libraries into Ghidra and see what they do

The Asahi people usually reverse engineer things like the audio system by running macOS under the m1n1 hypervisor, which lets you inspect interactions with the hardware using a Python API

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

#46

Post by zamnos »

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…

The other question is how much is done in software vs hardware? I can imagine an opamp doing the integration to kick in a volume reduction to avoid damaging the speakers when there's been too much power pushed, and Ghidra could never show you that.

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

#47

Post by Thev00d00 »

switch007 wrote: post #30
ansgri wrote: post #2

The post is interesting itself, but the addendum, > This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a Where author recovers text from Firefox core dump, is just hilarious.

[flagged]

What is with these asterisk posts recently? have I missed a memo

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

#48

Post by MrBuddyCasino »

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.

Tbf, there are varying levels in complexity, and it is near impossible to limit in a way that is foolproof without severly crippling volume.

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

branko_d wrote: post #36
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…

There is a difference between "monitor speaker" and "speaker built-into the monitor". The parent might have had the former in mind. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studio_monitor : Among audio engineers, the term monitor implies that the speaker is designed to produce relatively flat (linear) phase and frequency responses.

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by grishka »

arkitaip wrote: post #3
ansgri wrote: post #2

The post is interesting itself, but the addendum, > This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a Where author recovers text from Firefox core dump, is just hilarious.

That's an incredibly useful trick and now I wonder if there is a small Windows utility that makes it easy to recover similar ghost data?

The task manager had the option to dump the memory of a process. It's been a while since I last used Windows though, so I don't remember whether that does, in fact, dump all of its pages.
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