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Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

en.community.dell.com

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Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#71

Post by skriticos2 »

aestra wrote: post #49
philliphaydon wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you've ever owned a Dell laptop, but I'll never buy one again. On a couple of occasions I have tried to play DVD's on them and cannot hear people talking with the volume up. Put headphones on and its too loud. Dell speakers are junk.

Um in my experience all laptop speakers of all brands are like that.

No. I have a System76 Ubuntu laptop and the speaker quality is excellent. Plays music nicely and sound is clear and crisp. How many quality laptops do you have experience with?

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#72

Post by guard-of-terra »

ferongr wrote: post #56
guard-of-terra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody prevents the manufacturing to put some electronic bits before the speakers to cap the maximum power. Even better, teach the sound card to do that.

Analog limiter ICs (that I know of) limit the signal according to input voltage, something that does not catch this issue. Furthermore, limiting power at the audio codec level would require for the codec to have that feature and I don't know of audio codecs with that capability.

Then one should figure out why nobody needed this feature.

I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad.

(I could code the protection into the sound driver in half a day probably)

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#73

Post by TeMPOraL »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #72
ferongr wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Analog limiter ICs (that I know of) limit the signal according to input voltage, something that does not catch this issue. Furthermore, limiting power at the audio codec level would require for the codec to have that feature and I don't know of audio codecs with that capability.

Then one should figure out why nobody needed this feature. I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad. (I could code the protection into the sound driver in half a day probably)

> I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad.

Of course it is, but nobody wants to do that; it's not profitable. * sigh * .

I sometimes wonder how difficult would it be to create, say, a brand of kettles with lifetime warranty, designed to last 50+ years instead of 50+ weeks the ones we have do. How hard would it be to sell them and to what ends would the competition go to stop you from killing their market?

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#74

Post by astral303 »

guard-of-terra wrote: post #52
ferongr wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't support Dell's decisions, digital (and analog) clipping can easily damage speakers driven at what is normally their maximum power they can handle, since the resulting clipped waveform carries a lot more energy than an unclipped one.

Nobody prevents the manufacturing to put some electronic bits before the speakers to cap the maximum power. Even better, teach the sound card to do that.

A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude.

This is why distorting the amplifiers (especially digital clipping) is so much worse for speakers than overpowering the speakers. This is a very well known fact in audio circles.

Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume.

Yes, Dell is putting on shitty speakers on their laptops, (what else is new), but VLC should be amplifying the output using level-limiting (hard-limiting), which would effectively bring all the quiet parts to be just as loud as the loud parts, instead of just digitally clipping the output.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#76

Post by guard-of-terra »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #73
guard-of-terra wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then one should figure out why nobody needed this feature. I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad. (I could code the protection into the sound driver in half a day probably)

> I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad. Of course it is, but nobody wants to do that; it's not profitable. * sigh * . I sometimes wonder how difficult would it be to create, say, a brand of kettles with lifetime warranty, designed to last 50+ years instead of 50+ weeks the ones we have do. How hard would it be to sell them and to what ends would the competition go to st…

I never had either failing speaker or failing* kettle in my life so it's hard for me to say anything. Maybe there just so much you can get from laptop speakers so it makes sense to cap their power hard?

* Some no loger turn off automatically, tho

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#77

Post by KaiserPro »

astral303 wrote: post #74
guard-of-terra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody prevents the manufacturing to put some electronic bits before the speakers to cap the maximum power. Even better, teach the sound card to do that.

A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude. This is why distorting the amplifiers (especially digital clipping) is so much worse for speakers than overpowering the speakers. This is a very well known fact in audio circles. Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume. Yes, Dell is putting on shitty speakers on their laptops…

Its well known if you are over pumping your speakers.

You shouldn't be able to blow up your speakers if your amp, speakers and limiters are setup correctly.

After all, if you're busting out £20k on a set of decent speakers, you don't want to burn them out because your idiot producer "turned it up to 11"

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#78

Post by guard-of-terra »

astral303 wrote: post #74
guard-of-terra wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody prevents the manufacturing to put some electronic bits before the speakers to cap the maximum power. Even better, teach the sound card to do that.

A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude. This is why distorting the amplifiers (especially digital clipping) is so much worse for speakers than overpowering the speakers. This is a very well known fact in audio circles. Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume. Yes, Dell is putting on shitty speakers on their laptops…

I actually never seen VLC clip sound that much on volumes > 100%.

Maybe if your speakers are very quiet and crappy and you have to get every control to 100% (hardware, system, vlc) in order to hear anything - maybe in this case it will.

Hard clipping is very noticeable for the listener so not many people will set it to the maximum if they have choice.

Anyway, you can protect from this either in hardware or in the driver.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#79

Post by KaiserPro »

Ma8ee wrote: post #18
guard-of-terra wrote: post #3

This is stupid. They are making speakers that can't withstand some cases of within-the-bounds PCM signal. If we had a normal society anywhere on earth they would be sued to the ground there.

Speakers are built to be able to withstand short peaks with high power to reflect the dynamic in the music or your movie. This is what is abused to be able to play loud sounds continuously. You could take the possibility to do that away, but then you would of course also remove some of the dynamics out of the music. But of course, the people that burn their speakers this way don't care about dynamics or evidently abo…

Thats what limiters are for. The whole point of hard clipping is that +256 or -256 (or the 16bit equivalent) is below the point at which your speakers, amps, cabling or anything else starts to melt.

Speakers/amps should have DC protection builtin.

Re: Installing VLC Media Player voids your speaker warranty

#80

Post by byuu »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #63
mertd wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's impractical. VLC is just using the standard OS API to send some sound to speakers. Can you imagine every piece of software checking for every piece of esoteric hardware and having some special behavior? Maybe Microsoft could regulate the output for junk speakers, but really, Dell is the one to blame here.

> Can you imagine every piece of software checking for every piece of esoteric hardware and having some special behavior? This is what MS Office does. A Microsoft engineer told me once that because many printers lie to the OS about their capabilities, they built a giant lookup table into the Office, that basically consists of "if printer model X, vendor Y and firmware Z, then don't trust it about the fonts onboard, r…

I remember back in the day doing DirectDraw/Direct3D programming, I had to have lots of "if video card type == x, then ignore these capabilities and do this other thing instead" hacks. A much bigger issue back then when we had more than three video card manufacturers. (it's still a minor issue today ... nVidia cards tend to be way more permissive about OpenGL calls than AMD cards. But I can afford two discrete cards and one onboard chipset.)

It's so completely impractical for a hobbyist project to own every possible piece of hardware, or at least a huge majority of it. Yet it's nothing for a Fortune 500 company to do the same.

Really slants the playing field away from independent software developers.

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