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Nice review. I'm sad about the speakers if they are as flat as they said, even more if they are not upgradable parts. MacBook speakers are really good for thei

• prmoustache 5y ago
  Who listen anything on speakers anyway? When travelling I will always use headset, when hooked to docking it uses my home studio monitor speakers and if I want to listen to watch a movie in the bed or a show in my kitchen it is paired to my Bose bluetooth speaker.
• kzrdude 5y ago
  And no mention of the touchpad quality either, in the review.
• james_in_the_uk 5y ago
  Most modern laptops use DSP to get the speakers to sound the way they do. If you switch that off they have the same ‘flat’ sound described in this review. Wonder if this can be solved in software ?
  • marcan_42 5y ago
    This is one of those things where Linux is a decade behind everything else because nobody has bothered to solve this problem yet. Yes, most laptops require DSP for the speakers to sound the way they're supposed to, and Linux has no way of handling this. The Windows driver provided by the OEM would normally do this, AIUI. While you can certainly manually add DSP to your system (PulseEffects, some random JACK or PipeWire flow, etc. - I do exactly this for headphone calibration on my desktop), what we need is a standardized mechanism for storing speaker profiles and having the audio subsystem seamlessly and transparently apply the right EQ and crossover profile for your device (there are usually more than 2 speakers). This is already a thing on e.g. Android, but not desktop Linux. This is required for MacBooks too. For Asahi Linux, once the underlying sound hardware works, we'll be spending some time working out a sane way to do this; I consider it a mandatory feature in this day and age. And once that's all done, everyone will be able to use it to get proper sound on any laptop as long as they can obtain or make an EQ profile. For the Macs, our plan is to measure impulse responses of what macOS does (we have the ability to snoop on its hardware accesses, so we can just play a test sound and capture the raw samples going to the speakers) and use them on Linux. This should give identical audio at moderate volumes. I'll have to check whether it also does some kind of compression or volume-dependent EQ worth replicating or emulating too, at higher volumes.
    • matheist 5y ago
      > For the Macs, our plan is to measure impulse responses of what macOS does (we have the ability to snoop on its hardware accesses, so we can just play a test sound and capture the raw samples going to the speakers) They do some sort of crosstalk cancellation to make stereo sound better, it'd be interesting to look at those impulse responses and see that happening!
    • caskstrength 5y ago
      Yes, the terrible sound on my Lenovo x1c is the only driver-related issue I have with this laptop on Linux. In all other aspects it is either same or superior experience compared to Windows.
      • akvadrako 5y ago
        The X1 Carbon 7th edition has pretty good sound with Linux. It does require quite recent kernel versions to get the good driver.
    • FeepingCreature 5y ago
      You can handle it with Pulse (qpaeq), but it's pretty janky.
      • marcan_42 5y ago
        That's doing it manually; there are a million ways of doing that, but the point is it should be transparent and automated and select the right EQ profile for you based on your hardware.
• akvadrako 5y ago
  Ideally speakers should be flat. If you want effects they should be done in software.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • tuyiown 5y ago
    I suspect the confusion is between flat as "linear response across ear bandwidth" and "total lack of depth", eg, the later isn't about being linear, just low quality speakers with very inconsistent frequency response.
    • marcan_42 5y ago
      Yeah, there's clearly confusion here. The article and GGP are using "flat" to mean "bad". The GP is using it to mean "flat frequency response", i.e. good. Unfortunately, all small speakers sound awful uncorrected; there's no way to make a flat-as-in-good laptop speaker. The question is how would those speakers sound with software DSP for correction, which is standard on other OSes but not Linux.
  • breakfastduck 5y ago
    You're misunderstanding the situation.
• jerrygoyal 5y ago
  When I purchased mbp m1 pro I didn't expect the speakers to be that good as most of the mbp reviews were about processor, ports, and screen. I don't think I now need an external music system for indoor listening.
  • pjerem 5y ago
    To be fair, it’s not unique to the M1 pro. All macs of the last decade at least have pretty good speakers (for the size, that is). Just what’s needed to don’t need anything else to listen music on the go when you have no other solution or to watch movies in the bed.
    • FearlessNebula 5y ago
      Not of the last decade, their speakers have really only been top notch since the 2016 redesign, and even more so starting in 2019 with the 16”. I’ve had a 2012 MacBook, a 2015, 2016, 2019, and now 2021.
• nrp 5y ago
  The speakers are replaceable (and therefore upgradeable), but like a sibling comment noted, most of the magic in speakers in portable consumer electronics products comes down to DSPs and smart amps. We started with a CODEC that had built in smart amp and DSP functionality, but weren't able to get the necessary support from the supplier to enable it. It ended up not mattering anyway, because we had to switch to a different CODEC without that functionality due to the global silicon crunch. This is absolutely something we want to improve in the future. We're actively investigating other audio parts we can use that have better capability, but equally importantly, supply availability and software support.
  • pjerem 5y ago
    Thank you for your detailed answer on this topic. It’s wonderful when companies listen to (potential) customers. You are doing an amazing (and important) work. I wish you all the best and you are on my top list for my next laptop (although, my current one is far from dead).