4 ms·
Sounds like they were letting very low frequencies through to the speakers and/or accidentally producing DC. I only read the one thread on this, so I'm guessin
by blarghyblarg 4y ago
Sounds like they were letting very low frequencies through to the speakers and/or accidentally producing DC.
I only read the one thread on this, so I'm guessing a lot here, but it sounds like you could patch the <100hz frequency problem in hardware for like $0.50 with a high pass filter soldered in at the speaker?
That thread is a little hard to read, so I don't know if there really is a dc problem. That's a little harder to fix in the speaker cavity.
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoYes, you could. A high-pass filter that is able to drive a laptop voice coil down to 100 Hz would probably cost about that much, which is 50x more than the motherboard manufacturer wants to spend. A high-pass filter in the DSP/driver software is free, sell a million Chromebooks and that's $500k of pure profit from cutting costs. Unless you account for warranty recalls due to buggy drivers, in which case a 0.1% failure rate is enough to make this a bad idea.
- squarefoot 4y agoA high pass filter is essentially a RC filter in which the resistor part can be the speaker coil, so one only needs two capacitors, one per channel, which would cost a lot less than $0.50 in small quantities (example: Vishay ZSC00BM2211AARL, 220 uF - 10Vdc: €0.14100 in 10 quantity at tme.eu, a lot less in 100 or 500 qty). The problem however is either the amplifier ic which is too powerful, or the speaker itself being too weak to sustain its power. That would be bad design though; one should never assume the signal won't contain certain frequencies; it's good practice to pick a speaker that can sustain at least twice the maximum amplifier power indefinitely, and even more during peaks, regardless of what frequencies are reproduced.