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A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

• jacksgt 4y ago
  Off topic: it's such a breath of fresh air to read this content without 1) having to close half a dozen popups and 2) all in a single post and not painfully spread out across multiple messages.
  • alanfranz 4y ago
    Once upon a time this was called a “blog post”.
  • mrtksn 4y ago
    Doesn't do targeted ads, so doesn't have to have an EU cookie popup. Doesn't have an app, so doesn't have to try to make you install the app. Doesn't do registered users growth hacking, doesn't have to have sign-up dialog. The problem is, if and when they decide to monetise this thing they will have to have all of these because the money people and the analytics will tell them they have to. Everything is much more fun when it's paid by someone else, that's why the old web was so nice. The content was produced for free and the distribution was handled by VCs. Today, these VCs are recouping their investments.
    • Nextgrid 4y ago
      > The content was produced for free and the distribution was handled by VCs And even that, content distribution was handled by a volunteer happy to chip in a few bucks to pay for shared hosting. Content distribution (and infrastructure in general) nowadays is cheaper than ever thanks to technological advances (today's entry-level MacBook is more powerful than a lot of servers from 10 years ago). There is absolutely a way to distribute content for very cheap nowadays if you know how to - you just have to avoid the rent-seekers like cloud providers.
    • duckfruit 4y ago
      On that vein, I recently joined home-barista, an old school web forum for coffee geeks. That site is seemingly frozen in time from the early 2000s. There are no trackers - there's no need, since it is already filled with a self selected group. The ads are just simple banners. And best of all it filled with a group of passionate, kind and helpful folks. A simpler site from a simpler time. One of my favorite haunts on the web.
    • solarkraft 4y ago
      > Doesn't have an app, so doesn't have to try to make you install the app. Well, it does, but does nothing user hostile with it, so doesn't gain anything from coercing them to install it.
    • eloisant 4y ago
      No, all the bloggers I was reading on the old web were paying for their hosting a few bucks a month and no VC were involved. Some of them included ads but they were mostly in a sidebar.
      • mrtksn 4y ago
        They were paying for the costs? Then they were the VC. Some of them actually grew to be huge and wealthy.
        • makapuf 4y ago
          You equate VC with tracking and then equate VC with anyone that provides money whatever the intention. By that logic, you imply that anyone providing money (including a mom for his 14yo son) will track everyone and gather a lot of stats and push an app ? Remember WhatsApp did cost a few bucks a year and was self sufficient, it was bought by fb not because of cost of operation but to ensure market share.
        • pjc50 4y ago
          me paying $5 to wordpress: i'm a venture capitalist now mom (seriously, this is a very silly way of using terms to cover extremely small amounts of capital)
          • ValentineC 4y ago
            Did you mean paying for PHP site hosting instead, or paying to remove ads on the WordPress.com SaaS?
          • mrtksn 4y ago
            The size of the capital doesn't change the reality of the financial structure.
            • mathgorges 4y ago
              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 ’:-)
    • dmitriid 4y ago
      > Everything is much more fun when it's paid by someone else, that's why the old web was so nice. What are you talking about? The old web was filled with ads. They just weren't tracking you every nanosecond of your life. Google's AdWords was launched in 2000. DoubleClick that Google acquired in 2008 was launched in 1995. Ad exchanges are from 1998. And so on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_online_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_online_advertising
      • mrtksn 4y ago
        > They just weren't tracking you every nanosecond of your life. Exactly. But only some of that was paid by ads.
        • dmitriid 4y ago
          > But only some of that was paid by ads. Ah yes. They were paid by altruists who had the foresight to know that 30 years later they will be able to track everyone and collect their dues.
          • mrtksn 4y ago
            Those who relied on making profits were decimated as VC funded user experience was much superior. It was an era of land-grab.
            • dmitriid 4y ago
              Those who relied on anything were decimated in the bubble of 2001. Also, you're pretending that all of those sites were making a profit, or operated under the assumption of making a profit. There was a lot of money thrown at any and all internet companies by the end of 1990s. It's just that the market was much smaller.
    • makapuf 4y ago
      Distributing a static HTML page content does not need a VC. Nginx on an RPI on my home connection does provide sufficient level of performance and availability. If I need more because my content is way popular, I guess a monetization scheme (asking for a tip) might cover it ?
      • Nextgrid 4y ago
        > If I need more because my content is way popular, I guess a monetization scheme (asking for a tip) might cover it ? Hetzner will give you a powerful server for ~30 bucks/month and includes 20TB of bandwidth for free (and overages are charged at ~1$/TB, almost 90x less than AWS). That's enough to host and serve a lot of content.
      • mrtksn 4y ago
        If you are not getting paid for your servers you are the VC/Angel.
        • zopa 4y ago
          A bit of a difference in motivation between a hobbyist and a VC.
          • eaplmx 4y ago
            Agreed! Here you are more a patron or sponsor who's disinterestedly giving spare money for something you think is good for the rest of the people. Although the Angel investor expects a few shares of a company, I like the analogy of an 'angel sponsor'.
        • ysavir 4y ago
          How does that make them the VC/Angel?
          • mrtksn 4y ago
            They provide the capital required for that venture.
    • cesarb 4y ago
      > Doesn't have an app It does have an app. See https://joinmastodon.org/apps https://joinmastodon.org/apps for not only the official app, but also literally dozens of third-party apps.
  • nicce 4y ago
    You might like it even more when reading through elk.zone https://elk.zone/infosec.exchange/@marcan@treehouse.systems https://elk.zone/infosec.exchange/@marcan@treehouse.systems There is popup about the preview, but that might be acceptable. There is zen mode to remove all disturbances on right bottom.
• amluto 4y ago
  The idea of feedback-based userspace software thermal management like this seems suboptimal to me — the failure modes are nasty. (By feedback-based, I mean using V/I sense from the amp.) The goal is to prevent the voice coil from overheating, ever. So some kind of calculation runs at some interval t, and it needs to ensure that, over the upcoming time t, the input to the amp can’t possibly overheat the coil, and of course it can’t use V/I sense data to do understand the upcoming heat input. So, at best, one estimates the coil temperature and comes up with an upper bound on how much heat can be added over time t (either based on worst-case music, e.g. a 0dBFS square wave or based on the actual samples), and either allows the next group of samples to be sent to the amp or not. But this is all a tradeoff with real-time performance and battery life. You want t to be long to minimize performance impact and power consumption, especially if user code is involved. But you want t to be short to maximize the ability to play loud music, especially if you aren’t looking at the actual upcoming waveform. And you don’t want your speakers to burn out of you are doing something CPU intensive and your userspace daemon doesn’t schedule. To me, this all suggests that an in-kernel solution could work a lot better. The kernel is involved in sending samples to the hardware anyway — it has the opportunity to look at those samples right then, calculate the integrated power (could be as simple as the sum of the squares or even just a constant!), and decide whether it’s safe. And fetch the V/I sense data to figure out the status, and reduce the volume if it fails. And if the kernel code pushing samples to hardware stops running for whatever reason, the sound is inherently muted as long as the hardware isn’t configured to loop '90’s broken CD style.
  • astrange 4y ago
    There's no distinction between "user" and "kernel" that would mean kernel code gets scheduled more reliably than realtime userland threads. Or even that it necessarily has better access to the audio hardware. If it's really really important then you'd want to move it to a custom core on the SoC of course, but that'd make a Linux port harder.
    • amluto 4y ago
      > There's no distinction between "user" and "kernel" that would mean kernel code gets scheduled more reliably than realtime userland threads. The distinction is that the kernel submits buffers to hardware, so it can do safety-related checks synchronously. If it doesn’t get scheduled, nothing plays, and the tweeters don’t burn out. This can be done in userspace, too. Something in the kernel (ALSA? A driver?) could call into what would be, in effect, a userspace audio codec driver. That userspace driver would do its safety checks and then send the buffer off to the codec for playback. It’s a bit sad that x86’s abysmal context switching performance has helped nerf microkernel and userspace driver development for years. Fortunately we’re talking about ARM64 here. (On modern systems, the tens of thousands of cycles x86 spends doing nothing useful when context switching or handling interrupts don’t matter as much as they might have when CPUs we’re slower.)
• ksec 4y ago
  281 Comments and no one has yet touch on what I thought was the more important topic; >Oh yay, HN found my post. I don't do HN any more, but to answer some of the comments there: We now have fewer expert on HN and HN is fast becoming another Reddit.
• jbverschoor 4y ago
  Ok, buggy software might explain why my M1 speakers, and the motherboard had to be replaced within a year?
  • zamnos 4y ago
    Or just a case of bad hardware from the factory. QC is run by humans and sometimes out of spec (aka busted) hardware makes it out of the factory. Was your replacement covered by Apple care?
    • jbverschoor 4y ago
      Yeah it was still under warrantee, but it's just a hassle, because the solution was to replace the board + speakers. Which means restoring a backup and a week without my main machine. Just weird they had to change that, as it just sounded as if the speakers were blown up
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
• ansgri 4y ago
  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.
  • arkitaip 4y ago
    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?
    • no_time 4y ago
      GDB and grep but built for windows. Or you could use Cheat Engine if you have a fear of terminals.
      • gary_0 4y ago
        > GDB and grep but built for windows Beat me to it. Windows would be intolerable for me without MinGW/MSYS[0]. (Sure, there's WSL2, but that's not quite the same, and I was using MinGW and friends long before it existed.) [0] https://www.msys2.org/wiki/MSYS2-introduction/ https://www.msys2.org/wiki/MSYS2-introduction/
        • pxc 4y ago
          FWIW, ripgrep has a native build for Windows which is much, much faster than using grep or rg via WSL2. (I'm not sure how it compares to grep from MinGW/MSYS2.)
    • ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Windows Sysinternals
    • omnicognate 4y ago
      gdb is a general-purpose debugger. The equivalent tool for Windows is windbg [0] which is free and extremely powerful, though famously arcane. You can certainly do this with it. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/debugger/debugger-download-tools https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d...
• golergka 4y ago
  > 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.
  • jesprenj 4y ago
    Came here to say that. It's essential in every step of music production and playback, but mostly available to end users either on relatively expensive sound mixing stations in the entertainment industry or under ambiguous names, like "enchance sound" or "sound safety" for home usage.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    Or it's just a limiter.
    • golergka 4y ago
      Limiter is merely a very fast brickwall compressor.
  • MrBuddyCasino 4y ago
    Tbf, there are varying levels in complexity, and it is near impossible to limit in a way that is foolproof without severly crippling volume.
  • kkielhofner 4y ago
    I don’t know of any other compressors/limiters that are monitoring temperature sensors connected to each driver and modifying the parameters of the compressor and amplifier in real-time based on audio signal level and carefully calibrated driver amplification and temp vs time. All in a way that (to the casual listener) isn’t noticed other than “Wow this sounds really good for laptop speakers”. A picture is worth a thousands words and seeing temperature in anything having to do with compression should jump out any anyone familiar with these concepts as something novel/interesting. More here: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898 https://patents.google.com/patent/US20130329898
• thefz 4y ago
  IDK, it pales in comparison to any decent monitor speaker. Even the cheapest. Laptops unfortunately always sounds "from inside a cardboard box".
  • marcellus23 4y ago
    Well, yeah, and a bicycle goes slower than a sedan and you have to pedal it constantly to keep it going.
  • tomashubelbauer 4y ago
    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. If is some cheap BenQ, not sure the exact model. The Mac speakers on the other hand sound good even with the lid closed! They sound miles and miles better than the external screen speakers to the point where I use them over the screen ones.
    • thefz 4y ago
      Bought an M1 for my SO two years ago. You can tell she's playing sound through it from another room, even the TV built-in speakers sound better. I am not dissing Apple devices in particular, but rather all laptops. With speakers so small, there's only that much one can do. But then again, criticizing Apple hardware is a downvote bonanza every time, because Apple users need to feel like a particular demographic.
      • supriyo-biswas 4y ago
        https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html > Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names.
      • 4y ago
• fnord123 4y ago
  This is curious reading since my Intel MacBook speakers crackled all the time as it grounded through me.
  • esperent 4y ago
    Before anyone jumps in to say the issue is grounding and that it's your fault for having bad wiring: ground wires are not installed by default in all countries. If you live in one of these countries, in rented accomodation, there's not much you can do about this. And yet, most electronics are fine. It seems like MacBooks are some of the worst though, giving you shocks and crackling audio.
    • eastbound 4y ago
      No grounding on Mac adapters by default, they’re only 2-pin. The 3-pin is available separately.
      • hoschicz 4y ago
        Oh so this is why I feel a slight tingling every time I touch my Mac while it's charging! I was looking for this info for quite some time, thanks
      • ValentineC 4y ago
        Looking at the Apple World Travel Adapter Kit, I'm guessing the only places where the Mac adapters do come grounded by default are countries that use the UK plug (BS 1363) [1], at least for plugs shipped after 2010 [2]: https://www.apple.com/us/shop/product/MD837AM/A/apple-world-travel-adapter-kit https://www.apple.com/us/shop/product/MD837AM/A/apple-world-... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets:_British_and_related_types#BS_1363_three-pin_(rectangular)_plugs_and_sockets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AC_power_plugs_and_sockets:_Br... [2] https://support.apple.com/three-prong-ac-wall-plug-adapter https://support.apple.com/three-prong-ac-wall-plug-adapter
  • cassianoleal 4y ago
    That sounds like a QC issue. Have you sent it in for repairs?
• blackhaz 4y ago
  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.)
  • bayindirh 4y ago
    Because they both build tuned and big enclosures into their speaker assemblies, and also use the whole body of the device as an acoustic chamber. That’s why.
  • Spooky23 4y ago
    MacBooks have margin so there is room for engineering time. Also, companies like Lenovo care about their primary customer - enterprise. Apple designs for the end user first.
    • lostlogin 4y ago
      Is there anything that’s made better for the enterprise market? Network switches and wifi access points come to mind, and that’s it?
      • lwkl 4y ago
        Laptops for the enterprise markets are better for the enterprise market. They are often relatively easy to repair (at least for the most common repairs). They offer 5 years and longer warranty contracts with on-site repairs. They offer driver and software package for automated deployments and more. Most of these things are not important for the consumer market but very important for the enterprise market. There isn't a product that is the perfect fit for all markets.
      • Spooky23 4y ago
        Lwkl summed it up well. A great example is an HP z laptop - good build quality, sort of the equivalent to an old T series thinkpad. With two Phillips screwdrivers, you can disassemble and replace most parts within 15m. When I did this work, the other key thing was OEMs would guarantee image/driver compatibility for 4 years. I don’t think they do that anymore, but the hardware is very stable - consumer PC hardware will often have variance based on cost and supply chain. Enterprise doesn’t want surprises and cares about total cost. So keeping it boring and predictable rules the day. Depending on scale, repairs are important because at some point it’s much cheaper pay for service by the drink vs warranty.
• retskrad 4y ago
  I keep trying out Android phones and Windows laptops but the hardware are always inferior to Apple products. The competition has caught up and even surpassed Apple in Software but Apple has a big lead in chips, speakers, build quality.
  • traveler01 4y ago
    Curious to know, which competition caught up Apple on software?
    • newaccount74 4y ago
      I think it's more that Apple has dropped down to normal reliability levels. With Apple's focus on shipping a new OS every year no matter what, they have started shipping broken features by default, and you just have to hope they get around to fix the bugs next year.
      • lostlogin 4y ago
        Mountain Lion please, 3 years in a row. My new battle is that Apple Mail search just stops working. Quitting and reopening doesn’t do anything. When it works, it’s almost like crafting the ultimate regex at times.
        • traveler01 4y ago
          Man I switched from Windows and Android to all Apple recently and it’s a pretty good improvements overall. Competition isn’t caught up, they’re falling behind. One thing though, software quality has been falling down a lot, including Apple’s
  • jeroenhd 4y ago
    Only in laptop speakers do I think Apple is the very best. I'm sure their audio company acquisition helped them with that, I don't think any other laptop manufacturers have gone out of their way to buy audio companies just for their laptops. Apple's trackpad is also pretty good, but I prefer Lenovo's myself. Better hardware exists in every range (cheaper, faster, less power hungry), but Apple manages to put a lot of good stuff together. You can beat the M2 in CPU performance for less money but your battery won't last as long, you can beat the screen quality if you pay extra for the better screen, you can buy a usable GPU with your laptop if you want to play games but don't get the machine learning boost, there are so many deliberations to be made.
• captainmuon 4y ago
  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 people are very correct, but I'd be tempted to just throw the Apple libraries into Ghidra and see what they do. And a completely unreleated thought, maybe it is possible to remove the safetly limits on speakers of other brands and apply the same strategy to get better sound?
  • bottled_poe 4y ago
    That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile shows up to give some thoughts..
    • dsr_ 4y ago
      An audiophile opinion: there are so many good cheap systems out there, why would you mistreat poor hardware this way? - Any number of excellent in-ear monitors under $100 - Truthear Zero ($50) - Quite a few good-to-excellent headphones under $200, and under $50 if you can run a convolver equalizer for them - Superlux 668B ($35) - Several excellent powered monitor speakers regularly on sale under $450/pair (JBL 305, 308, Kali LP8v2) Laptop speakers are for getting your attention from across the room so you can plug in something appropriate.
      • izacus 4y ago
        Maybe we just don't want to constantly wear crap on our head?
        • toastal 4y ago
          Counterpoint: your neighbors don't want to hear the crap on your laptop speakers
• graderjs 4y ago
  When I first got my current MacBook Air the sound totally surprised me. It seemed like it was coming from places to the left and to the right of the actual device. I kept moving my head around that space to try to find the weird source of the sound! It truly blew me away. But then that sensation disappeared. Now I don't notice this? I like the AirPod head tracking, but this "spookily surround sound" that I noticed at first was very fucking cool!
  • deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  • tokamak-teapot 4y ago
    M1 Air user here too. I am convinced there must be some kind of ‘spatial’ processing going on, even though I’m as certain as I can be that I’m listening to a plain stereo source, Spotify web version on Firefox. Why does it sound like a particular instrument is up in the air to my right? I’ve found myself getting up and looking for the source of a sound before realising it was in the music.
    • kalleboo 4y ago
      On the M2 series laptops (Air and Pro) they tout "Support for Spatial Audio when playing music or video with Dolby Atmos on built-in speakers", but it's not on the M1 laptops.
      • audiothrowaway 4y ago
        Sorry to be the um actually guy, but every supported MacBook [0] (including some Intel ones at least on Monterey - like my 15” from 2019) will do a transaural rendering over the laptop speakers for Dolby Atmos content. The tech needed to do that doesn’t require fancy silicon, though it does seem they restrict the headtracked binaural (over headphones like AirPods Pro).[0] Though you can plug any headphones in and, at least in Apple Music, force it to do a binaural rendering (without headtracking) on any headphones. [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212182 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212182
      • 4y ago
• Mizza 4y ago
  My Mac speakers sound like shit because running a loud filter sweep in VCV Rack will break them and make them sound buzzy forever.
  • viraptor 4y ago
    That sounds like something a warranty repair should cover.
    • krono 4y ago
      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.
      • Terretta 4y ago
        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.
  • bob1029 4y ago
    This happened on my late 2013 MBP. I left some stupid YT video playing for hours and I think the DSP engine finally tripped and fell at some point.
• harby2000 4y ago
  I’m always amazed how big the soundstage is on a MacBook Air. Sometimes in certain content I hear things coming from left and right of me, as if it’s surround sound.
• 2636381321 4y ago
  I wonder if malware could bypass the speaker safety daemon and potentially damage hardware or even start a fire? Looks like Apple is relying too much on TrustZone and Secure Boot to prevent physical hardware damage? Also, Apple can now say that jailbreaking the devices could present a physical safety issue. So one more reason for making jailbreaking illegal?
  • krunkcoin 4y ago
    1. The consequences of playing loud sounds with no protection are unlikely to involve open flames. You're just going to fry speaker coils, after which they won't sound good (or make much sound at all). 2. Apple doesn't implement TrustZone. They don't even implement EL3 (the exception level typically used for TZ) in their Arm core designs, just EL0 (userspace), EL1 (kernel), and EL2 (VM monitor). They appear to have completely rejected the concept of an above-the-OS supervisor responsible for security and other system maintenance tasks, which is the idea behind things like TrustZone and Intel's insane System Management Mode. 3. One of the fairly novel things about Apple's Arm Macs is their secure boot infrastructure. Although it's clearly derived from iOS secure boot, it has been greatly extended, in part because (contrary to what you assume) Apple doesn't believe Macs should have to be jailbroken when users want to run something not signed by Apple. See this for more details than you probably require: https://support.apple.com/guide/security/startup-disk-security-policy-control-sec7d92dc49f/web https://support.apple.com/guide/security/startup-disk-securi... So, no jailbreak is required to boot Asahi Linux, or any other unsigned OS. Note that while Apple's documentation refers to booting an unsigned "XNU kernel" (XNU being the macOS kernel), the binary doesn't actually have to be XNU. In Asahi's case, it's a bootloader which loads another bootloader which loads the Linux kernel. (IIRC - I might have that chain a bit wrong.) Also, if you want to take the time to read through all of that link, you'll find Apple did put a lot of thought into making it possible to bypass while simultaneously keeping it quite robust against malware. Barring truly horrific implementation flaws, it should be impossible to remotely automate the bypass, and the procedure is designed to provide some level of warning to victims of social engineering. And, it's a per-OS preference, so you don't have to reduce the security of your macOS install at all if you just want to play around with Asahi on a different partition. Even more interesting - the low-security "unsigned" boot path is technically still signed, in a very useful way. Attesting that you'd like to boot an unsigned "XNU kernel" stores the "XNU" binary's cryptographic signature in Apple's Secure Enclave. Every time you boot it, its signature is checked to make sure it hasn't been modified since you authorized it. Which means... if that binary is a loader which does its own cryptographic signature check on the next stage loader, which does its own check on the next stage (or Linux kernel etc), you've built your own secure boot chain on top of Apple's, without having to ask Apple to sign anything. Pretty cool.
• alright_scowl 4y ago
  Except they don't? I hate the speaker sound on the Mac I use for work. Unless "so good" in the title means "not as awful as other shitty laptop speakers", but even that is a poor statement, when the text in the link makes only mentions some vaguely interesting technical musings, without comparing it to anything else. The way the title is written makes it sound just like any other inane data point of people gushing over Macs.
  • Kiro 4y ago
    The speakers are amazing on my M1. I'm constantly surprised how beefy bass and clean sound they can produce. Don't recall them being so great on my previous MacBooks though.
    • alright_scowl 4y ago
      I wouldn't describe the speakers on the M1 I use as amazing. It's more or less as bad as the speakers of previous laptops I used. I mean, it is a speaker. Good enough for simple sound feedback on most applications. Music on it sounds bad.
      • Kiro 4y ago
        Yeah, ok. I presume that by your standard anything less than FLAC on a Bowers & Wilkins Nautilus is unworthy your ears but for us mere mortals the MacBook M1 speakers sound amazing for music as well. It's a massive improvement compared to any other laptop speakers I've heard.
        • alright_scowl 4y ago
          [dead]
  • danaris 4y ago
    Different people are going to have very, very different standards for what sounds good in speakers. For me, the MacBook Pro speakers sound great. My HomePod mini sounds fantastic. Because a) they're literally the best speakers I have ever owned, and b) I have never made Getting The Very Best Sound a priority; it just doesn't matter that much to me. Most of the time, I listen on AirPods. For other people, music and high-quality sound are more of a way of life. They probably own speakers that cost high three figures (or more) individually. They are more likely to find the MBP speakers to be subpar. I'm guessing you fall into this category. And that's fine: it's just a question of different priorities. The important thing, for people on either side of that fuzzy line, is to recognize that the other people exist, and in the latter case to recognize that the former group is by far the larger one, and most people in it haven't really heard what day-to-day audio is like from really high-end speakers.
• thrdbndndn 4y ago
  Is this post part of a longer one? Because after reading it I still don't understand a thing. Did they mean it's done in software (i.e. not hardware)?
  • alanfranz 4y ago
    It’s a mix of hardware and software. Hardware monitoring and software control, if I understand things correctly.
  • pjc50 4y ago
    Software, surprisingly: https://github.com/chadmed/speakersafetyd/blob/main/src/types.rs https://github.com/chadmed/speakersafetyd/blob/main/src/type... I'm aware of hardware solutions that do the same thing.
    • thrdbndndn 4y ago
      Isn't it for Linux? I thought Macs use MacOS. Again I feel like I'm reading something out of context.
      • pjc50 4y ago
        Some people like to run Linux on their Apple hardware because they like the quality of the hardware but don't like Apple's software decisions.
        • Maursault 4y ago
          So it's about control, the preference of reigning in Hell to serving in Heaven.
        • thrdbndndn 4y ago
          I get that, but I don't get why this is "[a] reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most". Because Macs' speakers sound great even in MacOS.
      • 4y ago
• singularity2001 4y ago
  The speakers of the mac mini sounds absolutely horrendous!
• bluedino 4y ago
  This becomes apparent when people join calls with others who are using MacBooks and iPads. Why does everyone else sound better? Why is my company-issued Dell/HP laptop equipped with terrible speakers and microphone? This can be fixed by giving them a headset. It sounds dumb but one thing that keeps me from dropping my Mac for a Lenovo 100% is the speaker quality. It's nice enough to play music at a moderate level on my desk while I work on my corporate machine. This could probably be fixed by buying an external speaker but...
  • lostlogin 4y ago
    To go the whole distance the wrong way, you could make nearly all of it external. All the peripherals, wifi and Bluetooth on a USB dock, and run the monitor off a thunderbolt GPU. Think you’d then just be using the two ports and the CPU. The ultra non-portable laptop.
  • hgsgm 4y ago
    Until you plug in an external monitor and the MacBook Pro overheats and fans up so you have to close the lid which muffles the mic.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    • ericpauley 4y ago
      What year is this? I have not heard of these issues substantially affecting any modern ARM Mac.
    • avalys 4y ago
      This hasn’t happened since Apple ditched x86 processors.
      • astrange 4y ago
        It's because of the AMD GPU in this case presumably, if external displays trigger it.
• bob1029 4y ago
  I have always noted this when listening to music on my M1 MBP. "There is NO way my tweeters aren't about to explode!" I recall how quickly the speakers in my Microsoft surface laptop self-destructed... In my experience, the #1 prerequisite to driving a speaker this aggressively without destroying it is having a clean source of power. Hard distortion and clipping are what break voice coils in direct, physical terms. Thermals can be tolerated over brief durations. I have found (in larger scale pro audio) that the amplifier topology can have a major impact on the amount of real power you can put into a loudspeaker. One of the most popular is Class D because it requires virtually no magnetics (i.e. no toroidal transformers). The tradeoff is that it needs to have a lot of safety nannies at the extremes and will have to attenuate aggressive program material. You almost always have to put a full-time DSP on these amplifiers. Compare this to Class A,A/B, G or H topologies which can be pushed well-beyond rated supply amperage for brief durations (i.e. your lights will dim slightly, rather than the amp/DSP limiting its power draw). You can drive these with any kind of signal you please, filtered with nannies or otherwise. These topologies are where I go when I want to be able to reach to DC on a loudspeaker and am willing to replace the drivers if I bump a knob the wrong way.
  • tcrenshaw 4y ago
    Most, if not all, of the class D amps at the large scale pro audio level have that DSP built into the amplifier itself. More and more speaker manufacturers are also selling their own amplifiers (not necessarily made in house) with limiting that takes specific drivers into consideration, along with FIR correction for the whole box. I've also used a few that you can tell exactly what kind of power you're hooked up to (120v @ 25 amp perhaps) and it will draw just up to that limit and stop. Neat stuff
    • bob1029 4y ago
      > More and more speaker manufacturers are also selling their own amplifiers (not necessarily made in house) Indeed. I've had horrible luck with reliability of these products (i.e. loudspeakers with integrated class-D amplifiers). I would strongly recommend going for external amplification wherever possible, especially if you are running cabinetry that weighs more than 100lbs.
• kkielhofner 4y ago
  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 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 is the filing (priority) date and the grant (publish date). It’s patents so it gets really complicated but essentially the later grant (after patent office/authority “review”) more or less makes the effective date the priority date - which to complicate matters even further can actually be the filing date of a referenced provisional patent that (in the US) can be as long as 12 months before the non-provisional (real) patent filing. Clear as mud, right?
  • hcks 4y ago
    Lol, does Apple also owns a patent that prevents other manufacturers from making something else than pieces of plastic trash devices ?
  • foobiekr 4y ago
    So is the thesis here that there is no other way to have non-crap sound on a laptop than this Apple patent? No alternative? No patent-non-infringing approach? Because if not, the real reason is as the author suggests: other manufacturers don't bother. I have been working a long time - decades - in a part of the industry that is not just patent happy but patent berserk and it has never been my experience that other approaches are not available when a single approach is patent-walled off.
    • brudgers 4y ago
      I’m not saying there might not be another way. But iTunes and the other big music distribution power players have requirements and use encoding technologies based on loudness rather than power. [1] This is why your playlists don’t require adjusting the volume between songs from different artists/albums/eras/genres. So it is likely that Apple’s method works hand in hand with the technical constraints of iTunes requirements and other streaming encodings. And why the threat of Apple’s patent may be providing a moat. Like Dolby, except that licensing patents isn’t a core revenue stream for Apple. [1] TFA doesn’t cut a bright line between power and loudness within its argument. But that’s a critical part of contemporary audio engineering in today’s commercial music production.
• _2d30 4y ago
  Meta comment: the UI of mastodon is really bad.
  • thrdbndndn 4y ago
    Can't speak of other elements, but the color combination is definitely burning my eyes.
  • nyadesu 4y ago
    I wouldn't say it's bad, it looks above average for an open source project but definitely could use some improvements. What I hate about it is that it's not plain-looking (like HN, which has its own charm!) or very polished (like twitter, instagram, yooutube)
• jasoneckert 4y ago
  A month ago, Hector did an amazing talk on Asahi that was essentially was a talk on "What it takes to make an open source project work": community, tooling, considering users (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COlvP4hODpY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COlvP4hODpY). And one of the examples he gave regarding "considering users" was why they chose to disable speaker support until they could ensure user safety, as well as ensure a quality sound experience. When discussing open source projects and communities in academia, we often try to categorize every aspect, as well as focus on projects that failed and why. I try to do the opposite and instead focus on what worked and why - and the Asahi project is a stellar example of how to do an open source project well on every level.
• kilianinbox 4y ago
  Actually, I did indeed blow out the left speaker on my back then new MacBook Pro late 2016 - no tweaks to the hardware or software. It happened while I was experimenting with Ableton and the synth operator. I think I held a pure sine tone at either 66.6 Hz or 82.222222 Hz for an extended period at near-maximum volume, possibly with some frequency modulation. Sadly, the speaker became permanently distorted as an aftermath of that little mishap.
• zamadatix 4y ago
  I wonder how much energy/CPU all this uses compared to not monitoring and compressing the sound channels per speaker. It seems like “don’t run the daemon and let it go to -14db” is a valid option if it’s problematic though. I don’t really listen to music, I’m just looking forward to terminal dings and conference calls without headphones so will lean towards battery life.
• tiborsaas 4y ago
  I've given this 3 reads and I still don't understand what he wants to say and I'm producing music since 2001, not a professional level, but still :) Is it a software or a hardware trick by Apple? I'm totally confused :) I've assumed that Macbook Pros sound great because Apple put decent speakers into it and the alu-body picks up resonances much better than plastic ones.
• RicoElectrico 4y ago
  Dell bundles Waves MaxxAudio Pro with its laptops and apart from cheesy stereo widening it does the job of boosting bass and making the sound louder. Theoretically it's possible to replicate it using Windows filter drivers. It's something I would like to do - some multi-band compressor is what's probably needed.
• ofrzeta 4y ago
  I was expecting to learn more about the hardware (planar magnetic speakers as far as I know). There's surprisingly little info on this.
• wyager 4y ago
  I've noticed that my M1 MBP provides a seemingly implausible degree of stereo width (the left and right channel sound as if they are at a physically more extreme angle relative to your head than they actually are) but only if you are in the right place relative to the laptop. Also, if you play a pure R tone, you will hear it in the L speaker (wlog). This leads me to suspect they are doing some phasing tricks to increase the perception of stereo (again, assuming you're in the right place relative to the laptop).
• andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  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 effect. Turns out this approach is mathematically equivalent or such a close approximation that it's visually indistinguishable. Not related to laptop speakers, of course, but just a thought that came up as I was thinking about patents on small but important concepts.
  • PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    I have a question, suppose I came up with something similar or even identical on my own, wrote the code and published it, and I have no clue that a patent exists, am I liable in any way? Isn’t absurd that algorithms and mathematical solutions can be patented?
    • brundolf 4y ago
      Yes, that's how patents work. I believe patents normally expire ~20 years after being filed. The idea is to incentivize people/companies to invest the resources in solving really hard problems, knowing they'll be able to make back their investment in the time before it expires (at which point everyone can then use it) Software patents are controversial because of the rate things move in software; a software discovery from 20 years ago is likely worthless by the time the patent expires. I think the window should be shorter for software (5 years? 3 years?), just enough to make back the investment but not milk it until it's dead But as they go, this kind of real problem-solving is one of the more defensible kinds of software patents imo. Many software patents out there are things like "do X but store it in a database", which is obviously nonsense
    • gptgpp 4y ago
      Broadly speaking there does exist a defense of "innocent infringement." You can use that keyword to read about it more yourself. IANAL but I believe it only reduces your damages in an infringement suit. It's considered your responsibility to check if something infringes on an existing patent. Yes, I know there are patents on absurd things like doubly linked lists, and the whole thing is a bit of a mess, seemingly created to give lawyers a job and present a barrier to people who can't afford to do patent discovery and all that. As for it being absurd.... I don't know. Would you prefer that companies never file patents, revealing their algorithms and mathematical solutions, so it never becomes public knowledge (and useable by everyone once the patent expires), and they just keep it indefinitely as trade secrets? Because that's the alternative :(
• fortran77 4y ago
  They’re “louder and better״ for techno fans who like the sssssst ssssssst ssssssst.
• eimrine 4y ago
  The article gives an answer to "louder" question but not "better" one. As far as I have understood the screen after the text, Mac speakers are not 1-way but at least 2-way (every channel contains a speaker for bass and a speaker for higher frequences). That is the answer about quality of sound, there are no speakers which can play both highs and lows in nice quality.
• endorphine 4y ago
  Kinda off-topic: I remember reading that Apple laptops from 2021(?) onwards got a DAC (digital-to-analog converter) upgrade, making their DAC a pretty decent option with which you can avoid buying an external one. Anyone knows how much truth there is to the above? I'm sure the answer is more nuanced than that and depend on various factors.
  • astrange 4y ago
    Amp, not DAC. The DAC was always good. Audiophile DACs are scams and are worse quality than the $9 official iPhone headphone adapter, and probably had smaller QC budgets than it does. The amp can make a real difference because they don't always support high-impedance headphones.
• causality0 4y ago
  Most laptop speakers can be significantly improved by applying a calibration profile using a program like Fxsound. Took mine from "godawful" to simply mediocre.
• brundolf 4y ago
  Love this PS: > This post brought to you by gdb and grep -a, because after typing all that out as a quote toot and deciding that nah, I wanted it standalone, I clicked the "x" next to the quote box (which implies removing the quote association) and that didn't just cancel the quote, it deleted all the text. > So I attached gdb to the Firefox content process hosting this tab, took a core dump, and grepped it for the lost text. I wasn't about to write all that again from scratch.
  • 650 4y ago
    Anywhere to learn more about doing this kind of stuff?
    • worldsavior 4y ago
      Experience.
    • pitched 4y ago
      For a quick starting point, try gcore[1]. Open the file it pops out into your favourite editor and hope that search works. For gentler introduction, look for CTF sites. The one that gets recommended most is tryhackme.com. There are a bunch of great ones though. 1 - https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/gcore.1.html https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man1/gcore.1.html