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A better title for this would be "Asahi introduces advanced speaker DSP to Linux" as that is the real significance of this new development. I imagine it will b

A better title for this would be "Asahi introduces advanced speaker DSP to Linux" as that is the real significance of this new development. I imagine it will be incorporated into other distros soon as a result.

_joel 3y ago
Indeed, I didn't think much of the work until it dawned on me the effort needed to accomplish this behind the scenes. Interesting post.
mahmoudhossam 3y ago
Can someone ELI5 why advanced speaker DSP is a huge thing? I read the linked document and couldn't really figure out why this is important and why it differs from what we already have in Linux systems.
- vladvasiliu 3y ago
  The way I understand it, the tiny speakers in laptops don't sound great. But since sound perception is somewhat relative, manufacturers use DSP to try to improve the perception of the sound. Of course, this will never rival an actual "serious" amp and speakers, but it can drastically improve matters. Anecdotally, my HP laptop has a pretty crappy sound under Linux, but under Windows with the Realtek drivers, it sounds OK. The soundcard itself doesn't seem too bad: if I use a pair of nice headphones or plug it into my dedicated stereo, even under Linux I hear no difference compared to using an external DAC connected through USB.
  - globular-toast 3y ago
    But we could already do DSP with Pulseaudio and Pipewire. I guess is making the speakers DSPs "built in" and tweakable with GUI etc? As well as actually creating the speaker DSP profiles, I guess. The speakers safety thing seems like a completely new thing, though. All sounds like an absolute nightmare to anyone even remotely into audio. But I guess tiny speakers are occasionally useful.
    - hotnfresh 3y ago
      In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Phones, laptops, tablets. The tiny speakers built into TVs, much smaller than even built-in speakers on CRT TVs used to be. Ear buds of various sorts, and smallish headphones. That’s most audio-listening accounted for (except in cars). Hell, I’ve got a good hi-fi setup and (separately) a probably-top-couple-percent 7.2 home theater audio situation (in one room… but not on the other TV) and even so I listen to things on tiny speakers more than on big ones.
      - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
        > In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Hmm... I think you're probably right, but the one thing that gives me pause is the enormous market for Bluetooth speakers. I see Bluetooth speakers everywhere! I suppose most Bluetooth speakers are still "small" in the grand scheme of things, but they're certainly larger than phone and laptop speakers. Earbuds are similarly omnipresent. I'm not sure it's accurate to classify those as "tiny speakers"; the physics are different, because they only need to be loud enough to hear when they're next to your ears.
        johnwalkr 3y ago
        Good bluetooth speakers also use similar DSP to sound way better and louder than they would without it so I am not sure this is a counterpoint. The unique thing here is Apple does it on the main CPU, presumably because "why not", so you couldn't safely power the speakers of your mac while running linux until the related features were added.
        sethhochberg 3y ago
        At this point even "bigger" speakers make heavy use of DSP, too - from household commodities like Sonos to higher end hi-fi powered speakers like the KEF LSX series, almost everyone in the industry making an active-amplified product has wised up to the idea that some processing can make use of clever acoustic tricks or compensations to make their products sound better (by whatever definition of better their brand sells) than they would being drive flat from the source. When you provide the whole integrated package its a no brainer.
- jasoneckert 3y ago
  The main reason DSP is a big thing is because Linux has never focused on it - Google has with Android and ChromeOS, as has Apple and Windows, but Linux speaker audio has always paled in comparison: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 That leaves it up to the laptop vendor to implement hardware to perform DSP (and the quality of this varies tremendously from poor to OK). Apple doesn't use hardware for their speaker DSP (it's all software) and their speakers sound better than anything else out there. Linux now has similar functionality thanks to Asahi, and it will only get better over time.
- wzdd 3y ago
  I think the idea with the M-series laptops in particular is that you can drive the speakers at volumes that actually damage them very quickly ( see https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 ). The idea AIUI is that you can use a DSP along with a physical model of the voice coil to get better sound than you would if the speakers were volume-limited. I don't know how common this arrangement is in other laptops, but it's the kind of hardware/software integration that Apple is known for.
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    It is just dynamic range audio compression to simulate loudness. It is not a new thing.
    - wtallis 3y ago
      It isn't just dynamic range compression. This is actually driving the speakers beyond their safe limits for sustained output as long as the temperature estimate (a function of the specific speaker's characteristics and the recent history of the signal it's been fed) is safe. "Dynamic range compression" doesn't imply any of that.
- oneplane 3y ago
  It's a huge thing because you can't really fit all the big speakers and audio stuff in tiny laptops and make them sound good. So we use extra steps (the DSP for example) to adjust how the speakers and amplifiers are controlled. Doing it this way allows us to have much better sound from tiny micro speakers. This is important because the alternatives are: - Bad sound and nothing you can do about it - No sound at all - Carry external speakers with you all the time Where in the past it was impossible to both have physically small devices and good sound, technological advances have enabled us to do more with less. So adding that technology means we can now have better sound than in the past.
- johnwalkr 3y ago
  Manufacturers can do a lot with DSP to make small speakers sound better. But "advanced" is saying a lot here. Recent speakers in macs and macbooks are over-driven to sound better and louder, with the DSP modeling energy input to the speaker and temperature of the speaker and keeping it within its physical limits. Without this DSP, the speakers not only sound terrible but become physically damaged if you try to use them at more than a very low volume. Any modern smart speaker or smartphone you buy will use similar DSP to sound much better and louder than it ought to, given its size. I think other laptops also do something similar at the hardware level. Rightly or wrongly, Apple does it in software on the CPU but until now this wasn't replicated in linux. So the Asahi project (which is for macs with M1/2/3 CPUs), has added this feature to linux[1] and is working on adding DSP models for each model of Mx Mac. In Asahi Linux Speakers have been disabled by default on all models until this feature as well as the specific DSP for each model is ready. Now they have reached the point where speakers are enabled for the first model, which is a huge milestone. [1] I originally wrote "linux kernel" but it is actually done in user space, with interlocks in the kernel to fall back to simple aggressive volume limiting.
  - MichaelZuo 3y ago
    So if the DSP model were only slightly off, then it could permanently damage the speakers?
    - johnwalkr 3y ago
      No because you make the models conservative. In the link marcan mentions they will improve performance over time (presumably partly by making the models less conservative) and are "shipping with a hard volume reduction limit of -7dBFS to catch potential bugs or misbehavior."
      - MichaelZuo 3y ago
        If so, how are the speakers over-driven to sound better and louder? Do they have a very very conservative profile by default?
megous 3y ago
Or not: https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equalization-using-alsaeq/ https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equaliz...
- azinman2 3y ago
  This is more than just EQ.
  - megous 3y ago
    So is alsa. You can chain as many steps as you want.

_joel 3y ago

Indeed, I didn't think much of the work until it dawned on me the effort needed to accomplish this behind the scenes. Interesting post.

mahmoudhossam 3y ago

Can someone ELI5 why advanced speaker DSP is a huge thing? I read the linked document and couldn't really figure out why this is important and why it differs from what we already have in Linux systems.

vladvasiliu 3y ago
The way I understand it, the tiny speakers in laptops don't sound great. But since sound perception is somewhat relative, manufacturers use DSP to try to improve the perception of the sound. Of course, this will never rival an actual "serious" amp and speakers, but it can drastically improve matters. Anecdotally, my HP laptop has a pretty crappy sound under Linux, but under Windows with the Realtek drivers, it sounds OK. The soundcard itself doesn't seem too bad: if I use a pair of nice headphones or plug it into my dedicated stereo, even under Linux I hear no difference compared to using an external DAC connected through USB.
- globular-toast 3y ago
  But we could already do DSP with Pulseaudio and Pipewire. I guess is making the speakers DSPs "built in" and tweakable with GUI etc? As well as actually creating the speaker DSP profiles, I guess. The speakers safety thing seems like a completely new thing, though. All sounds like an absolute nightmare to anyone even remotely into audio. But I guess tiny speakers are occasionally useful.
  - hotnfresh 3y ago
    In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Phones, laptops, tablets. The tiny speakers built into TVs, much smaller than even built-in speakers on CRT TVs used to be. Ear buds of various sorts, and smallish headphones. That’s most audio-listening accounted for (except in cars). Hell, I’ve got a good hi-fi setup and (separately) a probably-top-couple-percent 7.2 home theater audio situation (in one room… but not on the other TV) and even so I listen to things on tiny speakers more than on big ones.
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      > In this, our modern world, tiny speakers are what most people listen to most things on, except maybe in their cars. Hmm... I think you're probably right, but the one thing that gives me pause is the enormous market for Bluetooth speakers. I see Bluetooth speakers everywhere! I suppose most Bluetooth speakers are still "small" in the grand scheme of things, but they're certainly larger than phone and laptop speakers. Earbuds are similarly omnipresent. I'm not sure it's accurate to classify those as "tiny speakers"; the physics are different, because they only need to be loud enough to hear when they're next to your ears.
      - johnwalkr 3y ago
        Good bluetooth speakers also use similar DSP to sound way better and louder than they would without it so I am not sure this is a counterpoint. The unique thing here is Apple does it on the main CPU, presumably because "why not", so you couldn't safely power the speakers of your mac while running linux until the related features were added.
        sethhochberg 3y ago
        At this point even "bigger" speakers make heavy use of DSP, too - from household commodities like Sonos to higher end hi-fi powered speakers like the KEF LSX series, almost everyone in the industry making an active-amplified product has wised up to the idea that some processing can make use of clever acoustic tricks or compensations to make their products sound better (by whatever definition of better their brand sells) than they would being drive flat from the source. When you provide the whole integrated package its a no brainer.
jasoneckert 3y ago
The main reason DSP is a big thing is because Linux has never focused on it - Google has with Android and ChromeOS, as has Apple and Windows, but Linux speaker audio has always paled in comparison: https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 https://social.treehouse.systems/@marcan/111230163766956867 That leaves it up to the laptop vendor to implement hardware to perform DSP (and the quality of this varies tremendously from poor to OK). Apple doesn't use hardware for their speaker DSP (it's all software) and their speakers sound better than anything else out there. Linux now has similar functionality thanks to Asahi, and it will only get better over time.
wzdd 3y ago
I think the idea with the M-series laptops in particular is that you can drive the speakers at volumes that actually damage them very quickly ( see https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 https://github.com/AsahiLinux/linux/issues/53 ). The idea AIUI is that you can use a DSP along with a physical model of the voice coil to get better sound than you would if the speakers were volume-limited. I don't know how common this arrangement is in other laptops, but it's the kind of hardware/software integration that Apple is known for.
- prmoustache 3y ago
  It is just dynamic range audio compression to simulate loudness. It is not a new thing.
  - wtallis 3y ago
    It isn't just dynamic range compression. This is actually driving the speakers beyond their safe limits for sustained output as long as the temperature estimate (a function of the specific speaker's characteristics and the recent history of the signal it's been fed) is safe. "Dynamic range compression" doesn't imply any of that.
oneplane 3y ago
It's a huge thing because you can't really fit all the big speakers and audio stuff in tiny laptops and make them sound good. So we use extra steps (the DSP for example) to adjust how the speakers and amplifiers are controlled. Doing it this way allows us to have much better sound from tiny micro speakers. This is important because the alternatives are: - Bad sound and nothing you can do about it - No sound at all - Carry external speakers with you all the time Where in the past it was impossible to both have physically small devices and good sound, technological advances have enabled us to do more with less. So adding that technology means we can now have better sound than in the past.
johnwalkr 3y ago
Manufacturers can do a lot with DSP to make small speakers sound better. But "advanced" is saying a lot here. Recent speakers in macs and macbooks are over-driven to sound better and louder, with the DSP modeling energy input to the speaker and temperature of the speaker and keeping it within its physical limits. Without this DSP, the speakers not only sound terrible but become physically damaged if you try to use them at more than a very low volume. Any modern smart speaker or smartphone you buy will use similar DSP to sound much better and louder than it ought to, given its size. I think other laptops also do something similar at the hardware level. Rightly or wrongly, Apple does it in software on the CPU but until now this wasn't replicated in linux. So the Asahi project (which is for macs with M1/2/3 CPUs), has added this feature to linux[1] and is working on adding DSP models for each model of Mx Mac. In Asahi Linux Speakers have been disabled by default on all models until this feature as well as the specific DSP for each model is ready. Now they have reached the point where speakers are enabled for the first model, which is a huge milestone. [1] I originally wrote "linux kernel" but it is actually done in user space, with interlocks in the kernel to fall back to simple aggressive volume limiting.
- MichaelZuo 3y ago
  So if the DSP model were only slightly off, then it could permanently damage the speakers?
  - johnwalkr 3y ago
    No because you make the models conservative. In the link marcan mentions they will improve performance over time (presumably partly by making the models less conservative) and are "shipping with a hard volume reduction limit of -7dBFS to catch potential bugs or misbehavior."
    - MichaelZuo 3y ago
      If so, how are the speakers over-driven to sound better and louder? Do they have a very very conservative profile by default?

megous 3y ago

Or not: https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equalization-using-alsaeq/ https://www.hifiberry.com/docs/software/guide-adding-equaliz...

azinman2 3y ago
This is more than just EQ.
- megous 3y ago
  So is alsa. You can chain as many steps as you want.