CommunityNews

CommunityNews

A reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most

Hector Martin (@marcan@treehouse.systems).
Attached: 1 image

For those wondering why the hell we need all this safety system stuff for the speakers: because the speakers sound nice and loud and crisp, but only if you drive them well past the max “always safe” volume level. With current kernel settings, that level is at -14dBFS on the 14" M1 Pro MBP. That means that while your system will work without speakersafetyd (once this is all tested and enabled), the speakers will be much quieter.

This is especially true for the tweeters. You can hear that in the stream where I played I Won The Loudness War: 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. After that part, you can hear them recover over a few seconds and the snares gradually come back.

Most music does not have ridiculous clipped leads like that song, but it very often does have loud snares and cymbals, and other high-frequency transients. Additionally, the tweeters are high-passed in hardware at 800 Hz, and most music does not have that much energy in the high end to begin with relative to the bass, but could. So if you want to set the overall max volume to a safe level, you have to assume the input is a 4000 Hz square wave or something ridiculous like that. And that’s how you get that -14dBFS “dumb” level limit, which makes the speakers sound a lot quieter and worse, even though the vast majority of music played at 100% would never come close to needing that much reduction to be safe.

With a dynamic temperature/power limit model for the speakers, you can squeeze out a lot more of that headroom and still remain safe. And that gives you nice and punchy music without requiring harsh limiters or low volume caps to keep the speakers from melting.

And this is one reason why Mac speakers sound better and louder than most. Because most manufacturers don’t bother to do this.

Read in full here:

This thread was posted by one of our members via one of our news source trackers.

Popular General Dev topics Top

First poster: mafinar
The following languages will help current and new web developers navigate the programming landscape to code web-based services and apps t...
New
First poster: bot
Hush Keyboards with Hushboard. Yesterday while surfing the ASCII highways of IRC (yes, IRC) a URL linking to a MacOS application scrolle...
New
First poster: mafinar
F# Is The Best Coding Language Today. If you want to personally pick up a programming language in order to become a better coder in what...
New
First poster: bot
Flipper Zero is a portable multi-tool for pentesters and geeks in a toy-like body. It loves hacking digital stuff, such as radio protocol...
New
First poster: mindriot
LG 28-inch 16:18 DualUp Monitor with Ergo Stand and USB Type-C™ (28MQ780-B) | LG USA. Shop LG 28MQ780-B on the official LG.com website ...
New
First poster: bot
sqlglot/python_sql_engine.md at main · tobymao/sqlglot. Python SQL Parser and Transpiler. Contribute to tobymao/sqlglot development by c...
New
First poster: dani
The pool of talented C++ developers is running dry. Highly sought after, rarely provided.
New
CommunityNews
The Definitive PHP 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 8.0, and 8.1 Benchmarks (2023). We tested the performance of 14 PHP platforms (WordPress, Drupal, Lara...
New
First poster: dyowee
Software engineering job openings hit five-year low?. There are 35% fewer software developer job listings on Indeed today, than five yea...
New
First poster: dyowee
olmOCR is an open-source tool for converting PDFs to text with high accuracy, preserving reading order and supporting tables, equations, ...
New

Other popular topics Top

AstonJ
A thread that every forum needs! Simply post a link to a track on YouTube (or SoundCloud or Vimeo amongst others!) on a separate line an...
New
siddhant3030
I’m thinking of buying a monitor that I can rotate to use as a vertical monitor? Also, I want to know if someone is using it for program...
New
AstonJ
Just done a fresh install of macOS Big Sur and on installing Erlang I am getting: asdf install erlang 23.1.2 Configure failed. checking ...
New
AstonJ
This looks like a stunning keycap set :orange_heart: A LEGENDARY KEYBOARD LIVES ON When you bought an Apple Macintosh computer in the e...
New
Exadra37
I am asking for any distro that only has the bare-bones to be able to get a shell in the server and then just install the packages as we ...
New
AstonJ
Continuing the discussion from Thinking about learning Crystal, let’s discuss - I was wondering which languages don’t GC - maybe we can c...
New
rustkas
Intensively researching Erlang books and additional resources on it, I have found that the topic of using Regular Expressions is either c...
New
AstonJ
Was just curious to see if any were around, found this one: I got 51/100: Not sure if it was meant to buy I am sure at times the b...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Author Spotlight: Sophie DeBenedetto @SophieDeBenedetto The days of the traditional request-response web application are long gone, b...
New
New