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Comment by JohnBooty | Hacker News Reader

    Much like with the speakers, Apple are trying way too hard to be fancy here

Could the author of this package comment on this statement? I'd be really interested in their opinion of their speaker implementation.

What's overly complicated there? The hardware? The software?

As a MBP user and hobbyist audio guy I've been really impressed with the implementation of those speakers, particularly on the larger MBP models.

But I'm just a hobbyist and don't have any knowledge of them other than the driver arrangement (tweeter + dual opposed woofers). It certainly seems like they're pulling the same tricks used by "good" bluetooth speaker designers in order to wring acceptable perf and bass extension from teeny tiny speakers (adaptive EQ etc)

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Getting reasonable speaker support in Asahi Linux was a big deal. Part of the problem is that limiting the power usage to prevent overheating requires sophisticated DSP. Without that, you get very limited volume output within safe limits.

Probably the best overview to find out more is here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio

wow I'm surprised overheating is the bottleneck, I would've assumed clipping would damage the drivers before that

Yup. A little more detail on the overheating part in particular is here: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/speakersafetyd

Fascinating, thanks for sharing! Very surprised they do this at the software level.

"Modern" speaker design is all about software, it's super interesting.

In some ways speaker design is all about trying to cheat "Hoffman's Iron Law": bass, efficiency, and compact size.... you can only have 2 of the 3.

Part of it (as we know thanks to Asahi's work) is that you are varying a lot of speaker parameters dynamically. For example at low volumes you can dump extra energy into the bass frequencies. But at increasingly higher volumes you need to limit that. To get really dynamic you need to know not just the user's volume setting but like, real time spectral analysis of the actual program material

A speaker designer from 50 years ago would not be impressed with a modern pair of $500 or $1000 bookshelf speakers, those have barely changed. But they would be absolutely astonished at how some semblance of performance has been extracted from teeny tiny speakers on a Mac laptop or a high quality bluetooth speaker

> Much like with the speakers, Apple are trying way too hard to be fancy here

It is just a reference that Apple Laptop speakers have been waaay above anything the competition uses - and this is true since multiple generations. Had a MBP from 2014 and multiple friends were astonished about the sound when we watched a movie on the go. Same with the M4 MBP - sounds quality from the speaker is at a level that you probably don't actually need.

In my experience MBP 2015 sound is pretty thin and high frequencies are prone to clipping at even a moderate volume – soprano vocal parts suffer from this quite a bit. Of course for most uses that’s not a big problem and I’m sure the sound is still much better than that of many other laptops though. But the M series MBP speakers are a crazy improvement.

I feel like this must be some kind of a language barrier thing - the dev’s name appears to be Spanish, so English may not be their native language. And I think that most native English speakers - as demonstrated by multiple comments asking about it in this thread - would interpret “trying too hard to be fancy” as implying “because you can get similar high-quality results without using such sophisticated techniques”; but it seems like you’re saying (and this makes sense) they meant “because getting such high-quality results is overkill for a consumer laptop”.

Language is fascinating - I can convince myself with enough effort that the latter is just as valid as the former, given the literal meaning of the words, but my linguistic intuition is screaming at me that it’s wrong. How does someone ever learn that? How would a textbook ever explain it?

Agree with you, I was confused why everybody else interpreted in a different way. Am not spanish but german and not a native speaker, so the language barrier thing might be a good explanation.

> It is just a reference that Apple Laptop speakers have been waaay above anything the competition uses

More like the opposite. The MacBook speakers are absolutely rubbish, just like all laptop speakers (there's only so much you can do when constrained to a laptop body). The reason why MacBooks sound good is entirely god-tier signal processing which manages to extract extraordinary performance out of some decidedly very ordinary speakers.

https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio#why-this-is-necess...

Not sure what you are saying (or just ranting?) - MBP speaker are the opposite as in the rest of non-apple Laptops have way better sounding speakers? That is definetely not my experience at all.

If they are all rubish together, well, they are laptop speakers - and as such you have to treat them. Still there is nothing preventing some set of laptop speakers being objectively better than others.

They're saying that the physical speakers inside the MacBooks body are not what makes them sound good (and that the physical speakers are on par with other manufacturers) — it's the fancy, custom post-processing that does.

2Quote from their own link: "In the case of Apple Silicon machines, Apple has taken things one step further by including actually good speakers on most modern Macs"

My guess (without value judgement) is he was referring to the fact that they don't really work without such software

Seems like a common pattern lately that apples hardware people continues to be top notch and the software group is slacking.

I don't think that's really fair here? The comment suggests the hardware doesn't work well without relatively complex software to support it, which seems to be the case on macos. That suggests the software group are keeping up their end at least.

That's not at all the takeaway. macOS has the requisite software built-in; the hardware is designed in such a way that it requires software assistance to function, which is a choice that has advantages and disadvantages. The OP exists for situations where you aren't running Apple's own beamforming software on this hardware (to my understanding)

How's hardware supposed to work without software?

With a hardware DSP? It's gonna have software in it, but doing this kind of processing in the upper most top level OS stack is certainly a choice.

It seems like a good choice. It’s computationally extremely light and you can update it much more easily with new features (they actually did this once - to let you change the beamforming mode in the menu bar)

It is also notoriously time sensitive however, and while likely the hardware can already ensure the synchronization between mics, processing in the OS itself necessarily means buffering for a significant period so you don't run the risk of draining the pipe in a non-realtime system.

Here's a similar situation with the macbook pro's speakers, from the Asahi Linux team (scroll down to "Audio Advances"): https://asahilinux.org/2022/11/november-2022-report/

Similarly they can't be used very effectively without special, complex software that involves physical simulation of the speaker hardware. Doing things this way allows them to reach an amazing level of compactness + volume, but at the cost of complexity

If Apple intended to support platform openness, they'd likely have made such software available to hackers. But they never enthusiastically encouraged that, so people like the Asahi team are left to reverse-engineer and reinvent everything they need that lives in software

firmware

Which is just software at a different layer.

I have a feeling that this package is for folks that want to run Linux distros on the laptops, and have access to the same capabilities as native MacOS.

I'm confused too. These days, "spatial audio" on speakers (different from on headphones) and beamforming mics is starting to feel standard, at least on premium hardware.

Dumb, noisy, cramped, unbalanced audio just doesn't cut it anymore.

if you think fake 5.1ch sounds better, not like better for enjoying action movies, you've never had exposure to a >$99 pair of bookshelf speakers with a non-USB powered class D amp. change my mind.

Huh? Who's talking about bookshelf speakers?

This is about laptop speakers that just pass audio directly through, vs. laptop speakers that process the audio including spatially. Yes, it sounds dramatically better. And it's not just about "fake 5.1" but even just mono or stereo.

External speakers are a totally different conversation.

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