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rangestransform 3 days ago

The audio is magic because Apple overdrives their speakers by analyzing the signal to stay under the sustained power limit of the speaker, instead of clipping everything at the sustained power limit.

https://forum.devtalk.com/t/a-reason-why-mac-speakers-sound-...

elcritch 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'd argue they're technically not over-driving them if the speakers survive and work well. Rather it's that other vendors are under driving their speakers by using a simplistic algorithm.

Apple is actually driving their speakers closer to their actual physical limits which are driven by average power not peak momentary power.

pjerem 2 days ago | parent [-]

Actually they do over drive them. I think it is explained in the asahi sound driver GitHub which reverse engineered the Apple driver.

IIRC, there is an algorithm which overdrives the speakers in physically dangerous zones only on some frequencies and only in short bursts of time with a throttle until the next over drive if necessary.

For the user it’s transparent because we are talking about timings in milliseconds so except if you play a static frequency you can’t notice anything.

Asahi explained that they had to reverse engineer this because they didn’t understand why the sound was so bad on Linux.

woleium 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

so someone could write an app for windows to do the same thing?

LorenDB 2 days ago | parent [-]

Asahi Linux already is doing it for Linux: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio