asahi-audio

It is entirely the fault of people buying shitty plastic shovelware pc laptops that they ended up with laptops with dogshit speakers. You can buy laptops with good sounding speakers https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio

It's not only a matter of having better hardware (though it certainly helps a lot). For example, Apple does a lot of software tuning and tweaking to make the Macbook speakers sound as good as they do. And it's been fascinating to read the extent of work Asahi Linux had to do to recreate the software portion of Macbook's audio stack. https://asahilinux.org/docs/sw/audio-userspace/ https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio

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

Yes you need calibration files for supported models. You can see the details and explanation at the asahi audio repository. They also criticize the MacOS curves, and point out how some Windows vendors are doing the same DSP approach. https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio

> 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...

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

It may be impossible for a little speaker to produce any sound at some low frequency, so manufacturers use "virtual pitch" psychoacoustic phenomenon by introducing harmonics above that frequency. There is no low bass, but there will be added harmonics that will be perceived by the listeners as low bass: https://sound.stackexchange.com/questions/37755/how-do-psych... Here's also a project and some info from Asahi devs on Macbook audio: https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio

You’re making the assumption the tweaks to the audio subsystem made a material change to the quality of the audio output. It’s not like laptop speakers are very good to start with, or like laptop sound cards ever faithfully reproduce the sound they’re asked too. Getting good audio out of a laptops speaker in 20% hardware and 80% audio filtering anyway. No laptop speaker (even Macs[1]) sounds good without significant processing to workaround the physical limitations of tiny speakers mounted in a non-ideal chassis. As for other speakers, sound pressure drops off following the cube law. So a speaker millimetres away from the hard drives which have substantially greater impact than speakers outside of the laptop. Of course if you crank the volume enough it’ll eventually cause an issue, but given there doesn’t seem to be widespread reporting o

This project seems to be progressing the audio, activity from last month. https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio

I am aware of that, that's why I mentioned it could be an ALSA plugin. From https://github.com/chadmed/asahi-audio > ASoC exposes the speaker array as six independent drivers - two woofers and a tweeter each for Left and Right. We want userspace to see this as a standard stereo speaker pair. The configuration fragment shipped in this package sets up a virtual sink that takes a stereo input and routes it appropriately to each driver. > We then run into another issue - the speakers sound awful. Turns out Macs aren't magic, they sound good because Apple invest a lot of engineering effort into DSP. Apple actually handle this with odd bespoke Core Audio plugins. We use PipeWire's convolver plugin to apply impulse responses to each driver, which effectively EQs the output signals. > The kernel driver currently makes no effort to diminish your a

> We aren't going to stop you from running ... no sound server > your speakers sound terrible and tinny or don't even work at all by default (once we ship that) So this sounds completely unrelated to Xorg vs Wayland. Can someone care to explain? I do prefer Xorg currently but I can think I can live with Wayland (I tried a bunch of times before, some things I found better than Xorg, but others were blockers, although they ought to be resolved someday I guess). Both live in userland though. Comparatively, this sounds quite surprising. Is the use of a sound server like pulseaudio or pipewire basically mandated to safely handle the audio hardware? Why should I need those? I'm aware of the design of these Macs audio that can physically destroy speakers if not driven correctly, and I know it's being worked on, but it seems to imply the safety f