Nobody prevents the manufacturing to put some electronic bits before the speakers to cap the maximum power. Even better, teach the sound card to do that.
A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude.
This is why distorting the amplifiers (especially digital clipping) is so much worse for speakers than overpowering the speakers. This is a very well known fact in audio circles.
Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume.
Yes, Dell is putting on shitty speakers on their laptops, (what else is new), but VLC should be amplifying the output using level-limiting (hard-limiting), which would effectively bring all the quiet parts to be just as loud as the loud parts, instead of just digitally clipping the output.
>A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude.
1.41 x
>Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume.
The output of the amplifier really ought to be bandwidth limited either as a natural consequence of the components used or explicitly with a filter. It is silly to spend power on things that can't be heard.
Assuming the parent is talking about equal maximum amplitude of the sine and square waves, the square wave RMS voltage will be sqrt(2), or 1.4, times the sine wave RMS voltage. And since power is proportional to voltage squared, the square wave will carry sqrt(2)^2, or 2, times the sine wave power.
The integral of the square wave on the same interval is = pi
So the ratio increase in average voltage at the speaker (comparing the sine to the square) is pi/2 = 1.57. The increase in speaker power is (pi/2)^2 = 2.46.
>> A square wave has twice the power of a sine wave of identical amplitude.
> 1.41 x
Yes, for a voltage of x, but remember that the speaker is a resistance, for which the power varies as x^2/r (Ohm's law: p = e^2/r), So the original claim is correct.
Most metal released these days is digitally clipped. Even classic old 80s "remastered" records are digitally clipping all over the place. The loudness wars has ruined most metal through remasters.
Ah yes, the death of dynamics in music! One horrendous offender that I own is Paul McCartney's Memory Almost Full. I think he remastered it and rereleased it but there isn't a chance that I'm spending my money on it again! I think the mastering engineer discovered the joys of gain and hard knee in compressors.
>but VLC should be amplifying the output using level-limiting (hard-limiting), which would effectively bring all the quiet parts to be just as loud as the loud parts, instead of just digitally clipping the output.
That's compression, not hard-limiting. Hard limiting would leave the quiet parts quiet relative to the loud parts. It would only crush them if they were not enough dynamics in the first place.
So would compression. The implication is that after you hard limit, you also increase the overall volume, such that the limit threshold of -Xdb is now 0db. Otherwise, there is no point to hard limit.
I actually never seen VLC clip sound that much on volumes > 100%.
Maybe if your speakers are very quiet and crappy and you have to get every control to 100% (hardware, system, vlc) in order to hear anything - maybe in this case it will.
Hard clipping is very noticeable for the listener so not many people will set it to the maximum if they have choice.
Anyway, you can protect from this either in hardware or in the driver.
Analog limiter ICs (that I know of) limit the signal according to input voltage, something that does not catch this issue. Furthermore, limiting power at the audio codec level would require for the codec to have that feature and I don't know of audio codecs with that capability.
Cheap shit. Seriously, cheap shit. There are several ways to solve this, all of which boil down to "use more chips" or "use better speakers", thus increasing the price of already incredibly shitty speakers. Source: I'm involved in designing consumer electronic products and the only corners that don't get cut are those that, if cut, result in certifications not being granted and therefore in products you're unable to sell. Everyone, Apple included, does it.
The easiest way to solve this is use stronger materials for the speaker construction. This does, yes, affect the quality of the sound, which is already somewhere between catastrophic and abysmal on a laptop. The frequency response is likely to be worse, on a set of speakers that already has a frequency response that makes them quite useless for music.
You can also do it in electronics, as measuring the power delivered to speakers is not exactly rocket science. The response time wouldn't be great, but it's continuously shredding the speakers with square signals that damages them, not a couple of pulses every once in a while. You can also detect heavy slopes. You can even detect heavy slopes in software.
But no, seriously, this is a problem that can be solved. The mere fact that a lot of manufacturers manage to come up with speakers that don't break should be a testimony to this. I have (granted, desktop) speakers that have gone through a decade of heavy metal, grindcore and fucking SIDs and MODs, on bad ALSA drivers that I could barely get to work for years. They're fine. This is just Dell selling cheap shit.
This is great information - and I'd love to know which speaker manufacturers you approve of. I'd rather own an expensive set of desktop speakers that lasts ten years than deal with Dell parts breaking all the time.
> I'd love to know which speaker manufacturers you approve of
I have no idea how things go in the laptop market, so I can't say there's one I approve of in particular. The fact that the ones on the laptops are crap can, however, be assessed quite easily by ear :).
> I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad.
Of course it is, but nobody wants to do that; it's not profitable. * sigh * .
I sometimes wonder how difficult would it be to create, say, a brand of kettles with lifetime warranty, designed to last 50+ years instead of 50+ weeks the ones we have do. How hard would it be to sell them and to what ends would the competition go to stop you from killing their market?
Over on this side of the pond we generally use "coffee makers" instead of "kettles". But the problem is the same. They fail after a few years. It's all cheap consumer crap made in China.
We've given up trying to buy "good" coffee makers. We just buy something cheap that's on sale and throw it away when it breaks. There should be the equivalent of "Gresham's Law" for consumer goods (the bad eliminates the good). But I don't know the name of that. Perhaps "China's Law" would be appropriate.
I used to boil water in a stovetop kettle. But that takes too long. So now I just use the microwave. Take a teabag, pour cold water over it, nuke for 90 seconds, DONE!
Of course it doesn't taste nearly as good as pouring hot water from a kettle onto a teabag, but it's so fast and convenient.
And I don't think anyone in the USA buys loose tea. It's all teabags here (i.e. probably 99% of the market).
The microwave trick not only tastes bad, but it also doesn't heat evenly as you get patches of boiling water and patches of cold water.
Modern kettles boil in about 2 minutes anyway. So I don't really see them as any more inconvenient than using the microwave. The real inconvenience is having to get up to switch the device on; what I really want is a networked kettle so I can boil it from the comfort of my seat hehe
I never had either failing speaker or failing* kettle in my life so it's hard for me to say anything. Maybe there just so much you can get from laptop speakers so it makes sense to cap their power hard?
