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- Hacker News
- I'm not having an issue with laptop with subpar speakers, but I don't see any way of not using EasyEffects. I'm running Arch on a Beelink SER8 through a focusrite 2i2 and into my Sony stereo receiver, out to floorstanding speakers. At the moment I am just using a slightly modified variation of one of the common community plugins, LoudnessEqualizer. For better or for worse, my ears are so accustomed to this. Elsewhere I also use it for things like dialogue boost and it surely does feel like overkill then, but convenient.
Now I am about to dig back into my Bitwig DAW, something I haven't done for many years, and dealing with all the issues around clean vs EasyEffects-modified sounds is daunting.
by chrisco23 - > EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I’m talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE’s System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything.
0.2% of WHAT?
by RunSet - Generally, 100% means 1 core. Not a very useful number if you don't know the CPU specification, for sure.
- Audio quality is deeply objective, sorry. Audio embellishments and distortions are subjective.
Analogy: air quality.
What is clean air is objective. Perfumes and aromas are subjective (one man's rose is another's skunk), but they objectively worsen air quality.
by kazinator - Laptop Manufacturers fail to appreciate how much better their product would be with good speakers. Particularly in today’s age where everyone is streaming music or watching videos much more than before.
MacBook Pro 16’s are great but most others suck.
by fsuts - The software driving them is good.by TiredOfLife
- I wouldn't be at all surprised if Macbooks were doing the same sort of room-monitoring real-time EQ tricks that Sonos speakers do. They own the hardware and the software, there's a real advantage to them in having such tight control over the audio environment.by regularfry
- If you have a thinkpad, you can probably extract the XML configuration from the windows driver installer using innoextract for your laptop. Then you can map those to pipewire settings with wireplumber to get very similar output to windows which was tuned in labs by the manufacturer (minus dolby atmos/dax).
Here is one for a recent thinkpad p1 gen8, no app necessary.
https://github.com/chergert/thinkpad-p1-gen8-pipewire-config
by audidude - Would be sweet if it could use the microphone to auto-tune the speakers by playing audio and listening to the result. Microphones are not perfect but a cheap microphone has much better frequency response than cheap speakers. If you assume the microphone is perfect you will get a pretty good result, probably better than a generic "laptop speaker" preset would be.by oofabz
- > Would be sweet if it could use the microphone to auto-tune the speakers by playing audio and listening to the result.
You need an omnidirectional mic.
by coldblues - Omnidirectional electret mics are nearly dead flat right out of the box, and cheap.by analog31
- i use EE on my parents tv (minipc connected to offline 4koled) to address the "movie too quiet then way too loud" for them but there is a cost, latency
fortunately its not large enough to notice unless you already know (i.e. problem for me but not for thee) AND fortunately MPV .conf can set audio offset globally to sync everything nicely, so its not bothering them; but i disable it if im going to play games where i need split second audio cue/reaction
the lack of vst support though, seems like a terrible oversight. obs audio filters with stacked vsts and routing filters can unironically do this programs job better because of the vst support, and depending on the setup choices, with better latency too
by downloadram - It's possible to run all of the audio output on a Linux box through a VST, if you want that.
For example: https://www.benashby.com/resources/pipewire-vst-carla/
Additional latency can also be dealt in ways that are probably good-enough for streaming/local media. Just make sure the audio output stack has a fixed latency and then adjust Kodi's audio offset to work with it.
by ssl-3 - I had to go on a bit of a journey figuring out how to do anything useful with EasyEffects when I moved to Linux on my Microsoft brand laptop. I question the value of including it by default though. As the article notes, it's easy enough to install manually, and most people won't have any idea what to do to configure it usefully. Even after all my research and tweaking, my audio still has quirks that I don't even have the vocabulary for to be able to find fixes.by delecti
- > most people won't have any idea what to do to configure it usefully
This was me.
Never had a problem with typical eq/effects and even dabbled in dsp/synths but was defeated by EasyEffects. My attempts at basic tweaks had terrible consequences. I'm sure it was pebkac but the experience felt buggy e.g. my attempts to reduce some painful treble caused the bass to vanish, adjusting volume caused static not loundness etc. Most of the modules have more cryptic numbers than I know what to do with giving the feeling of being trapped in an algebraic equation.
However, downloading some community presets and the results were excellent. Some tiny nudges from there were within my idiot grasp.
by Fluorescence - > Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours.
Interesting article (audio processing should be a standard OS feature), but I wish we'd stop doing this. Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones), they’re supposed to be flat – “equalised”. At least if you want to hear the thing as it was mastered.
I think it just hurts consumers in the end, as it validates snake oil in the form of various ”enhancements”, like image processing on TVs. It makes stuff really hard to compare and much easier to sell shitty hardware.
Not that I’m opposed to improving shitty hardware with software, – quite the contrary – it’s just the murky subjectivity that irks me.
by jurf - Yeah, but speakers aren't the whole system. Even if you've got perfectly flat speakers, the room they're in won't be.by regularfry
- The definition of sound quality tends to change between people.
My definition is pretty much the same as yours here, but I know quite a few people who hate listening to music on anything with a relatively flat frequency response.
by doubled112 - Why would speakers be any different than earphones? Botu are subjective ; I personally hate flat eq. I've listened to numerous products, some worth thousands of dollars, and I'll always take some sort of slight bass and treble boost over flat eq. I'll even take a big bass boost over no bass boost at all.
- I have heard that audio engineer's don't necessarily master to a flat EQ because such a small section of listeners are listening with a flat EQ. Most are using car speakers, airpods, etc so they master it based on those expectations.by redhed
- Speakers, at least the great majority of them, are not flat. Can you not hear differences between speakers? Studio monitors typically aim for a flat response, but most barely make an acceptable approximation. And then we're not even discussing phone and tv speakers or the fact that a flat response for pure tones doesn't necessarily translate to one for complex sounds.by tgv
- > Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones)
I don't think this has been true in my lifetime, at least. Some brands being known for "warmth" vs "brightness" is ages old, before the idea of audiophile earbuds was even a thing. At the extreme end, you can go back at least 40 years to see people with dedicated sub outputs and massively-oversized non-flat subwoofer setups.
by majormajor - No speakers have flat frequency response. If that's the target (it usually isn't[1] even with very elaborate systems that include a great deal of DSP grunt, in my experience), then they all miss -- every single one of them misses.
All speakers have resonances that add to the sound in ways that frequency response, alone, does not measure. All speakers also have imperfect dynamic response. All speakers have imperfect impedances, which can matter quite a lot to the power amplifier that drives them. All speakers have non-linear phase response. All speakers have different dispersion characteristics.
All speakers then operate within acoustic spaces (like a room in a house) that introduce even more variables.
[1]: https://professionalsupport.dolby.com/s/article/Dolby-Atmos-...
by ssl-3 - > In fact, I’d take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings.
Another important integration point would be the system volume control. If you could EQ your speakers to near flat response, and then apply loudness based on the volume control, you would get great sound at lower volumes without compromising the quality at higher volumes.
I do this currently with EasyEffects equalizer and loudness filters, but for best quality I need to keep the speakers and system volume at preset reference level and control the volume from the loudness filter volume setting.
by randomfinn - Some time ago, I’ve come across an Asahi patch to I think Pipewire that tied system volume to a Macbook-specific loudness compensation filter, but I couldn’t figure out how to actually make use of it outside of their environment.
- Last night I went through their guide on how to improve the sound of laptop speakers on my Framework. It's night and day, highly recommended.by cassianoleal
- Just seconding this so other framework owners may give it a try. The speakers on my 13" are pretty bad, but using easy effects made them plenty "fine". Without, it sounded like absolute trash.by brewtide
- I wonder, is there something stopping Framework from having this change as the default?
- Couldn’t agree more. This is practically mandatory on a Framework.
Noting too, I didn’t find my profile for Framework 13 to be optimal for Framework 13 Pro. I’m still tweaking there, and frustratingly didn’t track my tweaks, but will try to remember to diff at the end and publish the output.
by simonjgreen - I've used https://github.com/cab404/framework-dsp for the preset on mine. There is also a guide from the author of the preset linked in their on how they came up with the presets.by maztaim