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Comment by graderjs | Hacker News Reader

When I first got my current MacBook Air the sound totally surprised me. It seemed like it was coming from places to the left and to the right of the actual device. I kept moving my head around that space to try to find the weird source of the sound! It truly blew me away. But then that sensation disappeared. Now I don't notice this? I like the AirPod head tracking, but this "spookily surround sound" that I noticed at first was very fucking cool!

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M1 Air user here too.

I am convinced there must be some kind of ‘spatial’ processing going on, even though I’m as certain as I can be that I’m listening to a plain stereo source, Spotify web version on Firefox.

Why does it sound like a particular instrument is up in the air to my right? I’ve found myself getting up and looking for the source of a sound before realising it was in the music.

On the M2 series laptops (Air and Pro) they tout "Support for Spatial Audio when playing music or video with Dolby Atmos on built-in speakers", but it's not on the M1 laptops.

Sorry to be the um actually guy, but every supported MacBook [0] (including some Intel ones at least on Monterey - like my 15” from 2019) will do a transaural rendering over the laptop speakers for Dolby Atmos content.

The tech needed to do that doesn’t require fancy silicon, though it does seem they restrict the headtracked binaural (over headphones like AirPods Pro).[0]

Though you can plug any headphones in and, at least in Apple Music, force it to do a binaural rendering (without headtracking) on any headphones.

[0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212182

This would not matter to the parent poster listening to Spotify, which is not a Dolby Atmos source.

On the M2 Air (and new design MBP), speakers bounce the sound off the screen. I think if you were to remove the screen and listen to those speakers in open air it'd sound quite odd.

Probably they're pre-distorting the sound so it's correct only after bouncing off the screen, kind of like how VR distorts the image to account for headset optics undoing that distortion.

I had an M1 Air before the MBP release. The sound was good, but the sound stage is eerily wide on the M1 MBP (and presumably the M2 Air), compared to the normal side speakers.

Does the laptop have knowledge of the screen angle, or does its calculations just assume an 'average' angle? Or does it not matter too much (it seems like it would to me)?

Yes, modern MacBooks have a sensor for detecting screen angle

They do, and it's also used for Desk View when you use an iPhone as your laptop's webcam. This undoes the perspective of whatever is in front of your laptop, basically like an overhead projector: https://www.macworld.com/article/1371720/continuity-camera-m...

Pretty cool that speakers are driven in part by software that knows the screen angle. Add in the position of your head and you'll be able to do amazing things with those speakers. Sad that you can't get studio monitors that are integrated enough to do this on the fly (or can you???)

What a great way to describe it!

> the sound stage is eerily wide on the M1 MBP (and presumably the M2 Air), compared to the normal side speakers.

Thank you for giving me the new language to express this! :) ;p x

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