That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile shows up to give some thoughts..
- Any number of excellent in-ear monitors under $100 - Truthear Zero ($50)
- Quite a few good-to-excellent headphones under $200, and under $50 if you can run a convolver equalizer for them - Superlux 668B ($35)
- Several excellent powered monitor speakers regularly on sale under $450/pair (JBL 305, 308, Kali LP8v2)
Laptop speakers are for getting your attention from across the room so you can plug in something appropriate.
I have a proper home theater system, but I wouldn't use it while my wife is taking a nap. I have a nice stereo setup in the living room, but I wouldn't use that while people are talking in the kitchen unless I just wanted some background music.
And I have both IEMs and over-the-ear headphones because wearing either for too long can make my ears unhappy, but in different ways.
> And a completely unreleated thought, maybe it is
> possible to remove the safetly limits on speakers
> of other brands and apply the same strategy to get
> better sound?
That’s a really interesting topic. I hope an audiophile
shows up to give some thoughts..
However, as an audiophile hobbyist, getting good sound from bad hardware (or excellent sound from good hardware) via DSP is definitely a thing! In fact, it's essentially the reason why anything sounds any good at all these days, and why things like tiny laptop speakers and tiny portable Bluetooth speakers can sound halfway decent. Even inexpensive factory car audio can sound great these days, because you can throw a cheap DSP chip in front of not-very-special speakers.
I would suspect that many laptop manufacturers are doing some hardware/firmware/software magic already, in order to get decent sound from their hardware.
Hobbyists can do this as well. You can buy e.g. cheap speakers, measure their output with a microphone, and create a DSP profile to fix much of what they're doing wrong. The underlying principle here is that "good" sound is absolutely measurable, and it essentially is nothing more low-distortion playback that is tonally correct. The results can sound excellent. Here's an example of the process: http://noaudiophile.com/Micca_Club_3/
However, there are some physical limitations to this. Much of the sound we hear is reflected, not direct, and therefore part of a speaker sounding "good" is that it is emitting "correct" sound in a wide enough angle. If a speaker is shooting correct sound directly at you, but various and incorrect sound off at various angles, the result will not sound great because what actually reaches your ears is going to be a mixture of good (the direct sound) and bad (the indirect, reflected) sound. If a speaker is bad at this, that is not something that can really be fixed by DSP, so you need to get some elements of the physical design correct in the first place.
The software power management aspects of Apple's secret sauce ("you can dump more than max power into the speakers for x milliseconds, but after that, back off") are also beyond the limits of simple DSP solutions. There would presumably need to be some kind of stateful solution there like Asahi is doing.
There are also other things that Apple does in hardware. Their 16-inch laptops actually have six drivers. Two tweeters, and two pairs of dual-opposed woofers. Dual-opposed woofers give you twice the sound pressure and drastically reduce distortion caused via vibration. This of course takes more room, more hardware engineering, more expense, and isn't something we can software our way around. You actually don't see this in commercial subwoofers until you get up around the $2000 price level, though you could also build one yourself for much less if you don't mind DIY work. https://us.kef.com/products/kf92-subwoofer
If you're willing to go in the other direction, and tolerate bigger speakers, you can have very very enjoyable sound from the sorts of dumb big-box speakers folks commonly had in their living rooms up through the 1980s or so.
However, the paper from the speaker cones and the rubber surrounds have nearly all rotted away at this point. If there are capacitors in the crossovers, those may need replacing too.
So unfortunately resurrecting old vintage speakers (a noble and worthwhile thing!) from thrift stores is often more involved than refinishing the box.
However if you're willing to put in some legwork, scroll through lots of crap, and deal with safety concerns, you can get some nice higher end gear on Craigslist. (A decent seller will understand you need to demo the speakers to make sure they work)
If we say "affordable" is about $500-$1000, all in...
For amplification you can get a factory refurbished Denon or similar 5.1 receiver for under $200. This is what I usually recommend because it will give tremendous flexibility over the long haul and honestly, receivers/amplifiers all sound very similar if not identical.
As far as widely available brands, Sony and Polk sell some nice affordable tower speakers for a few hundred dollars. Those put out enough bass to be fun on their own without a subwoofer, depending on what you're looking for.
I actually tend to not love these quite as much as some of the old 80s style "monkey coffin" speakers but that's probably nostalgia talking. There aren't many of those around any more, affordable or otherwise. The cheapest are the BIC EV-15s, which have ridiculous 15" red woofers, but sound pretty nice and the grill covers do a good job of hiding the red woofers.
There are also a lot of great bookshelf style speakers and Wirecutter does a great job maintaining a leaderboard of sorts. Compared to what most people want these days, maybe these are considered "big." https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-bookshelf-sp...
So...
You can have a nice, simple 2-channel stereo system with a receiver and two tower speakers for as little as $500. It will sound great with nearly zero complexity and you can stop there. That is enough to be happy until the end of your days!
You can substitute bookshelves for towers, but practically speaking you'll probably need to buy speaker stands as well and at that point you've spent as much as towers would have cost.
If you're willing to spend a little more and add a subwoofer or two and tolerate more complexity, you can have something extremely good and full-range for $500-$1000 total.
There are options such as DIY that can deliver much greater price/performance, and are a lot of fun if you're into that and don't mind buying up half of the wood clamps at your local Harbor Freight. Very roughly speaking the DIY flat pack kits will give you about 2-3x the price/performance of commercial speakers.
I hear you on the bookshelf speakers. My desk speakers are a couple of Edifier S1000DB's (cheap Mackie CR3's before that) and for work stuff that's fine. I never thought about sticking them anywhere else, but that might be enough; my living room is small.
Definitely some stuff to chew on. Thank you again!
If you decide to look into the DIY route, PartsExpress and DIYSoundGroup are two of the most popular sources for affordable flat-pack kits.
KEF Q150 is a good home size speaker. Don't touch their higher end products, Britain is the home of horribly expensive audiophile snake oil.
are you talking about hardware or software DSP?
If I had a pair of decent speakers and a microphone hooked up to my PC
1. You need a calibrated microphone like the uMik from MiniDSP or one from Dayton Audio. That's about $100, though, so that sort of kills the value equation in a lot of situations.[1]
2. You then measure the speaker's output with something such as a free tool called Room EQ Wizard: https://www.roomeqwizard.com/
3. REQ can then output the necessary DSP configuration files, that can be then be used by a MiniDSP, EqualizerAPO, etc. Or it can just tell you the necessary corrections that can then be manually typed into anything that supports parametric EQ settings.
Here's a video fully demonstrating all of that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1aYsjPc2m4&t=2s
____
[1] There are community efforts to take these kinds of measurements and open source them so everybody can benefit. The largest I'm aware of is these open-sourced headphone measurements (which require a different sort of measurement rig) and corrections: https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq/tree/master/results/...
For speakers, there are the measurements and EQ corrections published by places like AudioScienceReview.com and NoAudiophile.com
If you do software EQ and use other peoples' measurements you can do this for $0, without the grunt work of measurements.
> You need a calibrated microphone
Ah, of course, it's a chicken and egg problem... :)
edit: typos
His corrections for cheap Micca speakers were my gateway into hi-fi. For under $100 I had true hi-fi sound at my desk. However, he's not active any more, and most of the speakers he's measured are no longer available.
Blatant plug: https://github.com/erdewit/HiFiScan
Acknowledging this lifts you out of the category of "audiophile" into "person who actually knows about audio" ;) There's a lot of what I can only describe as outdated prejudice about what can be achieved with class D systems. Your explanations in this thread are excellent.
> I would suspect that many laptop manufacturers are doing some hardware/firmware/software magic already, in order to get decent sound from their hardware.
Correct, especially in mobile phones. My employer has some products in this area, e.g. https://www.cirrus.com/products/cs35l41/ , which has exactly the sort of speaker protection under discussion done by on-chip DSP.