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Comment by boesboes | Hacker News Reader

> Much like with the speakers, Apple are trying way too hard to be fancy here, and implement an adaptive beamformer in userspace to try and isolate the desired signal from background noise.

Might be fancy, but it does make for surpisingly good audio from a laptops.

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Indeed. I can't help but think that anyone thinking Apple is trying too hard to be fancy on something like "audio quality from microphone in a laptop" doesn't quite grasp what Apple's about.

There are many advantages to vertical integration as regards end-user-experience.

Honestly, with speakers it was mainly a patent avoidance thing (patent on essentially the same thing but done with dedicated hardware, doing it with software on "application processor" bypassed the patent claims)

A lot of similar stuff is done in firmware on x86 laptops, to the point that both AMD and Intel now share considerable portion of the stack, with both using Xtensa cores for DSP, with Sound Open Firmware as SDK. When I use built-in microphone array on my laptop, it's parsed through the DSPs "transparently" to end user.

But technically you can load your own firmware there.

If it was just patent avoidance why aren’t there any non-apple laptops either their sound quality? Both the microphones and the speakers are some of the best audio I’ve ever encountered.

Aren't there? I haven't had any trouble with background noise in calls from my ThinkPad, which also does some microphone array trickery as far as I can tell. Unfortunately the drivers for Linux are nowhere near as good so the extra processing the Intel driver does isn't useful for my day to day experience, but I've never had any quality issues.

Apple does have some excellent audio engineers for the speakers, although these days the difference isn't as stark as it was five or ten years ago.

Of course you need to get a good Windows laptop to get any such quality, and many people and companies seem to only bother spending money on premium laptops if they're made by Apple.

Is it? I mean, compared to some laptops where I explicitly was not interested in paying extra for audio, sure. Especially with them being older than "standard" presence of audio coprocessor on board.

Compared to the two new-ish AMD laptops? For the rare use case that warrants using built in speakers and mic, I see no real difference. Maybe latest macs are better, but... Usually the only use of built in speakers and mic are as last chance backup, or watching movies in bad conditions. Otherwise it's always a proper headset or standalone speakers

Yes, it is. Please name a windows laptop with great speakers and mics.

It’s night and day.

Mind you, I haven't used Macs since last intel ones, but my current workhorse of Zephyrus 14 2023 has at least comparable mics to last intel 15" and 16", and better speakers. T14g5 AMD I have from one contract has slightly worse speakers than that but comparable to the Macbooks I used (if not slightly better, the Zephyrus just has a whole grade higher amplifier setup with 4 speakers). And doesn't vary sound based on where it's placed :V

I haven't bought for built-in sound quality in the past (or ever, it's backup's backup after all), but I do remember lots of laptops offered with Harman-Kardon sound system, including hardware implementation of the dynamic compensation system in M-series Macbooks. Except also usually with way beefier speakers. Microphone arrays came in later arguably, but that is more correlated with availability of audio coprocessors - T470 had not great twin mic (mac was better there), but new ones easily handle it beyond my needs.

Way above "last choice backup solution" that "built in speakers and mic" are used for by me.

Usually you can't load your own SoF firmware, on most hardware it has to be signed by Intel, with exceptions like Chromebooks, where you have to sign it with a "community" key that is publicly available. There was talk of a way for device owners to add keys, but that isn't implemented yet.

https://github.com/thesofproject/sof/issues/5814

"Time Domain Fixed Beamformer (TDFB)" -- https://thesofproject.github.io/latest/algos/tdfb/time_domai... might be relevant here.

Is it the same story with the Apple touchpad? Is the fancy palm rejection implemented completely in software?

No idea - audio just happens to be something I once looked into because claims about superiority of apple software solution on M-chip macbooks to the speaker quality made me look more in depth.

It's not just good, I found it to be way better than a standalone shotgun mic connected via USB. I researched this for WFH and found a lot of people saying you were going to spend hundreds to replicate the quality in a more "professional" mic setup. Super impressive.

As someone looking to replicate it from a pro mic setup, what do people recommend?

I've been trying to record audio in my noisy server room but only deepfilternet is able to deal with the fan noise in the background.

Biggest thing is you need a nice mic that's very close to your face, like you might see on a twitch stream. Good noise isolation via a directional mic off-camera is quite difficult/expensive apparently.

I bought a røde wireless mic which definitely helped. It gives deepfilternet enough good signal:noise to work reasonably well, but I was hoping there was an even better solution.

A lot of dialogue in movies is dubbed for this very reason, it’s very hard to not pick up noise. What you can deal with is how close the mic is to you (which is why news reporters rely on hand held mics, not just the boom mike) and the pattern of the mic: a cardoid, hypercardoid or shotgun mic facing the opposite direction of the noise source would pick up less than an omnidirectional one (which is why the mics you see in studios are not used on a loud stage—not only are they fragile and expensive, they also tend to be omnidirectional).

There's definitely an ADR (dubbing) component to movies, but it's not very much these days. (In comparison to decades ago.)

Instead, sound engineers spend weeks cleaning up spoken dialog by hand in spectrogram editors. It's honestly astounding the magic they can do, but it's also labor-intensive and therefore expensive. They're literally individually EQ-ing every vowel, splicing consonants from one word to another... it's wild.

Does it record a fixed point, or does it do something fancy like using the camera to attempt tracking the user's movement? Just curious, and I don't have access to a modern Mac. The article seems to imply that it's focusing on a fixed point.

No idea, I believe it's just a fixed point. Personally I use it while sitting in front of my Mac about 1-2 feet from my face. I've done tests, it's better than every other form of audio input I have available, including standalone shotgun mic, Airpods Max, Airpods Pro V2, etc.

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