On Wed, Aug 31, 2011 at 12:59:39PM -0400, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
On Aug 31, 2011, at 8:09 AM, Roman Haefeli wrote:
I always had the feeling, that on OS X on MacBooks (Pro) the sound coming from the speakers is heavily processed. Audio sounds a lot 'punchier' than for example the same audio played on the same machine from Linux. I haven't had a chance to play around with it, since I
don't own a MacBook, but from what Hans says, to me it sounds as the application output is not clipped to -1/1 before going to the
(CoreAudio internal?) dynamics stage, but processed and limited first and only
then sent to the speakers. This would also explain, why the setup Hans explained above would completely shutdown the sound output. Probably, if you wait long enough, sound would come back again, assuming that
it's the limiter's release time, that becomes very long due to the very
high level coming in...Yes, CoreAudio does do processing on the audio before outputting it. I forget all the details.
Is this true of the iOS devices too? I always got the impression there was some mad compression going on there. I could just imagine Steve Jobs issuing a directive: "My favorite crunk mp3s do not POP enough. Make everything POP more immediately." The resulting ear fatigue must explain why I get blank looks when I yell about how great GNU/Linux is to Apple users.
Cheers,
Chris.