If you want good sound from a laptop, the answer is pretty simple: 1) plug in some decent headphones, or 2) plug in some real speakers. You can get a pretty decent set of "PC speakers" consisting of satellite speakers and a subwoofer for not much money. You're not really supposed to listen to the laptop speakers if you care about sound and you're not traveling.

I find it funny that a lot of HN posts will expound in expletives about how a certain tech product is the best in class for example, how great macbook pro speakers are and then another poster will say that no laptop has ever had decent speakers…

Also, in one post “this dolby surround atmos reproduces everything about the concert, with hundreds of musicians it’s like I’m there” and then in the next post “speakers will never reproduce even the sound of one acoustic piano that’s been mistreated and mistuned, the piano will still sound better and the speaker will never replicate the magic of acoustic instruments” and then in the very next post start quoting how the Nyquist–Shannon sampling theorem proves that nobody ever needs anything over 44khz to reproduce exactly the sound of all acoustic instruments that ever existed.

The story, as always, is more complex than any of these hot takes, and tech folks usually refuse to accept that there are multiple factors at play.

This is not contradictory at all. "Best in class" means exactly that: the best out of the available selections. If they're all terrible, the best-in-class is the least terrible. MBP speakers may be best-in-class (I'm assuming, I don't know), while still being "crap" to someone who values high-fidelity sound.

It's more than just audio quality. Whilst I could spend time on quality, I'll address a serious issue with all modern laptops, that is they simply do not have enough audio gain.

Desigers design to the dynamic range allowed by the bit level and power output of the speakers/audio amplifiers—there is never anything left in reserve.

Let's go back to my 1930s radio receiver for comparison. Back then, a radio set with say a 5 Watt audio output would give 5W output when the radio station reached 100% modulation of its carrier signal. And to reach this condition the radio receiver would have its volume set to about half way (the volume potentiometer set to about 12 o'clock), so the listener could always increase the gain to 5W on soft low level audio. This was the normal situation with just about every radio receiver ever built in the pre-digital era.

That scenario is no longer possible with modern laptops (and much other digital equipment). In a noisy environment, you can no longer trade quality for distortion/clipping which one often wants to do. Same goes for audio recorded at low level, here one cannot reach full volume as there is no reserve audio gain. How many YouTube videos and MP3 files have you heard that have such low level audio that they're essentially inaudible? If you're like me then you'd have to answer hundreds if not thousands.

The fact is modern digital designers haven't a clue what to do when it comes to listener audio ergonomics. That they don't is a damn nuisance.

The fact that they need to spend some weeks training in an ancient radio factory is an indictment on the poor state of our modern tech education (why didn't their educators tell them to always design in reserve gain in situations such as this?).

> In a noisy environment, you can no longer trade quality for distortion/clipping which one often wants to do

Whenever a laptop comes out that lets you raise the volume to clipping, inevitably a bunch of users blow out their speakers and it become a support/warranty issue.

I once worked in the prototype lab of a very well known company that designed audio and television equipment and I can assure you speaker/amplifier matching is well known and understood.

Designing speakers that would clip (bottom out) and not self destruct happens all the time, it's a non issue as it doesn't really cost much extra (essentially nothing with small speakers).

The real issue is that some manufacturers started to use second rate products then they all followed suit—even those with 'named' brands that one paid extra for (but who got little in return).

The real problem was that both users and equipment reviewers didn't complain (or they didn't do so with sufficient vigor) and manufacturers let it slip, which was easy given the highly competitive nature of laptops where manufacturing cost are important.

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Edit: I should add that this was rarely an issue in the past when substabtial gain reserves were a normal feature in equipment. Although it was occasionally a problem in high powered HiFi equipment, it was essentially never so in domestic radio sets. The question remains — then why is it now a problem in laptops?

My memory, and indeed any current example I posses, is more along the lines of "wow, it actually makes sound" rather than trying to pick instruments from the back rows in a symphony out.

However, early on (pre 2000), the components in laptops were often better built. From my experience, two brands come to mind - IBM Thinkpads and some of the Toshiba ones, especially the old 'luggables'. They also had more substantial frames/chassis which provided better baffling for the speakers.

Moreover, my early Toshiba laptops had genuine volume potentiometers with a knurled knob that protruded slightly from the side of the case (like those in old style transistor radios). This made adjusting the audio volume dead easy.

I'm sure that when this last bastion from the analog era was removed the 'digital brigade' cheered enthusiastically—but I certainly didn't, in fact I was damn annoyed.

That's the trouble: digital ideologues who'd better be seen dead than found with analog technology in hand together with those who don't know what the word 'ergonomics' means run the electronics design business these days. Combine that mentality with accountants who'd feint at the thought of the additional cost of an analog potentiometer over a couple of membrane switches and we've a recipe for a generation of products that are essentially unusable (or so annoy users to such an extent that they ditch them at the earliest opportunity).

What truly dumfounds me is that it's not that non technical users haven't complained about this shitty design but rather techies—those who ought to know better (such as HN readers)—have not done so.

Much of this bad design wouldn't have happened if they'd whinged at appropriate times.

On the matter of YouTube volumes being too low, I've had to download some videos with tools like NewPipe when I didn't actually want to keep them solely because I didn't have enough volume in the phone's browser.

Downloading the video allowed me to loaded it into VLC player which allows a gain in excess of 100%.

On some equipment the headphone jack is essentially paralleled with the speaker feed and configured to switch out the speakers when the headphones are plugged in. In this configuration the level for normal headphones use is way too high. If the volume is still set to the level that's normally OK for the speakers when the headphones' plug is inserted then that level is likely to be sufficiently high to damage the headphones (and one's hearing).

The opposite also happens, some weeks ago I got fed up with the really crappy sound of my Samsung TV so I thought I'd plug in some better quality speakers as I've done previously with other TV sets only to find that it was genuine headphone outlet, the volume was so low I could hear almost nothing.

It's a nuisance that manufacturers don't make that distinction clear with better labelling.

But of course not to play or compare virtual pianos.

Whether this is true of laptops that aren't 15/16" MBPs is a different question.

Does it sound as good as wooden cabinet speaker? Obviously it doesn't. But it sounds better than AM radio is able to, presuming the audio file is of high enough bitrate.

Highly recommended.

Have you listened to the current 16 inch macbook pro?

I think modern apple laptops can compare themselves in audio quality to any laptop from the past.

What I should have said is that whilst the electrical signal from the DAC is usually excellent (far better than almost any analog-only system), it's interface with the acoustic world (the speakers and their acoustic environment, baffling, enclosures etc.) is mostly terrible and at best only a poor compromise.

It simply isn't possible with traditional speaker technology to provide an optimal environment inside a laptop. If it were then speaker manufacturers would have miniaturized their huge enclosures years ago.

My complaint is that most laptop manufacturers don't even try to work within those restrictive bounds and that makes things much worse.

The matter of having insufficient gain has little or nothing to do with the actual quality of the signal coming from the audio amplifier output, again it's usually quite excellent if one connects to headphones or to an external HiFi system.

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BTW, I never said laptops had good audio (acoustic sound as opposed to electrical output). As far as I'm concerned their acoustics are all lousy when compared with a decent HiFi system.

Sorry, I wrongly assumed that all readers were skilled in electronics and thus would have made a clear distinction between the quality of the audio signal within the electronics and that which actually emanates from the speakers. In fact, the electrical audio signals are nearly always several orders of magnitude better than what speakers can actually reproduce.

Electronics people usually take that for granted.