Comment by boesboes
1 year ago
> 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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
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.
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