[PD] making puredata headphone-safe

Chris McCormick chris at mccormick.cx
Thu Sep 1 02:01:31 CEST 2011


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.

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