This is why distorting the amplifiers (especially digital clipping) is so much worse for speakers than overpowering the speakers. This is a very well known fact in audio circles.
Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume.
Yes, Dell is putting on shitty speakers on their laptops, (what else is new), but VLC should be amplifying the output using level-limiting (hard-limiting), which would effectively bring all the quiet parts to be just as loud as the loud parts, instead of just digitally clipping the output.
1.41 x
>Playing metal at full volume is not as damaging as playing anything intensely digitally clipped at full volume.
The output of the amplifier really ought to be bandwidth limited either as a natural consequence of the components used or explicitly with a filter. It is silly to spend power on things that can't be heard.
> 1.41 x
Yes, for a voltage of x, but remember that the speaker is a resistance, for which the power varies as x^2/r (Ohm's law: p = e^2/r), So the original claim is correct.
You shouldn't be able to blow up your speakers if your amp, speakers and limiters are setup correctly.
After all, if you're busting out £20k on a set of decent speakers, you don't want to burn them out because your idiot producer "turned it up to 11"
That's compression, not hard-limiting. Hard limiting would leave the quiet parts quiet relative to the loud parts. It would only crush them if they were not enough dynamics in the first place.
Maybe if your speakers are very quiet and crappy and you have to get every control to 100% (hardware, system, vlc) in order to hear anything - maybe in this case it will.
Hard clipping is very noticeable for the listener so not many people will set it to the maximum if they have choice.
Anyway, you can protect from this either in hardware or in the driver.
The easiest way to solve this is use stronger materials for the speaker construction. This does, yes, affect the quality of the sound, which is already somewhere between catastrophic and abysmal on a laptop. The frequency response is likely to be worse, on a set of speakers that already has a frequency response that makes them quite useless for music.
You can also do it in electronics, as measuring the power delivered to speakers is not exactly rocket science. The response time wouldn't be great, but it's continuously shredding the speakers with square signals that damages them, not a couple of pulses every once in a while. You can also detect heavy slopes. You can even detect heavy slopes in software.
But no, seriously, this is a problem that can be solved. The mere fact that a lot of manufacturers manage to come up with speakers that don't break should be a testimony to this. I have (granted, desktop) speakers that have gone through a decade of heavy metal, grindcore and fucking SIDs and MODs, on bad ALSA drivers that I could barely get to work for years. They're fine. This is just Dell selling cheap shit.
I'm no expert but maybe it's actually possible to create speaker that doesn't go bad.
(I could code the protection into the sound driver in half a day probably)
Of course it is, but nobody wants to do that; it's not profitable. * sigh * .
I sometimes wonder how difficult would it be to create, say, a brand of kettles with lifetime warranty, designed to last 50+ years instead of 50+ weeks the ones we have do. How hard would it be to sell them and to what ends would the competition go to stop you from killing their market?
