Ancestors

Written by Dan Luu on 2024-08-19 at 06:48

Another surprise was that getting a halfway decent pair of speakers that can emit bass (but aren't particularly bass heavy) made a lot of audio sound worse without EQ.

The problem is that a lot of audio sources contain a huge amount of low frequency garbage, which most speakers don't reproduce. If you get speakers that actually reproduce the garbage, that audio actually sounds much worse. I don't remember this being an issue the last time I had speakers with bass, but

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Written by Dan Luu on 2024-08-19 at 07:03

there's a lot more low quality audio now. 15 years ago, I was mostly listening to was music on CDs.

Nowadays, it's YT, podcasts, etc., which tend to have bad audio, even when people have fancy setups.

E.g., I just listened to a podcast that has a full-time pro audio crew, with hosts and guests in the same room, in front of SM7Bs. 1 of 3 people had strong proximity effect; sounds terrible, and that person is way too loud. You're better off with 0 bass when listening.

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Written by Dan Luu on 2024-08-19 at 07:07

Ironically, I bought these speakers on the theory that it would make people easier to understand on calls. I don't think this was prima facie stupid since a $40 pair of speakers/headphones makes it much easier to understand people who have really bad audio setups (for video calls or w/e).

But it turns out that a more expensive pair of speakers, on average, makes speech harder to understand (though, on the rare occasion I listen to good audio, it sounds much better).

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Written by Dan Luu on 2024-08-19 at 07:16

Also, a few random comments about audio quality on calls:

1. With a few exceptions, the best audio I get is from people who do their calls outdoors without wind. Nearly everyone else is in a too-reflective room.

2. The worst audio tends to be people using non-mac laptop mics, then airpods, and then fancy mics in bad rooms without proper setup. The macbook mic is better than all of the above.

BTW, some people I know A/B tested macbook vs. airpods and the macbook won handily.

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Toot

Written by Adam Vartanian on 2024-08-19 at 09:09

@danluu Airpods (or any Bluetooth mic/speaker combo) has to share the limited Bluetooth bandwidth between input and output, so both of them end up pretty awful.

You can make this really obvious if you're listening to music through them and then start anything that uses the microphone, the audio quality drops drastically (and the mic only gets that differential amount of bandwidth).

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Descendants

Written by Ben Zanin on 2024-08-19 at 17:21

@flooey @danluu the audio quality drop is because simultaneous input/output requires shifting from high quality codecs like Opus, the Apt-X family, or a couple of others to A2DP. Bandwidth contention does factor in, but there is a lot of headroom before it becomes the limiting factor.

Bluetooth LE Audio offers a different structure for simultaneous input/output that should remove this particular problem, even if the LC3 codec is not used, but it's not universal yet.

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