> Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours.
Interesting article (audio processing should be a standard OS feature), but I wish we'd stop doing this. Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones), they’re supposed to be flat – “equalised”. At least if you want to hear the thing as it was mastered.
I think it just hurts consumers in the end, as it validates snake oil in the form of various ”enhancements”, like image processing on TVs. It makes stuff really hard to compare and much easier to sell shitty hardware.
Not that I’m opposed to improving shitty hardware with software, – quite the contrary – it’s just the murky subjectivity that irks me.
The definition of sound quality tends to change between people.
My definition is pretty much the same as yours here, but I know quite a few people who hate listening to music on anything with a relatively flat frequency response.
Why would speakers be any different than earphones? Botu are subjective ; I personally hate flat eq. I've listened to numerous products, some worth thousands of dollars, and I'll always take some sort of slight bass and treble boost over flat eq. I'll even take a big bass boost over no bass boost at all.
Earphones are forgoing the outer parts of your ears and skull.
Speakers don't; a "good" speaker setup with eyes closed and no wind/perceptible airflow and no smell and truthful thermal radiation surroundings is effectively indistinguishable from the real place.
Like, literally.
It's not _possible_ with earphones because you can't not feel their presence without being numb on a good bit of your head.
The main difference then is that a properly tuned earphone setup sounds very nearly as good for well under 1/10th of the cost. And generally comes working out of the box, or at worst needs a (similarly very affordable compared to speakers) headphone amp. And doesn't pick up echoes or dead spots from the installed location.
Tangent, but I found that a bass shaker / transducer massively improved my speaker experience without requiring a subwoofer. I built the subwoofer first, but it would annoy everyone around me and it was really spotty depending on its location, the exact layout of the room, etc. Slapped a bass shaker underneath me and it really completes the experience without annoying everybody else.
> Why would speakers be any different than earphones
There are various "ideal" EQ targets for earphones depending on what your model of an ideal audio source is. They all start with a flat response speaker, from then you can model:
- Two speakers right next to the listener's ears. (flat)
- A single speaker 1 metre away in the x axis, in an infinitely-sized anechoic room. (free field)
- Two speakers 30 cm away pointing to a plastic torso at a 90° angle, in a room with reverberations. (B&K/Harman)
- A 1 metre cubical room lined with speakers, listener in the centre with no reverberation. (diffuse field)
- An infinite wall of speakers 1 metre away in the x axis.
> Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones)
I don't think this has been true in my lifetime, at least. Some brands being known for "warmth" vs "brightness" is ages old, before the idea of audiophile earbuds was even a thing. At the extreme end, you can go back at least 40 years to see people with dedicated sub outputs and massively-oversized non-flat subwoofer setups.
Sure but they’ve always been mastered with the same setup, so the bar has not changed. And anything flavoured will not work universally for all types of music or other kinds of audio (like voice calls are really hard to understand with bassy speakers).
Mastering is done with the target in mind. There's tons of great videos by Masahiro Sakurai (Creator of Smash Bros.), one of which covers how they use typical household TVs to tune the audio/video for the game because relying on top-end audio/video equipment will result in worse results for the player.
Speakers, at least the great majority of them, are not flat. Can you not hear differences between speakers? Studio monitors typically aim for a flat response, but most barely make an acceptable approximation. And then we're not even discussing phone and tv speakers or the fact that a flat response for pure tones doesn't necessarily translate to one for complex sounds.
I have heard that audio engineer's don't necessarily master to a flat EQ because such a small section of listeners are listening with a flat EQ. Most are using car speakers, airpods, etc so they master it based on those expectations.
Yeah that's pretty good way to put it, except I'd say the average person is using way better screens with smartphones than the quality of speakers/headphones their using.
Can confirm. When I was in that world we'd have a shitty boom-box on a shelf that got pulled out for exactly that purpose. But you'd always start from the studio kit and work down, never the other way.
No speakers have flat frequency response. If that's the target (it usually isn't even with very elaborate systems that include a great deal of DSP grunt, in my experience), then they all miss -- every single one of them misses.
All speakers have resonances that add to the sound in ways that frequency response, alone, does not measure. All speakers also have imperfect dynamic response. All speakers have imperfect impedances, which can matter quite to the power amplifier that drives them. All speakers have non-linear phase response. All speakers have different dispersion characteristics.
All speakers then operate within acoustic spaces (like a room in a house) that introduce even more variables.
Plenty of exemplary (according to CEA-2034-A) loudpspeakers once you shop in the active category, including low THD/IMD at high SPL and optional phase linearization to lower group delay.
I'll bet you a beer that if we had examples of each in a room and spent the time to iterate upon setting them up in the most-optimal of ways that can be concocted, and then went through all of the motions of doing controlled, equatable, blind A/B/X listening: We'd still find that we prefer one loudspeaker system over the other.
And our preferences might not even agree, and that's OK. :)
I really suggest you get more into the NRC/Harman research about the subject. Individual preference does exist, but on average it doesn't. Same way that some people prefer more or less salt in their dishes, but you quickly converge towards a unique proportion when averaging those tastes obtained via rigorous blind testing (very important).
Said convergence happens for tonality: people do prefer neutrality as in lack of linear and nonlinear distortion (thus relatively constant directivity in order to get said neutrality when the reflected and direct sound sums).
Where there's still some considerable variation is the amount of directivity: some people prefer it wide to get stronger late reflections that give a sense of envelopment and others prefer it narrow to remove more of the room from the global sound, to hear more of the recording (like headphones).
If the research shows that there is only one optimal way to paint a portrait, or to construct a pizza, then: It is my inclination to reject it. I do not want this kind of homogenization in my world and it is my motivation to destroy it.
Consider this: most successful artists who worked outside of what is recognized as the academic classical style - impressionists, surrealists etc - were first trained very well in that reference academic style.
When you know the reference, you are free to break the rules. Otherwise you're just fumbling and drifting around.
Humans are given two brain hemispheres for a reason.
You raise interesting points and you present them well. They have interesting parallels.
One of the things I often try to impress upon others during $day_job is that it is important to always know and appreciate (and seek to find, and perhaps enhance) the very best way to do a thing.
It's not that we can't cheat. It's not even that cheating isn't sometimes adequate or permissible -- or, sometimes, necessary. Sometimes the most-proper way to achieve a thing within the confines of the constraints is to very deliberately cheat in a defensible fashion.
Like a Wilkinson combiner/splitter when used in the bidirectional RF space: It cheats. (It also works within its limitations and has great value in some applications. It's not universal at all.)
In some cases, cheating even requires review by an engineer to approve a particular method in a particular application.
But when we don't seek to know the best, most-right way to do a thing then we can't even recognize when we're cheating. When cheating and getting-'er'-done, fast-and-loose becomes the norm instead of the exception, and that's just doing ourselves (and the job, and the company, and the client) an unwarranted disservice.
And that does ultimately is just fumbling and drifting around, just as you succinctly suggest.
But standards aren't the be-all, end-all rule. They should be flexible to preference when preferences exist, and that preference extends beyond salt appropriation.
I once made an accidental purchase after a long day at work where I bought feta instead of the ricotta that I intended to buy. My family was predictably hungry when I got home and realized the depth of my mistake. So I built that lasagna anyway with the "wrong" cheese in the intermediate layers, and it turned out so excellent that I will never make lasagna any other way again. It's really lovely, and it was entirely the result of fumbling.
Or: Chicago, vs NYC, vs Detroit. These guys will never agree on what the best pizza consists of, but most of us can find an example of a pie in any of those regional styles that is lovely and satisfying to us.
It's very easy for me to accept variability in the norms of foods, and of painting styles, and of audio system implementations. I can't define a perfect guitar, or a perfect piano. These are all things that I think deeply involve emotional (perhaps even irrational) personal choice. There can be more than one way, and it's OK. We don't all appreciate the same tastes, sights, and sounds. The variability is a feature, not a bug.
But meanwhile: It's very difficult for me to accept variability in, say, electrical systems. There can be an established and objective best, safest, most-defensible way. And the method behind the walls is not the kind of thing that usually elicits an emotional response from the beholder while they plug in a lamp in their new place, so the best way can win.
Being both a technician and a musician, I couldn't agree more.
The technician in me strives to have as flat, transparent and precise audio reproduction system as possible, with the single purpose: to make what the musician in me does translatable to every other audio system out there, which may very well be quite imperfect, but still intimately known and adapted to by its listener - and thus reproduce my music without surprising the listener in a bad way.
(Funny enough, after many years of chasing that ideal, I'm much closer to it with balanced armature IEMs than with a pair of professional studio monitors at 100x the price!)
An analogy in graphics would be a display with neutral color reproduction that has as perfect black as possible and white as bright as it's sane to have.
It's a never ending quest of course, and it's the creator's one, not spectator's. Which is basically "give me pure silence and transparency so that I know precisely how much sound and color to add". How much is added is a dogma for one and total freedom for another, and that's a completely different story.
From a spectator's point of view, everything becomes much more subjective and roots more in psychology than anything else.
I always remember that interview of a vinyl mastering engineer for the Kompakt label, who said that the art of an audioengineer is that of persuasion. "This sounds awesome, trust me :)
And then, the reconstructive abilities of one's perception also mean a lot.
There's a wonderful passage from the Hesse's Steppenwolf, where the protagonist listens to a gramophone record, noisy and bandlimited, of an orchestra playing a piece, deeper and deeper until he manages to hear the original sound and intent of it through the veil of the record's imperfections.
Of course you can, but it doesn't change the fact that's there's a general preference.
Also, I'm pretty sure that even in your case, the changes you want to make are material dependent and neutrality would be more to your taste if you don't want to turn knobs with each album switch.
Now enough seriousness, if you're amongst the people who still do so, I'll look at you the same way I look at American tourists putting ketchup over all their dishes or people going to an art gallery with tinted glasses =)
> Of course you can, but it doesn't change the fact that's there's a general preference.
You haven't established that there is a general preference, though.
And meanwhile: Audio systems of every variety still usually come with some manner of tone controls for people to use. And when people make adjustments, they aren't seeking to find alignment with someone else's published idea of a good time.
Most people wouldn't know what a frequency response chart is even if someone rolled it up and hit them on their head with it. They aren't targeting things that they have no knowledge of.
> Also, I'm pretty sure that even in your case, the changes you want to make are material dependent and neutrality would be more to your taste if you don't want to turn knobs with each album switch.
Nope. I usually set my own listening systems to my preference and then leave them alone, although the more-proper stereo does have what I call a Ministry button that I engage when listening to Ministry.
So yeah, anyway. Standards. I did once put together some Python code to implement an ISO 226 equal loudness contour that worked with a hardware DSP and recomputed the curve based on the real-time position of a physical volume control.
Maybe Fletcher and Munson did have it right for what they were doing back in the 1930s, but that didn't make their work applicable to what I was doing in 2025. It was a fun exercise that taught me quite a lot, and which ultimately turned out to be a mistake.
> Now enough seriousness, if you're amongst the people who still do so, I'll look at you the same way I look at American tourists putting ketchup over all their dishes or people going to an art gallery with tinted glasses =)
Oh, yeah. Ketchup on ham sandwiches, and on eggs. Ketchup on cantaloupe. Ketchup in tomato soup. Ketchup on popcorn, and in my coffee. I garnish my martinis with ketchup.
When I drove by a Heinz ketchup factory last weekend in my giant American car, I was overcome by emotion and had to pull over. The juxtaposition was just too majestic and beautiful to behold, with the ketchup plant on one side of the road and the fertilizer distributor on the other; like the whole circle of life, all in one place. I sobbed softly for several minutes before I regained sufficient composure to continue.
Shout-out to the PEQdB Diamond target and the IG955, iykyk. I use EasyEffects to apply the EQ filters, and I think it is mandatory that you use EQ because your audio equipment most definitely sounds bad by default.
Most windows laptops will do something like this by default to enhance the sound. Part of what ships as "Dolby Atmos" is some EQ-ing and normalization, with the default not being flat. It is just necessary to make those tiny laptop speakers sound half decent and not crap out all the time.
I recommend trying out PulseEffects, my understanding is that EasyEffects is the same project they just did a rename of it. You might be stuck on an older version or something not exactly sure.
Since pipewire landed in arch all my issues with sound magically vanished. It's a really great piece of software. Maybe it's even worth to change the distro.
Just seconding this so other framework owners may give it a try. The speakers on my 13" are pretty bad, but using easy effects made them plenty "fine". Without, it sounded like absolute trash.
These are the ones I have been using. I've generally stuck with the lappy_mctopface variant. I have no idea about the naming, but these presets have been good enough for me without much messing about at all!
I've used https://github.com/cab404/framework-dsp for the preset on mine. There is also a guide from the author of the preset linked in their on how they came up with the presets.
Couldn’t agree more. This is practically mandatory on a Framework.
Noting too, I didn’t find my profile for Framework 13 to be optimal for Framework 13 Pro. I’m still tweaking there, and frustratingly didn’t track my tweaks, but will try to remember to diff at the end and publish the output.
Mine is a Pro as well. The profile I came up with is far from perfect and I will be tuning it as I go, but it's night and day compared with stock.
One thing I haven't figured out is how to switch profiles automatically when going from speakers to wired headphone. They register as the same audio sink!
I just bought a Pro with nothing pre-installed. I got the kit though, so the SSD was on its own box, still unopened. Maybe they pre-install if you buy it assembled?
In any case, you probably got stock Ubuntu. Anything different from that would mean you have no chance of reinstalling it and getting the same experience, or installing Fedora (which is also officially supported) and getting the same.
Why? Companies that sell Windows laptops absolutely have these figured out for various customizations they want. Those are usually shit customizations to be fair, but in this case it'd be actually useful.
I'm not having an issue with laptop with subpar speakers, but I don't see any way of not using EasyEffects. I'm running Arch on a Beelink SER8 through a focusrite 2i2 and into my Sony stereo receiver, out to floorstanding speakers. At the moment I am just using a slightly modified variation of one of the common community plugins, LoudnessEqualizer. For better or for worse, my ears are so accustomed to this. Elsewhere I also use it for things like dialogue boost and it surely does feel like overkill then, but convenient.
Now I am about to dig back into my Bitwig DAW, something I haven't done for many years, and dealing with all the issues around clean vs EasyEffects-modified sounds is daunting.
> In fact, I’d take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings.
Another important integration point would be the system volume control. If you could EQ your speakers to near flat response, and then apply loudness based on the volume control, you would get great sound at lower volumes without compromising the quality at higher volumes.
I do this currently with EasyEffects equalizer and loudness filters, but for best quality I need to keep the speakers and system volume at preset reference level and control the volume from the loudness filter volume setting.
I had to go on a bit of a journey figuring out how to do anything useful with EasyEffects when I moved to Linux on my Microsoft brand laptop. I question the value of including it by default though. As the article notes, it's easy enough to install manually, and most people won't have any idea what to do to configure it usefully. Even after all my research and tweaking, my audio still has quirks that I don't even have the vocabulary for to be able to find fixes.
> most people won't have any idea what to do to configure it usefully
This was me.
Never had a problem with typical eq/effects and even dabbled in dsp/synths but was defeated by EasyEffects. My attempts at basic tweaks had terrible consequences. I'm sure it was pebkac but the experience felt buggy e.g. my attempts to reduce some painful treble caused the bass to vanish, adjusting volume caused static not loundness etc. Most of the modules have more cryptic numbers than I know what to do with giving the feeling of being trapped in an algebraic equation.
However, downloading some presets and the results were excellent. Some tiny nudges from there were within my idiot grasp.
i use EE on my parents tv (minipc connected to offline 4koled) to address the "movie too quiet then way too loud" for them but there is a cost, latency
fortunately its not large enough to notice unless you already know (i.e. problem for me but not for thee) so its not bothering them, but i disable it if im going to play games where i need split second audio cue/reaction
the lack of vst support though, seems like a terrible oversight. obs audio filters with stacked vsts and routing filters can unironically do this programs job better because of the vst support, and depending on the setup choices, with better latency too
carla!! of course how could i have forgotten, i tried to figure it out a few years ago when i was still new to linux but got completely lost on the basics
I also often need EQ in the reverse situation, when I need less bass through my nice studio monitors when watching TV. Otherwise I’ll be watching Star Trek with dialogue at a normal volume and BOOM, the loudest photon torpedo you’ve ever heard.
If you're watching through VLC, you can set the mix to stereo in the audio settings - perhaps there's a similar setting you can find? Not sure if you've got the tv's optical going straight into an amp. Some stereo receivers also have a "night mode" that can do this, you might find an older cheaper one with pre-outs or similar.
Laptop Manufacturers fail to appreciate how much better their product would be with good speakers. Particularly in today’s age where everyone is streaming music or watching videos much more than before.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Macbooks were doing the same sort of room-monitoring real-time EQ tricks that Sonos speakers do. They own the hardware and the software, there's a real advantage to them in having such tight control over the audio environment.
Would be sweet if it could use the microphone to auto-tune the speakers by playing audio and listening to the result. Microphones are not perfect but a cheap microphone has much better frequency response than cheap speakers. If you assume the microphone is perfect you will get a pretty good result, probably better than a generic "laptop speaker" preset would be.
I can't find any before/after audio samples - can anybody point any out? I'd have thought it's about the first thing you'd do to show off the differences (I get it - it might not (probably won't be (?)) be tuned for my particular speaker... Still wouldn't hurt to hear an example).
the DSP at play here is more than just an equalizer, and as such an audio file cannot be produced to illustrate the differences in a meaningful way to unknown target speakers
Shout-out to the PEQdB Diamond Target and the IG955, iykyk. I use those EQ filters to make my music listening experience considerably better. Your audio equipment most definitely sounds bad by default and needs equalization.
EasyEffects can apply a generic improvement for most small speakers.
Kittenlabs has a writeup of using Room EQ Wizard to measure impulse response of your specific speakers to create a proper correction. The results are pretty dramatic on a GPD palmtop.
My limited and fuzzy recollection is that while the freq response of most cheap to mid speakers is balls, the freq response of most cheap mics is quite good - sure not studio quality, but much better than the equivalent speaker.
IIRC when using REW you're supposed to feed it the response curve of your mic (which you should get at least as a printout with any good mic) + also do a loopback measurement of your audio input.
In contrast, small speakers, especially non-round speakers with plastic diaphragms that are commonly found in laptops, have pretty wild response curves, something like this:
I am skeptical about measurements done using the laptop's microphone, though. My ThinkPad, for example, has bottom-firing speakers and effectively uses the desk as a part of the acoustic setup. This sounds very different depending on where you are.
> I am skeptical about measurements done using the laptop's microphone, though.
While any microphone might be able to provide some ballpark info which corrections to start with, laptop mics will be especially poor. Laptop manufacturers consider conferencing the primary use case for mics so they're intentionally placed and oriented to minimize hearing the laptop's speakers. More recent laptops feature far-field mic arrays which often apply DSP processing in hardware such as equalization, acoustic echo cancellation, spatial beamforming and dynamic multi-band compression with little or no control provided at the OS or app level.
If you care about audio it's worth picking a calibrated measurement microphone. It's one of those tools like a multimeter or colorimeter that are just good to have around. Even ~$100 buys a quite good reference mic you can use with REW to improve output from laptop and PC speakers but also home theater audio. If you have or can borrow one of the cheap calibration mics bundled with Denon Audyssey-equipped AVRs, you can download a community-created REW profile for it. It's not as good as any real measurement mic and since it's analog (3.5mm output), you'll need an SPL meter to calibrate the input gain of the sound card ADC but if you've got one already, it's free and better than nothing.
The little Sonos bluetooth speakers do something like this. I went in search of a teardown to figure out how on earth they get any sort of bass response from that size enclosure, and the innards turn out to be kinda boring. The trick is almost entirely from shoving the real-time room response through software correction. If that could be packaged up for Linux laptops, it would be amazing.
Does this make everything sound like those shitty gen Z speakers you hear everywhere these days? As someone into high end audio I really dislike that sound.
I'm mostly a Windows/Android user, but one thing I appreciate about Macbooks is that the speakers are quite capable. I have a MacBook Pro from work and the speakers sound excellent, at least for a laptop.
The audio design in Macbooks is intense. Fixed hardware so they can tune the hell out of it. Multiple mics for directional sensing - I don't know if they use that for real-time tuning, but I wouldn't be surprised.
If the aim is to achieve a "flat" sound response, you could take it one step further and use a microphone to check how it sounds in a given space. Like Sonarworks SoundID. Some studio monitor speakers have this built in. Treat the room, position the speakers, put a microphone to the listening position and apply a (often wild) EQ curve until the response is flat (enough).
If you have a thinkpad, you can probably extract the XML configuration from the windows driver installer using innoextract for your laptop. Then you can map those to pipewire settings with wireplumber to get very similar output to windows which was tuned in labs by the manufacturer (minus dolby atmos/dax).
Here is one for a recent thinkpad p1 gen8, no app necessary.
> EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I’m talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE’s System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything.
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[ 145 ms ] story [ 1389 ms ] threadInteresting article (audio processing should be a standard OS feature), but I wish we'd stop doing this. Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones), they’re supposed to be flat – “equalised”. At least if you want to hear the thing as it was mastered.
I think it just hurts consumers in the end, as it validates snake oil in the form of various ”enhancements”, like image processing on TVs. It makes stuff really hard to compare and much easier to sell shitty hardware.
Not that I’m opposed to improving shitty hardware with software, – quite the contrary – it’s just the murky subjectivity that irks me.
My definition is pretty much the same as yours here, but I know quite a few people who hate listening to music on anything with a relatively flat frequency response.
[1]: https://youtu.be/B_8HDPBfvHI
Speakers don't; a "good" speaker setup with eyes closed and no wind/perceptible airflow and no smell and truthful thermal radiation surroundings is effectively indistinguishable from the real place.
Like, literally.
It's not _possible_ with earphones because you can't not feel their presence without being numb on a good bit of your head.
There are various "ideal" EQ targets for earphones depending on what your model of an ideal audio source is. They all start with a flat response speaker, from then you can model:
- Two speakers right next to the listener's ears. (flat) - A single speaker 1 metre away in the x axis, in an infinitely-sized anechoic room. (free field) - Two speakers 30 cm away pointing to a plastic torso at a 90° angle, in a room with reverberations. (B&K/Harman) - A 1 metre cubical room lined with speakers, listener in the centre with no reverberation. (diffuse field) - An infinite wall of speakers 1 metre away in the x axis.
I don't think this has been true in my lifetime, at least. Some brands being known for "warmth" vs "brightness" is ages old, before the idea of audiophile earbuds was even a thing. At the extreme end, you can go back at least 40 years to see people with dedicated sub outputs and massively-oversized non-flat subwoofer setups.
But well, that's about sound itself, not all the other stuff like design that people may care about in a loudspeaker.
All speakers have resonances that add to the sound in ways that frequency response, alone, does not measure. All speakers also have imperfect dynamic response. All speakers have imperfect impedances, which can matter quite to the power amplifier that drives them. All speakers have non-linear phase response. All speakers have different dispersion characteristics.
All speakers then operate within acoustic spaces (like a room in a house) that introduce even more variables.
Neumann KH 120 II: https://assets.sennheiser.com/assets/Frequency_response.svg/...
Genelec 8351B: https://images.ctfassets.net/4zjnzn055a4v/3dFPEuC54NYv52ad7J...
I'll bet you a beer that if we had examples of each in a room and spent the time to iterate upon setting them up in the most-optimal of ways that can be concocted, and then went through all of the motions of doing controlled, equatable, blind A/B/X listening: We'd still find that we prefer one loudspeaker system over the other.
And our preferences might not even agree, and that's OK. :)
Said convergence happens for tonality: people do prefer neutrality as in lack of linear and nonlinear distortion (thus relatively constant directivity in order to get said neutrality when the reflected and direct sound sums).
Where there's still some considerable variation is the amount of directivity: some people prefer it wide to get stronger late reflections that give a sense of envelopment and others prefer it narrow to remove more of the room from the global sound, to hear more of the recording (like headphones).
When you know the reference, you are free to break the rules. Otherwise you're just fumbling and drifting around.
Humans are given two brain hemispheres for a reason.
One of the things I often try to impress upon others during $day_job is that it is important to always know and appreciate (and seek to find, and perhaps enhance) the very best way to do a thing.
It's not that we can't cheat. It's not even that cheating isn't sometimes adequate or permissible -- or, sometimes, necessary. Sometimes the most-proper way to achieve a thing within the confines of the constraints is to very deliberately cheat in a defensible fashion.
Like a Wilkinson combiner/splitter when used in the bidirectional RF space: It cheats. (It also works within its limitations and has great value in some applications. It's not universal at all.)
In some cases, cheating even requires review by an engineer to approve a particular method in a particular application.
But when we don't seek to know the best, most-right way to do a thing then we can't even recognize when we're cheating. When cheating and getting-'er'-done, fast-and-loose becomes the norm instead of the exception, and that's just doing ourselves (and the job, and the company, and the client) an unwarranted disservice.
And that does ultimately is just fumbling and drifting around, just as you succinctly suggest.
But standards aren't the be-all, end-all rule. They should be flexible to preference when preferences exist, and that preference extends beyond salt appropriation.
I once made an accidental purchase after a long day at work where I bought feta instead of the ricotta that I intended to buy. My family was predictably hungry when I got home and realized the depth of my mistake. So I built that lasagna anyway with the "wrong" cheese in the intermediate layers, and it turned out so excellent that I will never make lasagna any other way again. It's really lovely, and it was entirely the result of fumbling.
Or: Chicago, vs NYC, vs Detroit. These guys will never agree on what the best pizza consists of, but most of us can find an example of a pie in any of those regional styles that is lovely and satisfying to us.
It's very easy for me to accept variability in the norms of foods, and of painting styles, and of audio system implementations. I can't define a perfect guitar, or a perfect piano. These are all things that I think deeply involve emotional (perhaps even irrational) personal choice. There can be more than one way, and it's OK. We don't all appreciate the same tastes, sights, and sounds. The variability is a feature, not a bug.
But meanwhile: It's very difficult for me to accept variability in, say, electrical systems. There can be an established and objective best, safest, most-defensible way. And the method behind the walls is not the kind of thing that usually elicits an emotional response from the beholder while they plug in a lamp in their new place, so the best way can win.
Being both a technician and a musician, I couldn't agree more.
The technician in me strives to have as flat, transparent and precise audio reproduction system as possible, with the single purpose: to make what the musician in me does translatable to every other audio system out there, which may very well be quite imperfect, but still intimately known and adapted to by its listener - and thus reproduce my music without surprising the listener in a bad way.
(Funny enough, after many years of chasing that ideal, I'm much closer to it with balanced armature IEMs than with a pair of professional studio monitors at 100x the price!)
An analogy in graphics would be a display with neutral color reproduction that has as perfect black as possible and white as bright as it's sane to have.
It's a never ending quest of course, and it's the creator's one, not spectator's. Which is basically "give me pure silence and transparency so that I know precisely how much sound and color to add". How much is added is a dogma for one and total freedom for another, and that's a completely different story.
From a spectator's point of view, everything becomes much more subjective and roots more in psychology than anything else.
I always remember that interview of a vinyl mastering engineer for the Kompakt label, who said that the art of an audioengineer is that of persuasion. "This sounds awesome, trust me :)
And then, the reconstructive abilities of one's perception also mean a lot.
There's a wonderful passage from the Hesse's Steppenwolf, where the protagonist listens to a gramophone record, noisy and bandlimited, of an orchestra playing a piece, deeper and deeper until he manages to hear the original sound and intent of it through the veil of the record's imperfections.
I shall season the food on my plate however I please, counselor. :)
Also, I'm pretty sure that even in your case, the changes you want to make are material dependent and neutrality would be more to your taste if you don't want to turn knobs with each album switch.
Now enough seriousness, if you're amongst the people who still do so, I'll look at you the same way I look at American tourists putting ketchup over all their dishes or people going to an art gallery with tinted glasses =)
You haven't established that there is a general preference, though.
And meanwhile: Audio systems of every variety still usually come with some manner of tone controls for people to use. And when people make adjustments, they aren't seeking to find alignment with someone else's published idea of a good time.
Most people wouldn't know what a frequency response chart is even if someone rolled it up and hit them on their head with it. They aren't targeting things that they have no knowledge of.
> Also, I'm pretty sure that even in your case, the changes you want to make are material dependent and neutrality would be more to your taste if you don't want to turn knobs with each album switch.
Nope. I usually set my own listening systems to my preference and then leave them alone, although the more-proper stereo does have what I call a Ministry button that I engage when listening to Ministry.
So yeah, anyway. Standards. I did once put together some Python code to implement an ISO 226 equal loudness contour that worked with a hardware DSP and recomputed the curve based on the real-time position of a physical volume control.
Maybe Fletcher and Munson did have it right for what they were doing back in the 1930s, but that didn't make their work applicable to what I was doing in 2025. It was a fun exercise that taught me quite a lot, and which ultimately turned out to be a mistake.
> Now enough seriousness, if you're amongst the people who still do so, I'll look at you the same way I look at American tourists putting ketchup over all their dishes or people going to an art gallery with tinted glasses =)
Oh, yeah. Ketchup on ham sandwiches, and on eggs. Ketchup on cantaloupe. Ketchup in tomato soup. Ketchup on popcorn, and in my coffee. I garnish my martinis with ketchup.
When I drove by a Heinz ketchup factory last weekend in my giant American car, I was overcome by emotion and had to pull over. The juxtaposition was just too majestic and beautiful to behold, with the ketchup plant on one side of the road and the fertilizer distributor on the other; like the whole circle of life, all in one place. I sobbed softly for several minutes before I regained sufficient composure to continue.
Please do yourself a favour, since you seem actually interested in the subject, and pirate this somewhere: https://www.routledge.com/Sound-Reproduction-The-Acoustics-a...
https://github.com/antoinecellerier/speaker-tuning-to-easyef...
https://wwmm.github.io/easyeffects/guides/guide_1.html
These are the ones I have been using. I've generally stuck with the lappy_mctopface variant. I have no idea about the naming, but these presets have been good enough for me without much messing about at all!
Noting too, I didn’t find my profile for Framework 13 to be optimal for Framework 13 Pro. I’m still tweaking there, and frustratingly didn’t track my tweaks, but will try to remember to diff at the end and publish the output.
One thing I haven't figured out is how to switch profiles automatically when going from speakers to wired headphone. They register as the same audio sink!
In any case, you probably got stock Ubuntu. Anything different from that would mean you have no chance of reinstalling it and getting the same experience, or installing Fedora (which is also officially supported) and getting the same.
Now I am about to dig back into my Bitwig DAW, something I haven't done for many years, and dealing with all the issues around clean vs EasyEffects-modified sounds is daunting.
Another important integration point would be the system volume control. If you could EQ your speakers to near flat response, and then apply loudness based on the volume control, you would get great sound at lower volumes without compromising the quality at higher volumes.
I do this currently with EasyEffects equalizer and loudness filters, but for best quality I need to keep the speakers and system volume at preset reference level and control the volume from the loudness filter volume setting.
This was me.
Never had a problem with typical eq/effects and even dabbled in dsp/synths but was defeated by EasyEffects. My attempts at basic tweaks had terrible consequences. I'm sure it was pebkac but the experience felt buggy e.g. my attempts to reduce some painful treble caused the bass to vanish, adjusting volume caused static not loundness etc. Most of the modules have more cryptic numbers than I know what to do with giving the feeling of being trapped in an algebraic equation.
However, downloading some presets and the results were excellent. Some tiny nudges from there were within my idiot grasp.
fortunately its not large enough to notice unless you already know (i.e. problem for me but not for thee) so its not bothering them, but i disable it if im going to play games where i need split second audio cue/reaction
the lack of vst support though, seems like a terrible oversight. obs audio filters with stacked vsts and routing filters can unironically do this programs job better because of the vst support, and depending on the setup choices, with better latency too
thank you for the resource!
MacBook Pro 16’s are great but most others suck.
https://peqdb.com/#speakers
You need an omnidirectional mic.
https://purl.stanford.edu/bp189zs9642
Kittenlabs has a writeup of using Room EQ Wizard to measure impulse response of your specific speakers to create a proper correction. The results are pretty dramatic on a GPD palmtop.
https://kittenlabs.de/blog/2025/04/06/gpd-pocket-4-speaker-d...
HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43635295
If you haven't watched the video btw, I highly recommend it. It's quite amazing how much difference a bit of software can have.
I've always wondered with this, how do you know you're not just measuring the frequency response of your mic?
Or skip both and assume they're "neutral enough"
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/uploads/articles/CCTB_PUIME...
In contrast, small speakers, especially non-round speakers with plastic diaphragms that are commonly found in laptops, have pretty wild response curves, something like this:
https://www.bestartech.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/FRC-BL...
I am skeptical about measurements done using the laptop's microphone, though. My ThinkPad, for example, has bottom-firing speakers and effectively uses the desk as a part of the acoustic setup. This sounds very different depending on where you are.
While any microphone might be able to provide some ballpark info which corrections to start with, laptop mics will be especially poor. Laptop manufacturers consider conferencing the primary use case for mics so they're intentionally placed and oriented to minimize hearing the laptop's speakers. More recent laptops feature far-field mic arrays which often apply DSP processing in hardware such as equalization, acoustic echo cancellation, spatial beamforming and dynamic multi-band compression with little or no control provided at the OS or app level.
If you care about audio it's worth picking a calibrated measurement microphone. It's one of those tools like a multimeter or colorimeter that are just good to have around. Even ~$100 buys a quite good reference mic you can use with REW to improve output from laptop and PC speakers but also home theater audio. If you have or can borrow one of the cheap calibration mics bundled with Denon Audyssey-equipped AVRs, you can download a community-created REW profile for it. It's not as good as any real measurement mic and since it's analog (3.5mm output), you'll need an SPL meter to calibrate the input gain of the sound card ADC but if you've got one already, it's free and better than nothing.
Analogy: air quality.
What is clean air is objective. Perfumes and aromas are subjective (one man's rose is another's skunk), but they objectively worsen air quality.
Here is one for a recent thinkpad p1 gen8, no app necessary.
https://github.com/chergert/thinkpad-p1-gen8-pipewire-config
0.2% of WHAT?