It’s actually quite common that laptop speakers are unbalanced, but these ones are really noticeably so (Note: I plan to add graphs for my PowerBook for comparison, but I haven’t had much time to capture measurements — sorry). I hope that folks didn’t take my last MacBook Pro speaker post as dissing the MacBook Pro too much. More than anything, I wanted a great case to explore using FuzzMeasure, and seeing how the MacBook Pro just recently hit the market…

Anyway, using the (wonderful) MacBook Pro disassembly guide found at iFixIt, I will show you exactly why this problem exists. It will not be corrected by software (I have no idea why I thought that — clearly I was delirious), nor do I think it will be ever corrected (without some clever technician hacks).

If you enlarge the first picture on page 10, you’ll notice that the left speaker has some sort of enclosure near it, and the right speaker has no enclosure to speak of. It’s hard to see clearly from this angle, so we’ll delve deeper.

On page 13, note how they built what looks like a little transmission line enclosure to enhance the bass on the left side. Cute!

However, the last picture on page 11 shows clearly that the right speaker’s just resting on the logic board — with no enclosure to speak of! Without any enclosure, you can’t hope for a speaker that small to act like anything but a tweeter, which is exactly how it sounds.

So, it would appear that the imbalance is by design, and we won’t get any fix for it. If the right speaker’s buzzing, I suspect the only solution would be to add some sort of dampening material between the right speaker and the logic board (hence my calling it a technician hack), but the low frequency response will still be poor.

Gotta make sacrifices to make a product sleek! Anyway, listening to music through both speakers at the same time sounds quite decent, and this design is actually quite ingenious in my opinion!

It’s set up similar to older home theater subwoofers, which intercept the left audio channel to play lower frequencies, while your main bookshelf speakers handle the higher range of the audio spectrum. In fact, most of the Bose home theater stuff follows this same principle — surround the listener in tweeters, and do all the work in the woofer. Oh, and charge ‘em a bundle for it. ;)

By now, you have likely read a ton of articles reviewing the MacBook Pro, and have seen various benchmarks. I have as well, and they all seem to say a lot of the same stuff.

Well, I’ve been using my MacBook Pro for the past week, and have the following random observations. Note that the machine is a stock 1.83 except for having 2GB RAM.

• The screen is outstanding
• It’s way faster at compiling than my PowerBook G4 — my 3:05 FuzzMeasure compile went down to only 0:40
• The UI is snappier — way snappier
• Browsing feels much faster — this makes a big difference when working in FogBugz
• It’s not much hotter than my PowerBook G4
• The battery life doesn’t seem much different, even though I see lower “time remaining” values for my battery after unplugging it from the wall
• The MagSafe connector is very sturdy
• Waking up the MacBook is quieter, on account of a quieter SuperDrive mechanism
• The light on the latch release is very confusing — I have to wait until the light starts pulsing before I feel safe putting the MacBook Pro in my bag
• The power brick is large — almost comically so
• The high-pitched whine is annoying, but I quickly forget the problem when I’m ripping through compilations at 4.5x the speed…
• The wire connecting the power brick to the MacBook Pro is far thicker, and feels sturdier
• Aside from the imbalance in the two speakers, they sound fine enough — maybe the difference is by (a limitation in?) design
• The keyboard feels slightly sturdier, but that could be due to its newness
• Wireless reception’s noticeably better than on the PowerBook
• Rosetta applications run well enough that I barely notice — if only they didn’t take 2x as long to launch

I’ll stop there for now. Maybe I’ll add some more another time.

Before I received my MacBook Pro, I heard complaints about the quality of the right speaker. Many reports indicated that the speaker sounded overdriven, and distorted. I didn’t notice this initially, until I heard some system sounds at full volume. The system startup sound didn’t sound like this either.

Well, seeing how I have measurement microphones and write acoustic measurement software, verifying a discrepancy was the logical next step. Simply place the measurement microphone about 1″ away from each speaker and compare the result.

To my own ears, the right speaker was noticeably quieter, and lacked bass when compared to the left speaker. Also, it sounded horribly distored. I didn’t really need to analyze the graphs to notice that there was an issue, but I captured some anyway.

The left speaker’s shown in green, and the right speaker’s shown in blue. Notice how the right speaker’s about 12-16dB lower consistently below 1kHz? That’s exactly what I’m hearing. Since this is a third octave graph in the frequency domain, it’s simplifying things quite a bit, and not accurately depicting the distortion.

Well, this step response graph certainly gives us a good idea of both the difference in amplitude, and the distortion showing up on the right speaker (blue). It’s just a mess throughout the right speaker’s entire step response.

The left speaker (green) is very close to a clean step response for a speaker. The little bit of distortion noticed at the top of the green step response might be caused by the fact that I played the test at full volume, which is to be expected.

So, something’s definitely screwy in my MacBook’s right speaker, but it doesn’t seem to always be this way. It also appears that I’m not alone in my findings. Hopefully the cause will be found soon. I’m praying it’s a software thing.

Update: I posted the root of the problem here.

How cool is it that someone made a widget to track your order at the Apple Store? Up until just recently, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work with Canadian orders, but the developer fixed the cause of the issue and I’m counting down with style!.

Of course, I have no idea when the MacBook will actually get to me, as I cheaped out on shipping. Believe it or not, I’m not as crazy-rabid about receiving this machine as with my earlier Mac purchases. I think that after your 4th system in 3 years, you just tend to get numb to the process.

Also, this PowerBook G4 still rocks my socks from a performance standpoint. It is still quite zippy for what I need to do. However, I will probably change my story once I get my grubby hands on that super-crazy-fast memory bandwidth, and 4x better integer and FPU performance.

Of course, this is compared to what I have now — I am fully aware of how the G5 still spanks the Core Duo in FPU operations. However, I’m not so sure that the G5 will beat out the Core Duo with the large-sized FFTs that FuzzMeasure depends on. It requires increased memory performance, where the MacBook will most definitely shine.

Update: Did anyone else notice that the widget was one day off? I shifted this post to Feb 2 so that it makes more sense. Woo! 13 days! :)

Like a mad-man, I furiously refreshed the Apple store site and 1-Clicked my way to a new MacBook Pro. I got the stock config of the cheaper model — I barely even read the specs before buying it. I just knew that “Whatever they announce today, I’m buying”.

I totally wasn’t expecting PowerBooks to hit the market so soon, until I started seeing just how many other manufacturers announced Core Duo laptops at CES this past week. Not that I called it (trust me — MacBook’s were the second-last thing I expected to get announced today, with the last thing being a PowerMac (or MacTower Pro?)), but after about the 5th Yonah-based laptop announcement, I couldn’t help but think about how silly Apple would look if they didn’t announce one of their own.

When I heard the x86 iMac announcement first, I was disappointed that I’d have to spend so much on a test machine that I’d have to replace with a MacBook later — I really did want a Mac mini (MacCube Express?) to keep the port cheap. However, Steve pulled the “One More Thing” trick and made me a happy man. I can actually get away with a single x86 hardware purchase for the forseeable future.

Until now, every hardware purchase I’ve made with Apple has come with an idea of the next machine I wanted to buy to replace it. For the first time, I honestly don’t have any idea. The iBook G3 was purchased with the thought of one day owning a PowerMac G4. The PowerMac G4 was purchased with the thought of one day owning a PowerMac G5. The iBook G4 was purchased with the thought of one day owning a PowerBook G4. Apple announced the switch, which they claimed would take much longer, and I purchased a PowerBook G4 with the thought of one day owning an x86 PowerBook. Thinking two steps ahead, I was sure the first x86 PowerBook would have a single-core CPU, and might need to wait even longer for my dual-core laptop. Well, here I am. In about one month’s time, I can finally try to stop the upgrade madness. Note how I said “try”.

So, what does this mean for FuzzMeasure users? The x86 version of FuzzMeasure 2 (did I actually say that out loud?) should drop after FuzzMeasure 2.0 betas are in full swing (i.e. open and advertised to all users). I can’t promise whether the FuzzMeasure 2.0 release will be fully x86-friendly, but I can say for sure that I’ll be working hard on it around that time.

I would really appreciate it if any of you FuzzMeasure users who plan to purchase either an iMac x86 or MacBook Pro (or have a Developer Transition Kit) could contact me, so I can start building a list of folks that will be able to help me verify the port. Thanks, and happy transitioning!