Do the MBP speakers add compression?

[thebigcheese]

I couldn't find any stats on this (granted, I didn't search very thoroughly), but I feel like the speaker setup on my MacBook Pro (internal speakers) adds compression. For instance, if I listen to a song on the internal speakers and then listen to it on my reference monitors, there seems to be some sort of compression on the internals by comparison. Just something about the way they sound... Does anyone know if that's true?

 

[dgatwood]

I couldn't find any stats on this (granted, I didn't search very thoroughly), but I feel like the speaker setup on my MacBook Pro (internal speakers) adds compression. For instance, if I listen to a song on the internal speakers and then listen to it on my reference monitors, there seems to be some sort of compression on the internals by comparison. Just something about the way they sound... Does anyone know if that's true?

Could well be. They do all sorts of processing (EQ, particularly) to the signals they send to those tiny speakers to make them sound reasonable, but I couldn't tell you if compression is part of that processing or not. The only people who would know for sure work on the audio hardware team at Apple. Try asking on the coreaudio-api mailing list and you might get an answer from one of those folks.