unne

As much as I would love some sort of desktop mac that features the i9 Processor, has 8 standard ram slots, two M2 SSD slots, 4 sata slots and 3 or 4 PCI slots, I just don't think Apple will ever go there again.

It's kind of a lose/lose situation for them. Either it would be a machine that would equal a generic PC in a certain price segment, say around 2000, but it would cost at least 3500, meaning everyone and their moms would bitch about the "Apple Tax" or they would sell it for close to 2000, have horrible margins (just like the rest of the PC industry), while cannibalising a lot of iMac 5K sales. 

With the new Mac Pro, at least when compared to a hypothetical PC build with similar class components, they aren't THAT much more expensive, and they also have a bunch of unique features that you can't currently get elsewhere. With the iMac Pro, it's the same thing, there are no standard all in one PC's to compare it to. And the iMac 5K is actually quite good value for the money considering the screen you're getting with it and how nice it looks. 

I just don't see a way that they could make the xMac, have it be unique enough to not get stuck in a bad looking comparison to PC builds AND have healthy margins. But I hope I'm wrong. In the meantime, I'm all good with my Hackintosh, until a few years from now when all newer Macs have the T2 (or T3, 4, 5 by then) and the latest version of MacOS is completely locked down.

There’s a simple explanation for all this: Music audiofiles like the ones streamed from Apple Music and Spotify or downloaded from iTunes (or ripped from a CD for people who still buy those) are generally mastered at very loud volume levels (google volume wars) while movies are not. So the same song as part of the movie soundtrack will have much less volume since it has to have a level that fit with the rest of the movie. Movie soundtracks are mixed with much more dynamic range and so the playback system needs much more headroom.

HP is optimized for audio playback and they would need to change the gainstaging significantly to deal with soundtracks properly.

Perhaps this would be easily done in software, perhaps not. Regardless, a movie playback audio mode would have to be restricted to movie playback, or regular music would be able to totally overload and distort the HP.

Apple generally want to keep things simple for consumers, ie not allowing them to push way too loud volume to the speaker, so they would have to figure out a good way to know what type of material is being played back. I imagine that would be possible through ATV since the player would be aware of the source but not from other sources.

Its highly unlikely Apple would choose the easy way out and simply allow much higher gain. That’s what Google, Samescum etc would have done. They will take their time to figure it out or choose not to do it at all since HP is supposed to be a music device and not home theatre speakers.