robjn

wonkothesane said:

I don’t understand how the LCD should account for the longer battery life in the XR as opposed to the OLED. I thought the whole point of OLES (or at least one of the major ones) is the absence of the backlight Illini sting only the “non black pixels” and thus saving significant power?

Your correct, OLED is more power efficient than LCD. However, in this case the XR has far fewer pixels for the processor to push. This greatly reduces the power demand on the processor and might also result in the XR being faster.

It might be that Apple don’t want the XR to be faster than the flagships so they could have tuned down the processor and this might result in greater efficiency and battery life.

So for the HomePod test there was just two trained listeners from their staff.

I’m a professionally trained listener. I conduct acoustic testing every week. It’s true that despite having all the test equipment in the world the human ear is still an important test in some situations.

Never-the-less, no amount of training can eliminate the highly subjective, and personally biased nature of human listening - it comes down to the fact that everyone is anatomically different in terms of the way the bones in their head respond to sound and the degree of hearing loss they have at various frequencies. There’s also big psychological elements.

They report that they test everything with the same Jazz CD and this certainly adds consistency across tests but when the human brain is hearing music it knows well it can trick the listener by automatically filling in the gaps and making the person ‘hear’ what they expect to hear even though the speaker might not be reproducing certain elements well.

The scientific test equipment we have picks up problems the human ear cannot easily discern.

In my opinion these tests should lean heavily toward actual measurements and away from human listening. The published results should clearly distinguish between the two.

You report “an acoustical mesh that needed to be cut off”

Actually, after they cut it off they found out that it has a drawstring. If they had attacked it from the top instead of the bottom they would have found the drawstring and been able to remove it intact.

Apple hinted at returning money to investors.

It was the questioner who asked about acquisitions and Apple’s response was along the lines of ‘we’re always looking and have always had the ability so the new tax law does really change anything in that regard’.

I can’t wait to listen.

you write: In theory, this allows for a larger chamber volume for the Home Max, improving the physics of sound.

How so?
I would argue the opposite. The smaller the volume the more pressure can be generated when the woofer compresses the air. More pressure = louder bass.

The challenge is being able to do this without distortion which is why HomePod uses a special microphone to constantly measure and then dynamically adjusts to keep the woofer in phase. Without this advanced technology you would have to scale up to get more bass.