[ryandrake]

My first thought was that filtering a set of frequencies out from the laptop's sound output doesn't seem to be a good solution that addresses the root cause. This only corrects it for those laptops running that OS software, and does it at the cost of reducing the quality of the device's audio for all applications. What about other laptops playing the song, or just living room speakers playing it? What if I, as a user of the laptop, was doing audio processing and needed the sound card to faithfully output frequencies that I commanded it to play?

But there's a follow-up article that addresses all of that: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...

TLDR is it's cheaper to throw your audio quality under the bus than to recall the defective laptops/drives and replace them with a design that works. :(

[avianlyric]

You’re making the assumption the tweaks to the audio subsystem made a material change to the quality of the audio output. It’s not like laptop speakers are very good to start with, or like laptop sound cards ever faithfully reproduce the sound they’re asked too.

Getting good audio out of a laptops speaker in 20% hardware and 80% audio filtering anyway. No laptop speaker (even Macs[1]) sounds good without significant processing to workaround the physical limitations of tiny speakers mounted in a non-ideal chassis.

As for other speakers, sound pressure drops off following the cube law. So a speaker millimetres away from the hard drives which have substantially greater impact than speakers outside of the laptop. Of course if you crank the volume enough it’ll eventually cause an issue, but given there doesn’t seem to be widespread reporting of this issue, it looks like that wasn’t too much of an issue.

[1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio?tab=readme-ov-file...