[brador]

How about detecting Dell Speakers and automatically setting the max volume to 100%, with a notification so the user can give an a-ok if they want to go higher. That way, at least users know and can make a decision. Similar to the Android warning if you set your volume too high that it could cause hearing damage.

I'd prefer to be warned rather than surprised by this!

[mertd]

That's impractical. VLC is just using the standard OS API to send some sound to speakers. Can you imagine every piece of software checking for every piece of esoteric hardware and having some special behavior?

Maybe Microsoft could regulate the output for junk speakers, but really, Dell is the one to blame here.

[TeMPOraL]

> Can you imagine every piece of software checking for every piece of esoteric hardware and having some special behavior?

This is what MS Office does. A Microsoft engineer told me once that because many printers lie to the OS about their capabilities, they built a giant lookup table into the Office, that basically consists of "if printer model X, vendor Y and firmware Z, then don't trust it about the fonts onboard, render the text before sending instead".

[byuu]

I remember back in the day doing DirectDraw/Direct3D programming, I had to have lots of "if video card type == x, then ignore these capabilities and do this other thing instead" hacks. A much bigger issue back then when we had more than three video card manufacturers. (it's still a minor issue today ... nVidia cards tend to be way more permissive about OpenGL calls than AMD cards. But I can afford two discrete cards and one onboard chipset.)

It's so completely impractical for a hobbyist project to own every possible piece of hardware, or at least a huge majority of it. Yet it's nothing for a Fortune 500 company to do the same.

Really slants the playing field away from independent software developers.

[TeMPOraL]

Or, you could crowdsource an open-source abstraction layer; this would level the playing field again.

[patcheudor]

Impractical and impossible are of course two different things. It's sort of funny to consider a scenario in which a manufacturer adds a thermistor to the speaker coil assembly to measure the temperature & lower the amplifier output via the BIOS as the temperature in the voice coil rises to a dangerous level. I suspect that might cost more than using good speakers in the first place but then again if there's limited room for speakers which would lead to heat buildup in the voice coil such a solution might be practical.

[jrockway]

VLC doesn't do anything particularly interesting, though. There are plenty of CDs that already apply this filter to the music, meaning there's no way you can play that CD without damaging their speakers.

The problem is simply that the Dell speakers are piles of shit.

[anaphor]

Yeah, this sort of dynamic range compression is standard for the music industry (sadly).

[stevenhuang]

You've missed the point..

[jbk]

> How about detecting Dell Speakers

How would you do that?

And no, this is not specific to VLC.

[jrockway]

Pump DC into the speakers at full power, and pop up a dialog asking the user if their speakers have melted yet.

[DrJokepu]

Assuming the speakers are connected through an audio jack, is there a realiable way of detecting specific speaker models?

[lutusp]

The problem being discussed is by no means limited to Dell speakers -- it would be a problem for any small laptop speakers connected to an IC that can overdrive them under specific circumstances.

[marcosdumay]

An entire category that I just tough as empty, before reading this article and discovering one element.

Have you heard about this problem in any other laptop before?