The Glory Speakers
Just a few minutes ago, Declan has shown probably more because he was procrastinating getting in bed than because of genuine enthusiasm, but he was showing an unusual amount of enthusiasm about, you know, the mechanism and machinations of recording.
And so, you know, I was explaining, oh, that's the chat room, and he was, you know,
talking into the microphone wait nobody can hear me right now right no no no no you know actually what Marco does is he plays music and I you know logged into atp.fm slash live and put on my speakers and you know let it play for a few moments and I have to concede it actually whatever you were playing didn't sound bad this is about five ten minutes ago and he listens for a beat
This sounds like Dave Matthews.
Yes!
Yeah, now in the defense of Marco, when I do play, and especially lately I've been on a bit of a kick, and oh yeah, when were you not on a kick?
Ha ha ha.
No, genuinely, I don't listen to that much Dave Matthews, except lately I kind of have been.
So in the defense of Marco, when all he hears is Dave Matthews, I'm sure everything sounds like Dave Matthews, but he said that completely on his own, of his own volition.
And I'm not sure I've ever loved my son more than I did that one moment.
I just wanted to share that with the group.
well i'll tell you what so so you know i'm not even going to touch that because it's adorable but so you know there's there's new fish out uh from from a recent uh mexico uh series of shows i have had one of the most productive weeks i've had in months like i've just been going through these shows on repeat a fish a fish powered month
I even sent in a bug report to Phish because they had what I think is a mix error where in the middle of a song, they panned Trey's guitar a little bit to the left of center, and then it stayed that way the whole rest of the tour.
Oh, no.
I emailed them like, hey, I think this was a mistake.
If you happen to ever adjust that mix, let me know.
Did that go into DevNull just like Feedback Assistant does?
No, it's been escalated to the audio team and we'll see if we hear back.
Whoa, stop.
Hold on.
This is the second mix bug report I've filed with them and they fixed the first one about six months ago.
I'm blue screening over here.
You're saying that you filed a report, a bug report of some sort.
To a band.
And a human looked at it and acknowledged it.
I'm not even talking about fixing it.
You're saying there exists a bug reporting system wherein you get a response?
Even if the response is screw you, no way.
You got a response?
Yeah.
Impossible.
I can't believe it.
Meanwhile, I have this huge bug that's killing me on iOS 16.4 betas.
iOS audio app developers are probably familiar with the audio services were reset notification.
There's a notification you can subscribe to in the SDK to tell your app when, quote, the audio services have been reset.
And you're supposed to like, you know, if you created any audio objects in your app, you got to recreate them at that point.
Reset it all up.
You know, if you use audio graphs, reset that up.
If you use audio engine, reset that up.
Now, what this really, I think, means is a process crashed, like some, you know, system process for dealing with audio, you know, core audio D or whatever, some process has crashed.
what this has resulted in is the 16.4 betas overcast almost every time it crosses a podcast boundary like if you're between episodes and so it recreates the audio engine um it crashes that background process i get usually two or three of those services were reset notifications in a row and playback stops until you go over and hit play again
and i filed a bug report like at least one beta ago and nothing no response no no marked as duplicate no just sitting there wide open same as it ever was and my bug report i had a sys diagnose i had the logs from overcast showing the exact moment that they should be looking in the sys diagnose for what exactly happened oh say you've done everything they've asked for except perhaps a sample app
And I'm sure they must have told you how appreciative they are of all the details that you've provided in this bug report.
Oh, God.
You know, I hope at some point in the future, you know, if you look at, like, you know, the boring stuff that, like, you know, whenever you ask people, what do you want of Apple in the future?
Everyone's like, oh, I want a VR headset.
I want a car.
You know, what I want is much more boring stuff.
Like, make Siri better.
That's, like, number one.
And number two, hey, maybe fix the developer story in ways that you actually can and might.
Obviously, they're never going to get rid of a 30% cut.
There's going to be some kind of app store cut that's big for a long time, and they're going to require IAP as long as they possibly can, which is probably forever in practice in most places.
But...
You know, documentation, that'd be great.
And man, it would do wonders for developer relations if radar slash feedback was better.
Like if it was actually a functioning system where like we could file bug reports and they would get seen in a timely manner and responded to in a useful way that wasn't just seemingly some bulk process trying to close as many bugs as possible.
Yeah, that is a fantasy world that I will surely never see.
I can't fathom it.
What do you think comes first, self-driving cars or that?
Oh, self-driving cars, full stop.
I bet Tesla will ship their full self-driving before Apple gets any better developer story around feedback assistant.
Oh, God, I can't even.
That's grim.
As the last host of this podcast to catch COVID, I've sort of been playing catch up with you two when it comes to infectious diseases.
Oh, no, this is not good.
Tonight, I'd like to close the gap a little further by recording my second podcast episode while COVID positive, presumably tying the record held by Marco.
what i got the rebound baby you took the pax lovid and got the rebound i got the rebound although there is some debate whether pax lovid gives you more rebound than nothing because you can get rebound without taking pax lovid but regardless who whatever the cause is i got it baby i've been trapped in my room and i'm going stir crazy oh my god i'm sorry buddy i got two days of peace i got last wednesday when we recorded i was negative and then thursday after that i was negative and i was out of my house and i did a bunch of stuff that we'll talk about later in the podcast if we get to it
uh and then friday i went back into my room and i've been there since and it sucks i mean you're probably i mean i'm not an expert but i would assume you're probably not contagious at this point but i don't know no you're contagious during rebound oh man you just you just do the same thing again same the rules for it are the same as the first infection you isolate blah blah i mean the good thing is my symptoms haven't been as bad like i didn't really have a fever at all except for maybe the first day a tiny one and it's just mostly been a stuffy nose i'm just sick of being trapped in my room yeah
Yeah, of course.
So what prompted you to test again?
You were feeling crummy?
Oh, yeah.
On Friday, I felt bad.
I'm like, you know what?
I was feeling better and I had two days of negative.
But on Friday, I felt worse.
I felt not as bad as I did at the beginning, but I felt like, oh, headachy and kind of weird.
I knew the feeling.
I was like, this doesn't feel good.
So I tested again and positive.
And then I've been testing after that to see, oh, well, maybe the rebound will go away quickly.
Nope.
I was like super duper positive, like more positive than I was in the beginning.
Yeah.
uh you know so anyway but i've just mostly been stuck with snuffing nose and in fact today is the first day that my symptoms i feel like have gotten better i have as judged by the number of tissues in my garbage can um i'm i think i'm definitely on the mend so tomorrow i'm gonna you know hopefully hopefully i'll see the line fading on my test but uh you want to want to see what rebound looks like i'll put it in the slack so you can see these are not consecutive days but they're multi-day gaps between here but uh that's what rebound looks like it's great
Oh, my.
So I'm looking at one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine tests.
I love that you lined these all up, that you kept them all.
And you lined them all up.
It was in my room.
What else do I have to do?
So I'm looking at these nine tests going from left to right.
It's very red.
And then actually, even just the second one is, you know, kind of pinkish.
Yeah, there's a big gap between them.
So that first one was my first infection.
And then obviously, I didn't bother testing for a while because like, you know, you've got it.
What's the point?
So there's a big gap, you know, between those first two.
okay so then it gets you know weaker and weaker over time i would say one two three four the fifth one if there's something there i can barely see it that's my first negative okay so and then six also negative seven that's friday looking pretty positive and eight is like oh baby i'm back and better than ever it was friday and then that's saturday and i think that's uh monday or tuesday it's just yeah i'm sorry john that stinks
Man, I had two years between my infections.
This is still the same infection.
I feel like probably the two negatives were just like Paxlova just wiped it out or whatever, but it was like there was one left in the corner somewhere, and it's like, you know what?
I'm coming back.
If it makes you feel better, some very good friends of ours, the husband and wife team of the family, they got COVID.
This was maybe a month or so ago.
And they did take Paxlovid.
And I don't recall if the wife rebounded, but I know that the husband absolutely did.
And so he was, you know, he was feeling like garbage, took Paxlovid, complained incessantly about how bad it tasted, which from what I gather from what you've said is completely justified.
And then as he's starting to feel better, he starts to come out of his hidey hole.
And then, oh, nope, never mind.
I'm back.
Same story.
I would still take it again, though, because my symptoms weren't getting better.
And it was like I cannot my brain cannot be boiling in my skull any longer.
So I'm very thankful that it took away.
And also there's some it is possible that taking Paxlovid can help reduce the risk of long COVID as well.
I don't think there's anything conclusive on that, but there's some.
promising studies pointing in that direction so but just for the symptom relief alone i was glad to take and glad to have it but yeah rebound sucks uh but hopefully i mean by my past schedule it took me basically a week to go from positive to negative so i figure rebounding is probably going to be similar so i'll probably be negative by friday and then i'll be out of this ridiculous situation
oh i'm sorry that is stinky and am i right that ties the record because marco definitely recorded at least one episode with with covid and so did you casey but i don't know if marco got two of them maybe he did no i thought you did marco didn't oh yeah i definitely did did you have three well it depends on you know how you define you know an episode with it you know like my first i mean the first time i had it it lasted like you know nine days so i would have done two episodes but yeah it was it's not fun
You know what will cheer you up, John?
What will cheer you up is some follow-up.
And we have all kinds of follow-up with regard to the screen time and shoulder surfing stuff.
So we were told that the screen time passcode doesn't actually protect against iPhone takeovers like we thought it did last week.
So we gave you some crummy advice, and I'm sorry about that.
MultiGreg writes, I set a screen time restriction with a passcode.
without the option to remove it using the Apple ID.
You know, I tapped cancel and hit skip.
When I try the forgot passcode link, it still guides me through the options to enter my Apple ID or device password or find a forgotten Apple ID.
Whoopsie-dipsie.
And also, just FYI, this is us talking, disallowing account changes in screen time also grays out the entire Apple ID item and settings, which is undesirable as well.
it's not necessarily what it's confusing i noticed that i'm like what the hell why can't i go into my apple id why is this grayed out and when you tap it nothing happens so you're like is my phone broken do i need to force quit settings or whatever then you remember oh i disabled that in screen time but yeah like i i would blame apple for this because the ui explicitly says hey do you want to allow your screen time passcode to be reset with your apple id and when you hit cancel it says are you sure you want to skip this you won't be able to reset your screen time password without your with your apple id and you say yeah totally skip and then it's like no you can still reset it with your apple id
What's the point of that UI?
And I tried it multiple times and confirmed.
Even though you say cancel and you confirm that yes, you want to skip it, you don't want to reset it, you can still reset it with your Apple ID.
So the mitigation that we said last time, that specific one about the screen time password, if you did that on your phone, just remove it because it's not actually helping.
I mean, I don't know if you want to remove it because it will slow them down.
It will slow down the thief a little bit because now they have to go through the forgot password flow, which is kind of annoying.
And, you know, so it's a it's a speed bump, a tiny speed bump.
But that's about it.
And I'm kind of annoyed that it doesn't work.
Well, and it might be like, you know, a little bit of security of obscurity in the sense that, like, they might not realize why the giant bar of your account on top is grayed out because, again, it doesn't tell you.
That's an interesting point.
you know but yeah it's still not not as good as just having a really good passphrase that you never actually enter with people watching yeah but i just wanted to tell people right up front like if you took our advice last week be aware that does not actually actually protect you it is you know either a speed bump or security through obscurity at best yeah it will not slow down a sophisticated attack right sorry
All right, Eric Smets writes, I made an extra, oh, I'm sorry, this is with regard to protecting your iCloud photos from an Apple ID takeover.
Eric writes, I made an extra fake family member with a separate Apple ID and I added them to the iCloud shared library.
This way I can always use this Apple ID to retrieve all the important shared pictures.
The only requirement is that you have room for an extra person in your shared library.
And I strongly recommend not saving the password for this new Apple ID and iCloud keychain.
I don't think that this is necessarily something that I am going to do, but it's a very clever approach, and I see no particular problems with it, and it was worth sharing.
The most relevant piece of information here is that, you know, if you have an actual family member, iCloud Shared Library gives more than one person access to presumably your shared pool of photos that you care about.
So if someone steals your iPhone, takes over your Apple ID, and changes the password and totally locks you out, and you never get that Apple ID back...
Someone else has a copy of those photos in a live Apple ID that still works.
I don't know how this works, but in terms of like, well, who is the one who initially shared the photo library?
Like my wife is the iCloud photo library owner, and she created the shared library and shared it with me or whatever.
So does it make a difference if her Apple ID is taken over or if mine is?
Either way, this is just another form of...
probably a weaker form of backup like it's it's something that i think people are doing if you have shared an icloud shared library and you put most of your photos in it you're kind of getting a secondary backup just by doing that because someone's got the photos on their phone and their device and stuff like that it's not as good as a real backup because a real backup you would take care to take all the photos and make sure you download them all and save them somewhere that is disconnected from your app like you know all that good stuff so backups are still the solution but
Having someone else in the iCloud shared library is a good way to have separate copies of those photos accessible by an Apple ID that may still be live if only one of your Apple IDs gets taken over.
Pete Fernandez writes, if my memory is not betraying me, I think in the very first version of iPhone OS, you could set up a password for settings, kind of like a root password.
I think Apple should give us that option.
I have zero recollection of this, but that does not mean it is not true.
Yeah, I tried to look that up.
I had a vague memory of it, but I couldn't really confirm.
Do you remember this, Marco?
Could you set a passcode on the settings app?
You might have been able to, but I don't remember this at all.
it's difficult to say someone should find one of those like we have all these websites that you know like system7.app or whatever the hell thing is where you can just run old mac os and javascript in a browser uh an original iphone version of that that runs the original version of iphone os with a web assembly or something it would be a cool thing to have and i'm sure it will turn up in in a few years then we'll find out
Right.
AF Waller writes, there's a third option besides a short, convenient numeric passcode and a long alphanumeric passcode.
That option is a long numeric passcode.
This has the advantage of easy numeric keypad, but has an indeterminate number of digits.
A 10 digit or 20 digit number is a good compromise for some.
For older people, you can tell them to use a childhood phone number or even two phone numbers combined.
I didn't even know this was possible.
It is somewhat undocumented that if you choose an unlock code, but set it to only numbers more than eight or so digits, you get a numeric keypad for entry instead of the normal keyboard.
Again, I had no idea.
Yeah, I've never seen this.
Someone claimed that they heard about this by listening to ATP.
So that is possible.
And we all three of us just forgot about it, but.
I don't think so.
I think people might have heard from us that you can set a password-style passcode, not just numbers.
We've talked about that before.
But I did not know that if you go through that process, set a custom password, and only use numbers, then it shows you the number pad for input.
and just kind of like a text box above it so instead of having like you know the four or six dots so that to see like how many characters you need to fill in it just has like a text field so if somebody gets your phone and has not seen you enter the password they don't know even how long it is which is one of the benefits of you know the the passphrase style password to begin with um but if it's just numbers you get the advantage of easy you know large number pad entrance which is that also makes it easier to shoulder sharp obviously
It does.
I know making it longer is better, but telling which of the numbers you hit on the numpad is way easier than telling which of the tiny keyboard things you hit on the keyboard.
But even though they have the pop-up thing that goes above, but it's, you know, anyway, it's all trade-offs.
So just, you know, to put this on the table, this is one more option for you to try.
If you know you'll never be able to force yourself to use that tiny little, you know, QWERTY keyboard to type things in.
but you can use the numeric one, try a phone number or something like that, something longer that you'll remember.
Indeed.
John, tell me about what the latest scam is in the App Store, please.
Yeah, this is related to actually a Twitter thing when Twitter was getting rid of SMS or I don't know if they ever actually did this.
They say all sorts of things and I can't keep track of which things they actually did that they said or not.
But at one point they were saying, oh, if you wanted to use SMS for two-factor authentication, you have to pay us money because it's insecure and only the people who
Pay can use the insecure... Whatever.
They're a very confused company.
Anyway, once they said that, there was a kind of run on the App Store of like everyone trying to download Authenticator apps like Google Authenticator.
Similarly, with this story about Apple ID takeovers, it's like, oh, if I keep everything in my Apple ID and keep it all in iCloud keychain, then it's like once they get my phone passcode, they can get everything.
I should use, you know, insert application here, whether it's 1Password or Google Authenticator for my two-factor things or like just some other app, some other third-party app with its own...
password pass key you know one password has a it's obvious one password and authenticator apps can have their own passwords and pass codes to get into them and stuff so that if someone does shoulder surf your your phone unlock then they get to your phone they still won't be able to get to your passwords or your two-factor unless they know how to get into those third-party apps
So that was sending people to the app store as well to say, hey, I want an authenticator app.
I need to, you know, I'm going to go see what's available on the app store because I know I want something that, you know, either stores passwords or stores two-factor codes or whatever.
And Misk wrote in to say,
Many iPhone users are asking us to recommend safe authenticator apps.
Well, the app store is making it useless to recommend any app.
No matter what app you search for, the top hit is almost always an ad for some scam app.
So you can't even say, hey, go to the app store and check out Authy because people will type in Authy and the first hit will be an ad that's very enticing.
It looks like it's vaguely Authy related to people hit and it's actually a scam.
And, you know, you would think Apple would be there knocking down all the scam apps, but the scammers are there ready for their moment.
Like, oh, there's a flood of people trying to find authenticator apps.
Now is it time?
I don't know.
You know what the scam is.
Do they steal your passwords?
Do they do they get you to mine Bitcoin?
I don't even know what the scam is, but the scam is just it's another disappointing example of like.
when people are in need they're like go to the app store the one safe trusted place for you to find all your apps and you have a goal in mind even if you know the name of the app someone recommended an app to you this person's saying we've just given up recommending apps because they'll we know they'll go to the app store type in that word hit search and then see an ad search result if they don't realize an ad and think oh the top hit that's got to be it and go get it and it's not what a shame app store bad show yeah it's like
Does anybody besides Apple believe, oh, this is a great, safe place?
Look, I like Apple in general.
I think that's been proven over the years.
But man, the App Store is such a sad state of affairs and it could be so much better.
It's a good thing Netflix can't tell people to go sign up on their website because that's protecting them against all these scams.
Knowing what I know about the security of the iPhone and everything else, I don't even trust the App Store.
The good side of the trust there is that I know that worst case scenario, I can always delete the app.
And unlike on the Mac, this is not the case.
On the iPhone, I know that if I download an app from the App Store and then I later delete it, I know that it's gone.
There's no trace of it left.
So I am more willing to try things, and it is more secure than, say, a Mac in that way.
But as far as what happens in the app...
Yeah, yeah.
Like there's just there's so many like crappy apps that I get from the app store.
Like anytime I try to do anything that requires me to download a new app, I know I'm going to run into a whole bunch of crap.
And it's just a shame.
Here's an analogy for the old people.
Speaking of phone numbers, the analogy is like, you know, you're just at the app store.
Like I download an app.
I can easily delete it.
I'm sure that it's not destroying my phone or it can't like steal my contacts out from under me because it has to ask permission.
It's like that's the type of assurances you have.
It's like saying with the phone system, I can be assured that the phone lines are secure.
People aren't tapping into them because you have to get a warrant.
And if someone does tap into it, it's a federal crime.
And or, you know, or the U.S.
mail or any of these type of sort of older transport mechanisms where we have laws and strictures around them that make them fairly secure and safe with very onerous penalties for people who, you know, go against that.
Right.
Not the newer ones, but the older ones.
We could still pass laws like that.
Yeah.
It's like, so that means there'll never be any fraud over the telephone line or the mail system, will there?
Well, the telephone line is secure, but telemarketers still call up old people and get them to reverse mortgage their house and stuff, right?
So the App Store, yes, the installation process is secure and it's not going to screw up.
The line is secure, right?
That is as safeguarded as it can be.
One company controls it.
It's like back in the old AT&T days.
One company controls it.
You have to buy a phone from them.
You actually do have to buy a phone from Apple.
And everything's secure on that line.
But then someone calls you up and talks you into doing a reverse mortgage on your house or gives you your credit card number or whatever.
And that's exactly what's happening.
Once the app gets on your system and it says, hey, you should sign up for our thing and type your credit card number here.
How did that get through App Review?
I don't know.
How the hell does anything get through App Review?
the securing of the line and the mechanism to deploy the apps is nothing without the securing of the actual apps that arrive and apple is just not up to that task and even if it's a benign scam where it's like wasting your time and trying to get you to you know sign up for a one dollar a month subscription or something that you don't know you need or like there's all sorts of ways that these applications can be user hostile while still being within the letter of the law and somehow they get through apple app review but untitled goose game gets rejected twice by the mac app store and then they give up
It's so bad.
It's so bad.
And I mean, they're so petulantly refusing to listen to reason that it sounds like they're going to be forced to.
And honestly, they deserve it.
We've talked about this many times.
You don't need to belabor it again.
Not yet anyway.
uh bob then show skio i'm not sure there um before you go there do you know the the title the heading there this gives you ample opportunity to get a reference casey this is war games thank you very good so this is making up for your missing the net last episode yeah oh god i'm so mad at myself for that i genuinely am now in my defense i haven't seen that movie in like 20 30 years but i got it i heard marco get it and i knew he got it we've talked about it before on the show
Maybe.
I don't know.
I issue myself several demerits.
I'm so sorry.
I have shamed all of us.
But anyway, the heading in the show notes is strange game.
The only winning move is not to play, which is war games.
So anyway, Bob Von S. writes, this is going to sound bananas, but here it goes.
I have no password, touch ID, face ID in my phone.
When Touch ID came out, I could not get it to work consistently, so I turned it off and never bothered with Face ID.
I live on a farm, homestead thing, and so there are many instances where I'm wearing gloves, some kind of hat, face covering, my hands are wet, dirty, scratched up, etc.
Touch ID never worked beyond two or three days.
I also don't have a passcode because that's just cumbersome with these hand conditions.
That said, there really isn't a lot on my phone that would cause me material harm if someone got my phone.
I use a small regional bank whose app is basically a web view to their site, so you have to log in with a username and password.
Otherwise, you can see pictures of my dog, what I listen to in Overcast, and about 10,000 spam emails.
Good for you.
But the point is, when I go into iCloud in settings and tap password and security, I'm only prompted for my iCloud password.
So if all you've done is stolen my phone, you can't lock me out of my Apple ID without my iCloud password.
And since there isn't anything particularly interesting or useful on the phone itself, you only have a short amount of time to capitalize on the device by selling it or whatever, because I'm pretty sure I can wipe the phone from my Mac.
So unless I've missed something obvious, my lack of security has come full circle, where I have ultimate convenience and minimal exposure to badness.
This horrifies me, but I mean, the logic does add up, at least on the surface.
There are some vulnerabilities here, but the perverse thing is by not having a passcode, you can't use your passcode to unlock your Apple ID.
Right?
You just can't because there isn't one.
So there's no mechanism for it to say, hey, I want to, you know, I forgot my password to my Apple ID, right?
The bad side is, I think, even if you don't have a passcode, the I forgot the password to my Apple ID may find its way through your trusted device of the iPhone.
Because there are other ways that Apple can prompt you on your supposedly trusted device of an iPhone to say, hey, I see you're trying to reset your password.
Is this you?
I know Apple doesn't do the text message thing, but they have those pop-ups or whatever.
So I'm not 100% willing to endorse this.
Well, they do have text message fallbacks.
Hmm.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, I suppose, because, yeah, you could be if you have a telephone number or whatever.
So I don't think this is maybe as secure as he thinks.
But the other thing that he's doing is if you don't have anything of value on your phone and someone gets your phone and they don't have anything of value like that works, that, you know, the only winning move is not to play.
Hey, don't have anything valuable on your phone.
So when someone steals your phone, you don't care.
probably not the best solution but i did think it was funny that by literally not having a passcode at all and no biometrics which i think is silly but not having a passcode at all as if you're living in like you know 2008 with your ipod touch like me where you just slide to unlock uh yeah that's uh that's one interesting way of looking at it i just hope there aren't any a lot of iphone thieves stalking you out there on the farm i think you're probably safe
I would just like to quickly note that the only winning move is not to play also war games.
I just want to make sure now that I get the appropriate credit.
All right, moving on.
The headline for this is Those Darned Kids, which I'm assuming is a Scooby-Doo reference.
Gosselgold writes, my son got the screen time pin when he handed me his phone over so that I could give him more time.
I made sure they could not watch me enter the pin.
except he had started a screen capture before giving the phone to me.
This is totally owned.
So good.
This is amazing.
It makes me so happy.
There are so many people gave it the same story that their kids, I guess this is going around and like the, you know, the, the, the kid circles of like, just start a screen recording and ask for more time and give your parent the device.
And then you'll see what they typed in.
Cause it's amazing.
Cause the screen recording will show what things highlighted, you know, when you hit the numbers or whatever, but,
That's very, very good.
Very clever.
That's incredible.
There's so many more exploits people have sent us.
The iMessage apps, even if iMessage itself is secure, like the exploits that my kids were using, the iMessage apps have ways to get through it.
Someone was saying that if you ask for one more minute time in three separate apps, there's a bug that just...
totally uh stops all screen time prescriptions like not if you don't have to get it go to app number one and say one more minute go to app number two say one more minute go out number three say one more minute you don't need a parent to approve those things at all just by merely requesting it in three different apps then downtime for the the phone just goes away that's amazing
Oh, Apple.
With regard to ISP bandwidth, and I think it was an Ask ATP asking, you know, what do you do with your gigabit connections anyway?
Michael Hansen writes, one thing that you didn't mention in the discussion about asymmetric bandwidth, TCP needs the uplink speed for ACMES or acknowledge packages.
If you saturate your uplink, download speeds will suffer heavily too.
So in other words, the way TCP works, which is the way most of the internet is hung together, when you download something, you need to acknowledge, okay, I've got this.
And so what Michael is saying is, if you're downloading something crazy fast, well, you need to send those, yep, I've got it messages back to where it's coming from.
And it can end up that you have more download bandwidth to spare, but you're flooding your upstream bandwidth with, yep, got it messages.
And that would be very unfortunate.
Yeah, this is why nowadays most routers that people have in their houses and everything are a little bit better at dealing with this.
But there used to be a problem back in the day because if you took a video on your iPhone and then you plugged your iPhone into charge...
it would upload it to iCloud and it's uploading, you know, this two gig video you just shot on your phone.
Then the Wi-Fi is, quote, down for the entire rest of the house because everyone else is trying to do stuff and your phone is saturated in the upstream.
And so nothing else works.
So that's it's one one of the many reasons why having a whole bunch of headroom on your upstream bandwidth as well is very important because you can't do that.
And of course, if you have a modern router that supports prioritization and QoS kind of stuff, then this problem is largely mitigated, but it definitely helps.
Moving on, John, tell me about a problem with the Apple TV remote with touch disabled, please.
Last episode, we were talking about the ability to force quit apps without the ability to swipe them up.
And of course, the answer there is to double tap the up button, something that many, many people sent us on Mastodon while they were listening to the show.
only to learn minutes later that we said that.
So we caught a lot of people on that one.
We don't do this on purpose, by the way, but it is fun to see how many people do respond in real time as they're listening, right?
And the answer is a lot.
Anyway, one more thing from Eric Himeter.
It says, when you disable the touch on the Apple TV remote,
you don't have a way to find out what the screensaver location is.
So the screensaver shows like different places on earth, like with a slow camera pan over them or whatever.
And if you just touch the touch pad, like not click it, but just touch it, it says, Oh, this is London or this is whatever.
Like it tells you the location.
Cause you're always curious.
Like what city is that?
Where is that?
Uh,
So now we'll do it again.
We don't know how to get that to appear without touch enabled, but maybe before the end of the show, we'll find out and say it in the show.
So if you know, you should probably finish listening to the whole show before you send a message to Mastodon telling us how to do it.
Now, chat room, the race is on.
You have to figure this out before the end of the show so the people who send us a message will feel embarrassed for the fact that they didn't wait to hear the answer.
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All right, we have some yellow things follow up.
Joel McIntosh writes, the best and worst car colors for resale value, according to carpro.com, which I've never heard of, but that's neither here nor there.
According to carpro.com, they write, while it may be among the least popular color choices, because it's gross, yellow is the vehicle color that holds its value best overall, depreciating 70% less than the average vehicle.
Well, okay.
So just for reference here, I saw this too and I was going to do a victory lap, but then I thought, but at the same time though, most cars aren't available in yellow.
So the ones that are available in yellow are already like, you know, more rare, more specialty models, most likely.
And so I think that might be skewing the data.
Like, you know, you can't get like a Honda Accord in yellow.
Is it not normalized for within each car?
Like, is it just, I don't know.
Look at the stats.
I figured they would do it within each car.
So this car comes in five colors, one of which is yellow, and the yellow one depreciates 70% less.
Like, that would be the stat, not what you're saying, like, across all cars.
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Well, I believe it because you know why?
Yellow is a fun car.
When people buy a used car, they want it to be fun.
Anyway, I also would like to point out that it says in the same article, and I am pointing this out because I'm trying to be better, the colors that retain the best value by segment are, and for the SUV segment, the answer was yellow.
Similarly, even though this isn't a car thing, well, I f***ed around and found out because Apple has released a yellow iPhone.
Yes.
So this could not have been a better troll.
To be honest, genuinely, I'm not trying to be funny.
I think this is not my favorite yellow, but I'm in full support of fun iPhone colors.
Just because I don't like yellow cars doesn't mean I don't like yellow other things.
I have my Playdate sitting on the desk in front of me.
I adore the yellow, although it's honestly like an orangey yellow, but I adore the Playdate yellow.
uh this is a little aggressive but i'm still here for it i'm in favor of it i wish we could get the pros and fun colors as we've all lamented many times and particularly the colors ours on upgrade no i'm this is cool i dig it yeah this is it looks fun it is fairly light and in fact apple also released a whole bunch of yellow accessories um in their spring color refresh uh they got some new watch bands new iphone cases
Nothing that jumps out at me necessarily, but I want to go see him in person.
There's what might be a promising orange on the sport band.
But yeah, going back to the yellow phone, it looks fun.
You know, whenever they do this in the spring, you know, they do some kind of, you know, minor iPhone color refresh in the spring in the last few years.
It's a fun thing.
I don't know a lot of people who get them because most people in our circles will make their buying decisions in the fall.
So, you know, this is more for like people who haven't upgraded yet and, you know, don't just jump on it in the fall.
And, you know, they just kind of get it whenever the previous phone dies or breaks.
It looks like a pretty good color.
And like Casey and like Upgrade, I do wish they would give us these fun color options on the Pro phones.
So maybe in our titanium USB-C future, maybe they'll be a little bit more generous with the colors.
Who knows?
Rumor is it's like some, you know, darkish magenta type thing is the new Pro color, but we'll see.
Yeah, it was like a maroon.
Actually, I don't know if they're renders or what, but the mock-ups using that color actually looked pretty cool to me, but we'll see.
It's hard to guess colors.
When I saw this yellow phone, I thought it looked like the yellow E36 BMW 3 Series.
I was trying to figure out what that color was, so I put a picture of it, a link in the chat room.
I guess we'll put it in the show notes.
It was...
dakar yellow two roman numeral two it's a little bit more because there's there's a dakar yellow that looks really like deep uh saturated yellow but i always remember the one from walking down com ave and and the 90s at bu seeing all the uh the bmws that belong to the wealthy students and i saw this yellow all the time and it was definitely kind of a pale yellow that's what i feel like the phone is the phone is not like even though people have been holding it up next to the play date the play date is is richer and more orange um
uh this is more kind of like it's not totally pale yellow it's not like you know springtime pastel yellow but it's a little bit more pale it's not it's not big bird yellow right um is it is it uh r1s yellow i don't know because i can't figure out what yellow that freaking car is every time i see a picture of it looks a different color
yeah me too i have yet to like i i just i feel like i don't have a good handle on what the color is like it's in pictures i've seen it has looked everything from basically like champagne gold to like super like you know you don't drink enough water kind of yellow big bird yellow sometimes it looks big bird yellow how is this the same color
I don't know if this is my reformed BMW fan speaking or something, but this Dakar Yellow, as yellows go, and I stand by that yellow cars are gross, as yellows go, this is pretty good.
Hey, if I ever buy my old classic Toyota MR2 that I've always wanted, that comes in yellow.
i thought you gotta you gotta get that in fake ferrari red because it's a fake ferrari toyota red is kind of like the default like mr2 color if i'm honest it is um but that is that is a cool yellow and when they catch fire they turn orange this yellow marco is not good it is i do not approve i would drive it straight to your house that's fine i would love i would love for you to do that because it has been too long since we've seen each other and you visited and vice versa but i do not approve of this yellow
Yeah, if I'm honest, you know, the correct color for the MR2 Turbo is red.
But, you know, oh, well, someday.
One day.
All right.
Let's talk about some other stuff.
Is there a spring event?
What's the story here?
We just talked about the yellow phone.
And the yellow phone was one of the things rumored for the spring event.
But, of course, they released the yellow phone and gave it to, they had, like, you know, press briefings remotely or whatever and handed out the yellow phones to people and stuff.
They did all the things, right?
Like, and they did it without an event.
So is there going to be an event or was there going to be an event?
They said, no, no event.
We'll just send people yellow phones.
We don't know.
But either way, the rumors about the things that might have been in that event are some vaguely interesting developments in the Macs that I care about, at least.
So the first one is when we talked about a couple of past episodes is the Mac Studio.
We talked about the rumor like, oh, the Mac Studio is not going to be updated that often.
Oh, is it a dead machine or is it just going to skip a generation or whatever?
The rumors are stronger now that have the Mac Studio skipping the M2 Ultra.
Right now, the Mac Studio, you can get an M1 Ultra in it and it would make sense if you think like, oh, we're just going to update all the Macs every year with the next big M number.
The Mac Studio had the M1 Ultra.
And then we'll get the M2 Ultra because we've got the M1 Pro and Macs and a bunch of other Macs, right?
And it's time for the M1 Ultra to be in the new version of the Mac Studio.
Seems like that's not going to happen.
That is related to everyone's favorite Mac, the Mac Pro, where the rumor that we talked about in past shows about that is the 4X1, the one that would have been two M2 Ultras shoved together somehow magically, that that chip was canceled, that Apple's not making it.
Part of the reason why that chip may have been canceled is...
you know, what we talked about, low volumes.
Not a lot of people are going to buy that.
It's going to be super expensive and high cost.
And this is something I think we didn't get into as much in that past episode when we talked about it.
But
when apple put zeons in its mac pros like the one i have here intel zeons those are expensive chips right and apple didn't get to make them intel made them and apple had to pay intel's markup on them and so on and so forth and they were still expensive chips but apple benefited greatly from the fact that mac pros are not the only place zeons appear zeons are mostly sold into the server market
And what Intel hopes is tons and tons of them sold way more than they're going to that Apple's ever going to sell Mac pros.
They're selling servers from Dell.
I don't know if HP still sell things and just into data centers everywhere.
Xeon's being a server chip, a big, expensive server chip.
That's what Intel selling.
Oh, and by the way,
Apple, since we're your chip supplier and you need some big honking CPU for your top-end computer, you should probably buy a Xeon from us.
Here's the ones we have to offer.
And that was frustrating for Apple.
They're like, we don't really want the Xeons.
If we could make a chip for a Mac Pro, it would be different.
It would be better, right?
Well, now Apple has its wish.
They can make their own chip for the Mac Pro.
But lo and behold, when it's time for them to make a chip for the Mac Pro, they're like, geez, it costs a lot of money to make this chip that's two M2 Ultra stuck together.
uh you know and because it's not like apple's making it themselves they have to farm it out they have to you know have it done in the fabs uh for you know tsmc fabs at three nanometers or whatever then they have to package everything together with whatever weird interconnect you know we only know what the m1 ultra has as an interconnect and priscilla m2 ultra will have one we don't know what the plan was for four because geometrically like the m2 the m1 ultra is just connected to end to end if you've got four of them how do you connect them and there was all those rumors that we talked about before about how that would work but anyway
That is a weird thing to do.
And then you have the packaging where you have to put all that thing in a package with all the RAM chips around it and put it all together.
And that's expensive.
Really, really expensive.
Because, again, Apple has to pay manufacturers to do all that.
They have to pay someone to, you know, print the silicon chips.
They have to pay someone to do whatever interposer stuff that they do.
They have to pay someone to package it together.
And they have to pay someone for all the RAM chips.
And it's like...
and the people who they're paying to do that they're like okay so how many of these do you want apple's like i don't know a dozen who's gonna buy them buy this mac pro like the volume not that they're that low but like the volumes are low compared to intel xeon right and so now it's like it's a reckoning it's like well if you want to make your own ship for the mac pro you think you can do a better job than a xeon
you're only going to sell a tenth a hundredth as many xeons and so everybody you pay to do this is going to charge you an arm and a leg because you're not ordering you know 10 million from them that you're ordering in small volumes you are a small volume manufacturer of like bespoke artisanal mac pro ships now even though you're trying to reuse all the building components from like the mac studio and the laptops and stuff like
They're already trying to save money that way.
But the one way you can't save money is, well, if you want four of those things in here, you have to connect them some way and you have to package them and that costs a lot of money.
And it seems like Apple ran away screaming from the idea of actually paying for that chip because Apple
Their volumes are just not high enough.
And I guess even Apple thought we can't, you know, if you're going to charge us that much, then we have to charge our customers so much money, then they're going to be like, no one's going to buy this Mac Pro because instead of it being a $10,000 machine, now it's an $80,000 machine.
And it's, you know, not as not eight times faster for that advantage.
Now, I don't know any of that for a fact, that's just speculation, but it's something that occurred to me when I thought about why they bailed on the 4X chip.
And it's irrelevant to the Mac Studio skipping the M2 Ultra because if the Mac Studio skips the M2 Ultra, then you can roll out the Mac Pro with an M2 Ultra and say,
It's the fastest Mac because the Mac Studio still has the M1 Ultra.
So if you had updated the Mac Studio, you'd be like, why would I ever buy a Mac Pro?
It's got the same system on the chip as the Mac Studio.
They both have the M2 Ultra.
I don't need any slots.
I don't understand.
And I can't put GPUs in the slots anyway or whatever the hell the stories are going to be there.
Why would I ever buy a Mac Pro?
But now by intentionally, not intentionally, but basically like logically, as we discussed previously, not updating the Mac Studio every year because it is also a low volume device.
The Mac Studio stays stuck with the M1 Ultra.
The Mac Pro gets the M2 Ultra and Apple gets to put a bunch of graphs on stage showing how much faster the Mac Pro is than any of their other Macs.
And I think that makes a perverse kind of Apple sense in terms of how they explain the machine, how they run away screaming from the cost of making the big 4X thing, and how the Mac Studio update cycle can skip a chip generation.
Just like, I mean, I'm presuming eventually the ARM Mac Pro will also skip chip generations just because the lower the volume, the less Apple seems to be able to justify updating the machine every single year.
The rumors and, you know, quote information that we keep hearing about the Mac Pro are so all over the place.
The more I think about it, the more time goes on, the more I think either you are right that, you know, the Mac Pro will basically just be the studio with slots of some kind and, you know, same chips and everything otherwise, or the rumors are way off, just totally wrong, or
Or option three, the Mac Pro will actually never ship.
And I don't know which of those is the most likely at this point.
An Apple person recently in an interview gave vague reassurances that the Mac Pro is still coming, as in, I think, less than a month ago.
I mean, they said AirPower was coming, and then it didn't.
I know, but they said the Mac Pro was coming in that event presentation, whatever it was, last year sometime, right?
And it's like, okay, well, maybe the plans have changed since then.
But I feel like if many, many months have passed since then,
And an Apple person officially is saying to the press, oh, yeah, the Mac Pro is coming.
I feel like that means it's coming.
What's coming?
And I agree with you that we could be totally wrong because this is the type of stuff that doesn't leak because no one cares about it except for us.
And the thing is, again, the rumors are so all over the place.
Whatever the Mac Pro is currently rumored to be is usually something that is so far different from everything else in the Apple Silicon lineup that it is kind of...
it seems like kind of a reach that that that's what they would be doing and so it's just i don't know i i'm starting to get worried really about the mac pro like i'm starting to think then you're then you're doing it right this is this is the mac pro experience i know right this is this is our this is our show for the last decade it's like you're starting to get worried about the mac pro you say marco we can play this clip at any time in the next 20 years it'll be true or the past 10.
Yeah, so I hope the answer is that the rumors are just wrong, or at least largely, because they're so all over the map and kind of not encouraging that... Yeah, I'm hoping that's the real answer, because that does happen too.
Yes, Apple does fail at things and change their minds.
Also, rumors are wrong a lot.
So I wouldn't say which one is more likely to be the case, but the rumors, they just don't make sense with what else we know and what else we expect.
And so...
Either they're going to chicken out of the high end like your theory about the Mac Studio being skipped a little bit and stuff like that, or something's wrong.
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There's some other Macs that were rumored potentially for a March event that may or may not happen.
The iMac, the 24 inch iMac that hasn't been updated in a while.
It still has the plain old M1, no modifier, no suffix.
And it's fine for that, you know, size of computer.
But the idea is, OK, well, that will eventually get the M2, won't it?
Uh, seems like maybe not because the M2 has been out for a while and the machines that Apple would update with the M2 have mostly been updated to the M2, but still not the iMac.
So most recently, German thinks that there won't be an update to the 24 inch iMac until the second half of the year at the earliest.
And by that point, the M3 will be available.
So it could be that the iMac also skips a generation and goes from M1 to M3.
Presumably for similar reasons.
Not a lot of people buy desktops, right?
I guess the iMac is probably, well, I don't know, which sells more, the 24-inch iMac or the Mac Mini?
Probably the iMac.
Probably the iMac.
Oh, yeah.
Those are sold in a lot of offices and stores.
They do sell a good number of those.
The volumes compared to the laptops have to be smaller.
Is that why it's skipping a generation?
We don't know.
Because of supply chain COVID and because of the ARM transition, it's still very difficult to pick up patterns in Apple's because it's still much chaos.
What is their pattern?
What is their update cadence?
Related to that...
Again, I think, oh, I think it was German, not an Apple sports person.
German said something to the effect that Apple, again, declaring this with no sourcing or anything, we're just saying Apple seems to want to update their Mac SOCs on a yearly cycle, just like the iPhone.
So, you know, A15, A16, A17, they want to do M1, M2, M3 every year, not a 1.5 year cycle, not a two year cycle.
Every year they want the M number to go up one, just like the A number goes up one.
If that's true, I endorse that plan.
Apple is, you know, go for it.
But that doesn't mean they're going to put those updated numbers in every one of their Macs on a yearly cycle, as evidenced so far by the Macs that have not come along to the M2 generation.
And the rumor is that some of them may wait for the M3.
So we'll see.
By the end of 2023, presumably 24-inch iMac will be updated.
Will it be updated with an M2?
Or will it be updated with an M3?
related to that one more mac the 15 inch macbook air that everyone's been talking about the macbook air already has an m2 in it they already updated that one from m1 to m2 so that's out that's here the 15 inch one the sort of uh you know straightforward rumor is it'll be just like the existing 13 inch macbook air except it'll be 15 inches it'll have a bigger battery and it'll have a bigger screen and it'll have an m2 in it and that's a perfectly fine product i think it's great i think it fills a whole new line i think it's cool
um there are some rumors that it might have an m2 pro in it instead of an m2 because you've got more room and more cooling the thing that i've been thinking about that i haven't seen anyone say yet and it's been weeks and i figure someone would have done it by now but if not i'm going to say it uh they talk about the room like maybe it won't even be called a macbook air i wonder what it will be called and they never they never let the other shoe drop wonder what it will be called what what will it be called two co-hosts of atp if it's not called macbook air and it's 15 inch what will it be called according to apple's current naming conventions
maybe macbook just by itself but i know that's what i was but it's a little big for that am i the only one who thinks this macbook studio that's what's between the bottom end and the pro it's the studio suffix it's the macbook studio it's 15 inches it's got an m2 pro the macbook studio it's right there no i don't buy it no studio is higher up the line studio basically means desktop pro right now like no it's it's below it's below pro
right because the mac pro is above the mac studio the macbook pros are above the macbook studio i see what you're saying i don't think i think it's going to be the 15 inch macbook air yes it probably just should be i mean this was predicated on it coming with the m2 pro which is one of the rumors right if it just comes with the m2 it's a 15 inch macbook air that's literally what it is right and that is the most straightforward thing and that's what i would expect that like i don't think they would give it the pro chip
Or best, you could option the pro chip and it would not come by default.
Oh, it definitely won't come by default.
Yeah, no, I feel like this really depends on whether Apple does what they did with the 14 plus, which is like we want to have a larger version of the cheap phone, right?
Yes.
And that's basically like it's 14 inside there.
It's just bigger.
Like that is straightforward what it is.
or they could say no we still refuse to do that if you want anything with a 15 inch screen you're going to pay more because that's a step up and even though we could make a 15 inch macbook air we're not going to we're going to make a like you know scaled down 16 inch macbook pro and we'll call it the macbook studio i hope they make the 15 inch macbook air they call it the air it has the air motherboard has air like pricing it'll be more expensive than 13 inch but not that much more because i think that's the product they need to make
But if they can't resist saying, well, no, as soon as that screen gets bigger than 13 inches, we're getting more money from you.
If they do that, then it's a MacBook Studio.
Although I do admit that that naming convention is too consistent for Apple to do it.
I mean, I expect, first of all, I expect this 15 inch MacBook Air.
This seems to be a real deal.
The rumors are very strong and I hope it's real because I think they'll sell a ton of them.
I think it's a great idea for a product.
And I don't think that it will too badly cannibalize the 16-inch just because I don't think – if you look at the current price gap here, the MacBook Air, even if you get the new M2 model, it's like $1,200.
And the cheapest 16-inch is $2,500.
This is this is a huge gap.
And so I would expect a MacBook Air 15 inch going from twelve hundred dollars from a 13 inch.
I would guess maybe it's two or three hundred dollars more.
So maybe it's like fifteen hundred dollars.
That's still very far from twenty five hundred dollars.
So that's the kind of difference I would expect there.
And if they do that and it's otherwise the same computer with no other changes, no pro chip, nothing higher spec, just a bigger screened MacBook Air for a few hundred dollars more.
And a bigger battery, importantly, which I think is going to make that machine extremely attractive.
Yeah, but honestly, I don't even know how much... I mean, the battery would need to be proportionally bigger just to have the more screen area be lit up, but it doesn't need more battery life.
The MacBook Air has tons of battery life already.
I know, but what I'm saying is I think the amount of extra area they have for battery is more than enough to account for the larger screen size.
I don't know if I'm right about that calculation, but that's my gut feeling that...
they will have excess battery.
And since the M2 MacBook Air already has good battery life, this thing will be a battery camel.
And I think it will make it very popular because, hey, you pay a little bit more money, you get a bigger screen and even more battery life.
That is a very attractive machine.
Like I've wanted Apple to make a machine like this for a long time.
that's why i kind of feel like i can't believe they're actually going to do it they did do with the iphone and the rumor is the 14 plus or whatever is not selling that well it disappoints me and i hope they don't get scared by that and pull a mini and be like oh we did that once and people didn't buy enough of them so we're not doing it again it's like apple every model can't be the best seller and they're not all going to sell evenly someone's one phone is always going to be the one that sells the least doesn't mean you cancel that one just have a you know a cheap phone and big and small an expensive phone and big and small and
apple seems to be like well we made the cheap phone a big and small not enough people bought the big one so we're back to just small want more pay more i don't like that attitude and instead what they're going to do is the you know the iphone ultra right it's like well we have the iphone pro and that wasn't expensive enough so we're going super high end it's the iphone that that is we haven't talked about the rumor but the iphone ultra rumor is out there that there's you know an even higher price point for the one that's made out of diamond or whatever yeah
No, but going back for a sec to the 15-inch Air.
So first of all, your battery camel theory is good.
I'm not sure they would necessarily do it, though, because batteries are heavy, and the Air brand means thin and light.
I mean, it means mainstream, really.
I'm saying they're not making it any thicker than the 12.
They just get more battery because it's 15 inches.
Like, that's just free real estate.
But it's not free weight, though.
I know, but they're not going to leave it empty with Air.
No.
It's going to be no battery.
They can put a cellular modem in there.
um oh stop it actually actually they can't that's that's impossible it's been proven yeah but yeah also you know so anyway this machine i expect to be great it feels a little early to be seeing any m3 max uh you know the m2 macbook air just came out last summer so right yeah no the macbook air is not rumored to be the 15 inch is not rumored to be m3 the only ones that have rumored to be m3 is potentially the imac which would be second half of the year and uh
and that's oh and well there was a couple other m3 ones rumored about more of this but even the mac pro there would be m2 ultra not m3 ultra yeah so we'll see about all that but anyway the 15 inch air it sounds real i think they're going to do a good job with it and i think you know it continues there it fills in a huge gap in the lineup because right now if you want a bigger screen than 13 inch you have you have to again like more than double the price and
Again, cannibalizing the 16-inch I don't think is a huge problem because what you get with the 16-inch is not just one more inch of screen space.
You're getting way higher-end components in other areas.
When you compare to what the MacBook Air offers today versus what the MacBook Pro offers today, the MacBook Pro has way better screen, way better performance, way higher resource limits, better speakers, better microphones.
It's a lot better in a bunch of ways.
And so a 15 inch Air would not really eat into that.
Meanwhile, if you are looking at the MacBook Air at twelve hundred dollars and you're like, well, I wish the screen was a little bit bigger.
You don't go look and say, oh, well, OK, I'll pay twenty five hundred dollars for the extra couple inches.
No, you just buy the smaller MacBook Air or you go buy a cheap PC.
So I don't think that upsell process is working that way very well now.
And I think this would be a pretty big thing.
Also, I think where this would sell a ton is in corporate sales.
Tons of companies buy large quantities of MacBook Airs.
And they also like to have a little bit bigger options.
And I think if there's a 15-inch MacBook Air, they would sell so many of those in bulk to fleet buyers.
And that's another reason why I think they're not going to go super high-end with anything.
I don't think they're even going to go with the pro chip there.
Again, because the purpose of the MacBook Air is large-volume, inexpensive model that satisfies most people's needs.
And the regular M2 does that.
You don't need the M2 Pro to do that.
I know right now a lot of companies do just buy a bunch of 16-inch MacBook Pros as their stock computer, but that's mostly for higher-end uses, like developers, designers, that kind of thing.
Not a lot of people are buying those for their sales staff.
Apple's stupid price structure for the big laptops cost a ton of money was passed on to me in my corporate life because companies in general want to offer...
Yeah.
oh, oh, wait a second.
If you want the Mac with the big, because it's literally double the price.
It's not like a hundred dollars, right?
If you want the one with the big screen, you have to be this level or your boss has to approve it or whatever.
And you're like, I don't, I don't care.
Like they don't, people who ask for that, they don't know or care anything about Macs.
They just want a bigger laptop screen because it's easier for them to do stuff and they work a lot on their laptops when they're
Not on the road even, but just in meetings and rooms.
People are like, oh, why don't you just hook a monitor up?
Nobody cares.
Buy a cheap Dell monitor.
That's fine for when they're at their desks.
But people are, quote-unquote, on the go, even within the office back in the day when we were all in the office, just going from conference room to conference room.
And a 15-inch screen is bigger.
And people would request in the companies that I work for, I want a Mac laptop and I want one with a big screen.
And they got so much pushback because of Apple's stupid pricing structure.
So if the 15-inch was available, corporations would snap it up because they do not want to buy...
to the cheap corporations, do not want just most of them, don't want to buy every employee who wants one a big screen Mac laptop because they're so expensive.
And honestly, employees don't need a 16-inch MacBook Pro if all they're going to do is check email all day and look at web browsers and have Excel open, right?
15-inch MacBook Air will do that perfectly.
I would go even broader than that.
Almost everyone doesn't need a 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Almost everyone's needs could be solved just fine with a 15-inch MacBook Air if it was – maybe you bump the storage and RAM up for some people.
But otherwise, many of us are still stuck in the old way of thinking like, well, the low-end consumer-priced entries in the Apple lineup are –
not suitable for if you're, you know, a video editor or, you know, a heavy coder or whatever.
And that maybe used to be true.
That's not true anymore.
Now, almost anybody's job can be done perfectly well and not just like barely done, can be done well.
on a macbook air class processor almost no one actually needs the larger resource i'm very happy to keep making them i'm going to keep buying them but the fact is like if i had to do my job entirely on a macbook air i could a year ago i did like it was fine like the the apple silicon class low-end chips quote low-end are so good we are not even coming close to to filling that headroom and actually using it in most fields
And every year as those chips get better and better, the number of tasks that you really benefit with the higher end hardware for is getting smaller.
It's a very good place to be.
Already the 13-inch MacBook Air is an amazing computer for almost everything.
Make it a little bit bigger and you cover way more needs and you don't need to make the chip any faster if you don't want to.
A couple of things they could do with a 15-inch MacBook Air if they wanted, because we were talking about, oh, if they fill that space with battery, it makes it heavier or whatever.
You know what you could fill that space with?
I know they're not going to do this, but I've just thrown that out there for Apple.
I know it's too late, but 15-inch MacBook Air, plenty of room for an SD card slot.
i know we were talking about what do you get with a 16 inch you get an sd card slot that is one thing i really would like you get an sd card slot and you get an hdmi port i'm not saying on the air put the hdmi it might not be thick enough right but sd is very slim and it will fit and if you have all that space maybe think about that the other thing you can do you're not going to get the cool hdr screen on the macbook pros that's part of what makes it expensive those are amazing screens but the macbook air uh ships with a default resolution that's not native res for its screen
The 15-inch potentially could ship with native res for its screen instead of a scaled resolution.
No, that's a pro thing.
They're not going to do that.
I don't know.
It's 15-inch, though.
I'm saying it's not 16-inch native resolution.
It's 15-inch native.
And honestly, screens for native res 15-inch that aren't HDR, you're not breaking the bank on that, Apple.
That is not advanced technology.
That is a known quantity.
You can get those screens.
It's not that much more expensive.
Yeah.
And because so few people even know about what we're talking about, the fact that the MacBook Air comes at non-native res out of the box, people don't even know that.
So it's not even like it's a selling proposition where you're pushing people up to the high-end line for that.
At a certain point, not having native res even on your cheapest laptop becomes silly.
We're not at that point yet, but we're getting close.
And I feel like with a 15-inch MacBook Air, it's a chance for Apple to take that next step up.
So on Upgrade, when I guested a week, I think it was last week, we discussed this rumor about a compute card.
And there were references for this found in the iOS 16.4 beta.
And Mike and I had a conversation trying to figure out, well, what does that even mean?
And I don't think we came up with any particularly great conclusions or solid conclusions.
What is this about?
Is this something for the Mac Pro or is this something else entirely?
Yeah.
so this this is such an age-old rumor for apple stuff but i think for computers in general because it's like a sci-fi thing right i remember back i guess this was around the power pc time perhaps when the when the mac was transitioning to power pc and especially when like the the g5 was rumored to be coming out after the g4 uh this is an evergreen rumor and the idea is
that it's some kind of powerful computer that gets more powerful the more kind of building blocks you buy and plug into it.
And it's a thing that makes sense to non-technical people, but anyone who has ever done programming or ever studied computer science and understands...
just the basic theoretical limits of parallelism and then the financial and practical limits of, you know, wide buses that are very fast and what kind of intertext are needed became different components.
It very quickly becomes the realm of fantasy to think that you're going to have just a bunch of these interchangeable modules and you'll click them together.
And if you want your computer to be more powerful, you just click two more modules on it gets twice as fast because you had two modules and you put two more and now you have four and it's just...
Things, you know, things don't scale that way.
If you look at what the speeds are in the interconnects between a computer and its caches and its memory and its SSD and how those buses work and the idea that you just make one backbone that carries everything and will plug things into it.
And it's like, I mean, anything's possible if you give enough money, right?
But not at prices consumers are going to spend.
Even at the supercomputer level, this stuff is very expensive and very difficult to do in a way that the interconnect does not cause bottlenecks and give you diminishing returns.
uh so for people this compute card rumor people quickly said this is for the mac pro you'll be able to buy a mac pro and it'll come with one m2 ultra but if you want it to be faster you can buy a compute module that has another m2 ultra and it's like well if you do want two computers just get two mac minis like i mean do you want two computers because two computers sitting next to each other unless you can split up your video render between the two of them which is possible you know you could farm out the job and blah blah but there is some overhead to that
You don't magically get twice as fast by putting two SOCs in there.
It's like, how do they talk to each other?
How do they have memory coherence?
This is not something new, but in sci-fi, it's cool to think that everything is modular, and if you don't have to think about what happens when you plug a module, and if you're just a user reading a book about sci-fi or whatever, you're like, I'll just plug it in, and everything will be faster.
But if you're someone who has to design this, you're like, wait, so how does that work?
How do they share information and resources and I.O., and how do they interact with memory and
You've got a non-uniform memory architecture where some memory is more distant than others, and it's overlapping cache hierarchies and cache coherence between the CPUs and how the jobs bounce around it.
It's like, and on and on and on.
Part of the reason that Apple's SoCs are as amazing as they are is because they are systems on a chip where...
Within that system on a chip, you've got your memory, you've got all your computing resources, you've got everything locally, you know where everything is, and you can optimize all the paths between them to be as efficient as possible because everything is close together and everything is designed by the same party.
Once you say, oh, there's going to be another physical box that's going to plug into a plug, now you're sipping through a straw.
You're like, well, we won't make it a straw.
We'll make it really wide.
Well, now you're spending lots and lots of money.
So this compute card stuff as an idea that it's going to be a thing to make the Mac Pro faster,
daughter cards for or whatever you want to call them for the mac pro that add computing sure we have that fpga thing that did afterburner you can buy cards to accelerate video things they're called video cards i don't know if apple will support those we'll see um there are cards that you can plug in that will do a specific task faster but the idea that you'll just be able to make the whole computer twice as fast by plugging in something that is basically a second mac pro on a card
if you plug in a second mac pro on a card you've got a second mac pro which is fine and well and good and probably cost you a lot of money but that's kind of like the old like 486 card that you can plug into a mac now my mac can run windows things yeah because you plugged in a 486 pc into your mac so now you have two computers in one which is great but you didn't just make your mac twice as fast
So I basically entirely discount the fantasy rumor of just adding resources to your Mac Pro by plugging in compute cards.
I don't discount the idea of cards that you can plug in that can do a special job faster.
Because again, the Afterburner card does that.
And there's a long history of cards that you plug into a Mac Pro that can do a special job faster on behalf of the host computer.
That makes perfect sense.
Even if that card has some other SoC on it, like a specially made SoC that just has neural engines all over it, right?
If Apple wanted to make that, they could.
And that is a reasonable application of an accelerator card where you would farm out a job to the accelerator card.
It would do the ML job.
The ML card might even have its own memory, kind of like GPUs have VRAM or whatever.
And then it would give you the result back.
But the idea that there would be two peer SoCs that are exactly the same and they would magically make your computer twice as fast, not going to happen.
So don't worry about that.
All that said, I don't think that's what this compute card thing is.
I don't know what it is, but it's kind of related to the rumors we've heard about like the AR VR headset and how whether all the computing is going on inside the AR VR headset.
Or whether like your phone is doing some of it or whether there's an external compute module that you have to connect it to or something.
Maybe it's some leftover from that.
Maybe that's, you know, maybe the AR VR headset will work that way somehow with a compute card that you can plug into a Mac Pro to do development work when you're projecting onto the headset.
Or maybe it's something really boring.
as unrelated to either one of these things the fact that it's in the ios 16 4.4 beta doesn't mean that it's a phone feature it just means that you know the compute card might run ios because if ios has references to compute card ios would have to run on the compute card and so we'd have to know about the compute card the same way that ios probably has references to the studio display because apparently inside the studio display is a little version of ios running all the speakers and the camera and all the other stuff so
I'm assuming the compute card thing is way, way, way, way less exciting than people think it is.
But until and unless Apple releases something related to this, we can speculate.
Just try to tamp down the idea that you're going to plug modules into your Mac Pro to make it twice as fast.
Noted.
I'll be aware of that when I buy my Mac Pro for $80,000.
If they ever ship it.
If they ever ship it.
And it will take, you know, 1,500 watts to power it.
Small price to pay.
Am I right, John?
Yeah.
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Hey, so do you need us for this next thing or can Marco and I just like come back in an hour?
I mean, I don't know.
Like as I, as I said, I had a two day break in my COVID isolation where, where I could unpack all the boxes that had arrived in my house and have fun with my little project.
I talked about it last week.
I said, you know, I had a bunch of boxes arrived to upgrade my sound system, but I hadn't been able to unpack them yet.
And eventually I wouldn't, I would talk about it.
So yeah.
I did do what I could in that two-day period.
I didn't know it was going to be a two-day period, but practically speaking, I didn't have time to complete it, but I figured I'll just give an overview of what I did.
To review, my project was upgrade my sound system because I bought a new TV and a new receiver and a new Blu-ray player recently, and I've talked about that on the show.
I didn't buy new speakers.
My speakers are very old.
They're very small.
They're fairly cheap, and I figured every other part of my system has been updated.
I should update the speakers too.
And it wasn't just like, oh, I should just do it because I just need to spend money.
It was... I felt like they were not holding up their end of the bargain in the television and movie watching experience.
Not that they were bad, but now my TV was so much better and the speakers...
The speaker is 4K now.
My Blu-ray player is 4K.
And the speakers, they're fine.
It was a 5.1 system.
I'll see if I can put a link in here, Casey.
I'll see if I can find one to my 5.1 system.
I think they still sell it.
It's pretty cheap.
It comes with all the speakers you need.
It comes with front, left, right, and back surrounds, and a center channel, and a subwoofer.
But they're small.
These are small speakers.
I like the fact that they were small because originally I was like, oh, how am I going to even find room for 551 speakers in here?
Is my family going to accept it?
You know, so it was good that they were small, but small also means...
Not great sound reproduction.
Obviously, none of these small speakers have any bass.
That's where the subwoofer comes in, but subwoofer trying to, you know, cheap subwoofer trying to fill in the bass for all these tiny speakers.
And practically speaking, one of the things that would always come up, and I talked about this when I was setting up my receiver, is people complain that they can't hear the dialogue.
Now, that's not just my sound system.
There's many articles about how sound mixing in television and movies has been making it harder and harder to hear dialogue.
Wait, I thought that your surround system with your center channel was supposed to make that a problem of the past, because I don't have that problem with my basic two-channel stereo setup.
You don't watch movies or TV shows, or at least not recent ones.
What are you talking about?
You're watching sitcoms.
I know you can hear the dialogue there and the laugh track.
I know you're watching Last of Us with Tiff, though.
That's good that you're getting there.
Yeah, I'm watching Last of Us.
We're watching New Girl.
That's not that old.
You're not watching Christopher Nolan movies where everybody mumbles.
No.
So...
the center channel as i talked about about receiver really does help there because you you have you know where the dialogue is coming from it's coming from the center channel and what you can do what i did which is turn up the center channel which makes the dialogue louder than the other stuff because if you just turn up the volume everything gets louder and if it's mixed poorly again the problem is not necessarily the speakers involved but if it's mixed in such a way that the dialogue is overwhelmed by the other sound effects just turning up the volume doesn't help because it just makes everything louder so having a center channel
You can just turn up the center channel and pretty much just the dialogue will be there.
And that really does help.
But it's not just that.
It's not just the center channel.
My center channel speaker is small.
And also, but if you, you know, seen the diagram of my room that we talked about last week, I've got two couches in my room.
And when we'd have like my family was visiting for the holiday or whatever, even just, you know, my, you know,
local family just sitting around at the various seats in the couch especially someone wants to lay on one couch they take up half the couch and they have the dog with them so two other people on the other couch we are spread pretty widely in our weird room around the television screen right and the center channel speaker speaker is only really pointing at one person and if you have a cheap small center channel speaker without sort of a wide dispersion
The person who's sitting in the quote-unquote good seat can hear the dialogue fine, but the people in the other seats feel like they don't hear it as well because, first of all, the volume is lower, and second of all, who knows which frequencies are reaching them, right?
So you can turn up the volume, but then the person sitting in the good seat says, the dialogue's too loud now, right?
So these are the problems I was solving.
Better sound system in terms of just, like, just better sound overall, right?
Not, you know, small, tiny speakers that can't reproduce lots of frequencies.
And also, you know, better dialogue, better clarity of dialogue, but also better in more seating positions, which means a speaker that is able to send the same sound information to a wide...
array of people like instead of just a beam that goes straight out from the speaker more of a fan shape so that if you're sitting directly in front of it offset by five degrees 10 degrees 15 degrees it still sounds more or less the same so these were my goals with this system oh and also don't spend a lot of money obviously
And don't be humongous, right?
Because I have no place to put any speakers, let alone big giant speakers.
And that was my COVID research project.
And I had a tech podcast host twist thrown in here, which I can't complain about because it is my privilege to be in this position, but it was nevertheless a confounding factor in my decision-making process.
Yeah.
A nice person who works for a speaker company passed along a friends and family discount to me for a couple of particular brands of speakers.
And the discount was substantial.
So now it's like those elf puzzle problems.
It's like you have to find, you know, speakers that aren't that expensive, that fit in your room, that have wide dispersion for, you know, the center channel audio clarity and are better than your existing ones that aren't that expensive.
And oh, by the way, these particular brands are way cheaper than other ones.
And it really, really confounded things because you can't just shop.
I'll just shop based on price and features.
every time you shop based on price of features like up but is this one of those ones that cheap now suddenly it raises an esteem is like or maybe you can you can shop the next level up in that product line but maybe you should shop down and save some money and spend the money on other things that made everything so much harder for me i know boohoo me you got a big discount on speakers it's mostly so hard to pick right so uh one of the first things i encountered in my research was trying to find people who talk about the issues that i was saying how you know
the the centerpiece haha of my system was going to be the center channel speaker people don't think about that in a 5.1 system because they think about like the glory speakers the left and right channel for your stare or whatever but when you're watching television and movies the center channel is where it's at yes all the dialogue comes through there lots of other sounds come through there too it's the main sort of like central sound of the show
It's not like listening to stereo music where the left and right channels are the stars.
The center channel is the star on television shows and often a lot of movies.
So if you're going to spend a lot of money on your 5.1 system, do not skimp on the center channel.
That is a very important channel.
the thing that i found and was confirmed by a video that i'll link in the show notes is that most companies that sell speakers also believe that the left and right channel are the glory channels and do not care about the center channel and they make weird bad speakers for center channels compared to their cellular channels right because well for two reasons one
The center channels are often intended to be laid on their side for obvious packaging reasons.
And that messes with speakers, especially if you're like, oh, we have our special fancy audio engineers and they made this amazing speaker for our stereo speakers, right?
If you lay that speaker on its side, all of the careful, you know, engineering they did to make the sound dispersion work is now sideways.
like it was made to be uniform at a certain height for you know listening for people sitting in front of them with the expectation that speaker is vertical but when you put that speaker on its side now its expression pattern is on its side unless you're laying on your side as well things aren't going to work quite the same way so that's one problem second problem is center channel speakers are often smaller again for obvious reasons people need to stick them in their entertainment center they want to put them under their tv you can't make them 20 feet tall unless you're one of the real uh
uh home audio people like the home theater people the thing that the fancy home theater people do is they do what they do at uh movie theaters which is the center channel speakers are behind the screen which is acoustically transparent and they're like the size of refrigerators wait what the screen is transparent
In a movie theater, like the movie screen in a movie theater.
Oh, oh, oh, right.
The speakers are behind there, right?
Right, okay, yes.
That's why the sound comes out and it's acoustically transparent like movie projection screen, right?
And people who do home theaters in their basements with projection screens, that's what they do.
Because you can put huge refrigerator-sized speakers there, right?
Just like in a movie theater and spend lots of money.
That's not me.
That's not relevant to me.
So center channel speakers are...
Oh, I have to fit this in my, you know, I have to fit this above my VCR, huh?
Whatever.
Above whatever you have, above my cable box or whatever.
Or it has to fit underneath my, you know, right by the CV, kind of like a sound bar.
So when you make a center channel speaker really small like that, it's not going to be as good as your, you know, left or right speaker because the drivers on it are smaller.
You can't have anything even approaching a woofer because everything is super tiny.
it's kind of a mess um so this this youtube video is the problem with most center channel speakers and it's from this audio one of these obsessive nerdy audio reviewers that i found in my travels uh and he has this really weird measuring device where he puts a speaker in the center of the room and sends his robotic armor and it measures uh you know sound dispersion while playing test tones of various frequencies and stuff like that and he produces these little polar coordinate uh graphs
of sound dispersion that show like you know you see these graphs in the show i'll probably put one of them as a chapter art or link to them uh they're on the web um they're not it's not a spatial diagram so don't picture yourself seated at the bottom of this diagram uh it's polar coordinate so it's a circular chart uh and as you go from the circle to the edge that's frequency right so i think what is the outer edge is the higher frequencies and the middle is like the base yeah and
So at every step along that thing, it's saying, okay, if you're listening to a 200 hertz signal and you're sitting at zero degrees, here's how strong it is, and 300, 400, 500, and so on and so forth, right?
But still, what you want to see in this diagram is a big fan...
shaped region that is similarly colored that says if you're anywhere within this fan you're going to hear all the frequencies more or less the same way you would if you were sitting dead in front of the speaker that is a speaker with good dispersion and they show horizontal and vertical versions of that
And one of the ones that was used as the example in the video that was good was called the SVS Prime.
SVS is a speaker brand.
Prime is their product line.
The SVS Prime Center had really good dispersion.
And he also gave an example, if you scroll down on the show, you'll see this of the Mica MB42XC as an example of a center channel with really bad dispersion.
And if you compare the two diagrams, you can see, oh, wow, big difference, right?
If you are sitting even, you know, 10 or 20 degrees off axis on this Mica speaker,
many frequencies are just gone for you right like an important frequencies frequencies and the and the uh the uh words of kill bill frequencies that you will miss right like speech frequencies or you know and the speech range right you can look at them in there it should be all red and dark red instead it's like blue which is like the minimum color there are spots where they're blue green yellow
You're missing lots of frequencies, even if you're sitting in the seat next to the quote-unquote good seat on the couch.
So that's an example of a center channel with bad dispersion.
And you'll not be shocked to learn that most center channels have really bad dispersion.
And one of the reasons cited in the video is that most center channels, since they're laid on their side, are done with like...
A mid range and then a tweeter and then a mid range.
So it looks like three drivers if you take off the little speaker grill.
And they're only mid ranges instead of woofers because they're so skinny.
Right.
So it's a tweeter right in the middle of two mid range drivers.
And the interference pattern you get from that is not great with the two mid-ranges overlapping with each other and having the typical interference pattern.
He does this whole thing with the wave pool, but if you just know how, you know, two sources of waves can interact and leave, like, dead zones, that happens.
And also, with just one tweeter, tweeters tend to be pretty directional.
With just one tweeter pointed in one direction, you're missing out on all those frequencies as well.
um so the svs prime center was said this is this is the center channel with good dispersion but that doesn't mean the svs prime center is a good speaker it's just saying hey dispersion wise it sounds the same in all these locations but then you get into okay but how good a speaker is it how is its frequency response how does it sound you know blah blah you know all the speaker review stuff so this is the rabbit hole i went down trying to find a center channel speaker speaker that was a good speaker that fit in my entertainment center and that had good dispersion
And that really narrowed the field down a lot because I needed to find speakers where I could see a dispersion diagram, either from this person or another person.
Lots of people do these type of diagrams, right?
So I could tell what the dispersion was like.
One of the things you can tell is if it's, you know, he gave all these acronyms like, uh, MTM is a mid tweeter mid.
You can do, uh,
WMTW where it's woofer mid tweeter mid woofer like all these different arrangements most of those arrangements are bad in that you know you're not going to get good dispersion the two arrangements that were good were one that Marco will be familiar with
the keff brand does a thing where they do what do they call it coaxial or uh yeah they put the tweeter inside the mid exactly so they did they it's it looks like it's just one speaker cone thing but the thing in the middle is the tweeter and the thing on the outside is the mid and that prevents like the the waves overlapping in a destructive interference way because they're literally coming from the same centralized source oh it sounds so damn good i don't know if that's why these speakers sound so damn good but these speakers sound so damn good
It's not necessarily a big thing about audio quality because that's not what we're talking about.
We're talking about dispersion.
We're saying if I sit 10 degrees off, does it sound more or less similar to what I'm sitting dead on?
And the coaxial tweeter inside the mid or the woofer?
makes it sound the same more the same the more you get off access now whether it sounds good or not is the question of how quality high quality speaker whatever so kef speakers tend to have pretty okay dispersion and more importantly not a lot of dead zones where you get the destructive interference of like the tweeter and the mid or whatever right the other arrangement that seems to work well is
a mid and then this is what the svs is and then a tweeter uh a woofer and then a tweeter and a mid on top of each other vertically because again stereo speakers very often have you know a big driver and a little one a woofer and a tweeter above each other like vertically
And lots of speakers are tuned to sound good that way.
Stereo speakers, you know, setting aside the Kef ones, are tuned to sound good that way.
It is a common arrangement.
So when you lay a speaker on its side, if you can get the tweeter and the mid still to be on top of each other, they'd be side by side if it was vertical.
But when you lay it on its side, you do that arrangement.
That also produces a good dispersion.
at least in the SVS Prime.
I forget what they call that.
I think they're called like three-way or something where it's WT slash MW because it's a woofer and then a tweeter and a mid vertically and then another woofer.
That's what the SVS Prime is.
And then other brands also do make conical ones.
And so that really, really narrowed down the field because pretty much every single standard channel speaker is one of those
Not one of those good ones.
It's either KEF, which does the conical, SVS Prime, which, as it turns out, is not a great speaker, or the one I eventually settled on, which is from a band I'd ever heard of, the ELAC UC-52.
You got an ELAC?
I've never heard of this brand.
I haven't ever owned Elix speakers, but they are extremely well regarded.
So this center channel speaker has coaxial mid and tweeter in the center of the center channel speaker.
It's got like two pretty large, I don't know if you call them woofers, but the center thing of it is one of those coaxial type of things.
It has really good distribution, according to the diagrams.
Not as the SDS Prime, but still pretty good.
And also, it's also a good speaker.
Like, that's also important.
Like, you want it to be a good speaker with good frequency response and clarity and all the other crap you can read about or whatever, right?
The downside is that it's huge.
This is going to be big.
Yeah, I was going to say, like, I was just looking at the woofers in it are five and a quarter inch woofers.
So that's, this is a large speaker.
I have two of those in it and the mid, like, that's...
I mean, the other thing you learned about doing all the speaker research is you see lots of pictures of speakers and they never show like anything next to them for size.
So you might have in your mind how big they are.
Like there's nothing for comparison.
Like they should put like a little person or like an Apple or like a, you know, a quarter or like a MacBook Pro or something that recognizes the size of...
it's like how big is it because they all look small and you see them on the picture and then you go look at the dimensions you're like wait what that's 24 inches deep what the kef speakers are great example your kef speakers are so deep yes they're just so huge so everything i'm looking at i was constantly measuring will this fit will this fit in at my entertainment center the elac uc52 fits in my entertainment center
barely and you know how it fits i have to eject from the shelf that it is on both the tivo and the blu-ray player see ya because there's just no room for them with that stupid speaker in there but i said oh this is going to be you know the centerpiece of my system and is literally my only option it's this or the svs prime which isn't as good a speaker
The other thing I was worried about that I talked about in Mastodon is like, people tend to advise against mix and matching different speakers on a home theater system because you have to match the timbre and it's not going to sound right and this, that, and the other thing.
And it's like, okay, I did a lot of suggesting to people like, is that always terrible?
Can you make that work?
How bad is it?
And I got varying opinions.
Some people are like, oh, it's not that bad.
You're not going to notice the difference.
Other people are like, never do it.
You should never mix.
But if you don't mix, you're stuck with like,
Every one of these manufacturers has a product line like, buy all our speakers from us.
Here it is.
Here's our 5.1 system.
And people tend to review individual speakers, not entire systems.
This speaker is good.
This speaker is bad.
This left and right channel are good.
These surround speakers suck.
This center channel sucks.
That's usually the thing in the 5.1 systems.
Here's this 5.1 system.
The center channel sucks.
Here's the 5.1 system.
The center channel sucks.
I found the ELAC one.
The center channel didn't suck.
I could have bought ELAC left and rights and ELAC surrounds, but guess what?
They're huge.
And also very, very expensive.
And by the way, ELAC is not one of the brands that I discount.
So I'm paying full price, baby, for the ELAC UC52.
I did try to buy one on eBay because I'm trying to bring the price down.
Someone was selling the ELAC 52 for way too little money.
And I lowballed them because it was like, you know, our best offer.
I lowballed them by 50 bucks and I never responded.
And I just, I felt a little bit scared even buying it on eBay because I'm like, what condition will this be in?
And speakers are delicate.
And my wife kind of scared me off a little by saying, who knows what you're going to get in the mail?
That picture is really grainy.
I'm like, you know what?
That picture is grainy.
Well, also like, you know, worst case, if you really hated it, you can't easily return it to just an individual on eBay, you know?
Yeah, like what if I get this and it's like not worth the money or I thought it would fit, but it really doesn't.
Because remember, another thing I have to do with the center is tilt it up a little bit because I'm putting it like it's right under my TV.
It's as close as it can get to be under my TV.
But my under my TV, you know, under my TV is not where my TV is.
So I have to tilt it up slightly.
So it.
aims at our faces when we're sitting on the couch so it just barely fits oh my word so that was the big the big expense no discount elac uc 52 basically my only choice i knew i wasn't going to be able to buy other elac speakers because they're just too expensive and also too big to fill the other roles so i got that
um but then after that painful experience i'm like you know what i need to use a discount for the rest of these speakers because i just can't i can't continue at this pace uh it's not super expensive how much is the like it's like 400 and change something yeah yeah it's not that bad like in terms of like volume or weight you feel like you're getting it's so big i don't know what's in there but whatever it is it's heavy and expensive this is 400 bucks worth of wood that's for sure yeah
Um, so for the, uh, for the rest of the speakers, I said, okay, well, if I can't match, you know, uh, I can't buy a full EOX system.
Why don't I just at least buy matching front, left, right, and back surrounds from, from the same manufacturer.
So at least those will all match.
And I'll buy one from that I have a discount on.
And so that's what I did for my front right and left and my back right and left.
I bought Polk speakers because I had a discount.
That is literally why.
Right.
And they're well reviewed and they're good.
And I was able to shop.
What I ended up doing in Marco fashion was rather than saving money and getting the cheap speakers with a big discount.
i got i just went out the line until the speakers that i bought with a discount were as much as i was willing to spend for the full price cheap ones you know what i mean i'd basically yeah so i bought the polk r100s for my front right and left not just because of the discount but also because they are they're bookshelf speakers and they are among the smallest bookshelf speakers in their sort of price category because unlike the kef ones they are not 19 inches deep for some reason right
And that was important to me getting them in the room because I have very little place for these to go and they're like near walls and everything.
So I bought those and I had to buy stands to put them on because they're bookshelf speakers and I wanted them to be at the right level and the stands were also expensive and I didn't get a discount on them.
Maybe I'm Casey.
I need to get a discount on everything.
If I get a discount on it, I'll buy it.
For the back surrounds, I bought the very poorly reviewed Polk XT15 back surround speakers.
But honestly, I don't care because they're back surround speakers.
Yeah, who cares?
They are bigger.
They're undoubtedly better than my past speakers, for sure.
They are bigger than my past speakers.
But so far, they have passed the spousal approval.
I mean, not approval.
She said disapproving things about them when I was setting them up.
but didn't demand didn't didn't demand that i take them down immediately and i feel like i feel like you'll get used to them yeah if they aren't immediately rejected you're in a good you're in a good place yeah they are bigger than they were but they're they're as small as i could get instead i need one of them to be better than my other ones my other ones were so tiny and these are okay um so there i've got my my five speakers here on my expensive center and my poke uh right and left and back right and left and then i need subwoofer
And here is where... So it's like I've got KCM1's shoulder saying, buy a Polk subwoofer.
You've got a discount.
And I've got Marco saying, don't buy it just because you have a discount.
Get a good subwoofer.
No, that's not... You haven't asked me this question yet.
I love having subwoofers.
The difference between a great subwoofer and a cheap subwoofer is not as big as the other speakers involved.
It is a much smaller difference and you get severely diminishing returns.
The audio reviewing world disagrees with you strongly.
Look, there's different characteristics.
One thing I love is a force-canceling subwoofer.
I've mentioned before, the Sonos sub is one of those.
I've never admitted this before in public.
I think only Ben Thompson knows this until this moment.
But I have a small Kef subwoofer under my desk for my computer subwoofer, and it was absurdly expensive.
I know which one.
you got i got the smallest because i looked at all the reviews for it and yes it was but it's made of aluminum it's really heavy it's actually pretty good and it's force canceling and before because before this i had um some inexpensive one from amazon you know one of those one of those brands that had some kind of hipster name that like seems like it would be fancy and you get it and just like particle board and it's just crap
Do you remember which one it was?
Because now I know every subwoofer in the world.
I'd have to look it up.
But I ended up, I sent it back to Westchester and it's waiting in a closet to be used for something.
But that one, it was just too like boomy.
Find out which one that is because I may want to buy it from you.
It's probably, it wasn't, I wouldn't recommend it.
I know, I'll get to that in a second.
But yeah, so the one you were describing, you said it's force canceling.
I believe they mostly describe it kind of Subaru fashion.
Kanto.
oh yeah okay i know canta uh and i know i know those subs um it's not that bad but uh the yeah the keff one is the keff one is way better yes it's a good sub but i believe the keff one they describe it in subaru fashion as essentially horizontally opposed and not because that's what it is if you look inside it's horizontally opposed drivers but not necessarily force cantering in the same way as the as the sonos one is it's still a very good sub
No, it is.
They don't use that term, but it's the same design.
It's the same thing.
And there's a couple others on the market that are force-canceling, but it's very, very few.
The other thing about the Keflon that definitely recommends it is it's good sub and also very small for how good it is.
That is the key.
Very, very small.
That's why I was looking at that one until I saw the price and then ran away.
Yeah, it also it has a bunch of adjustments on the back.
So, you know, not only I mean, every decent subwoofer will have like the crossover and level adjustments in the back.
But, you know, because that tells, you know, how much what frequency is to play through the subwoofer and how loudly that's those are very important.
But the calf also has all all different adjustments for things like, you know, like different like little EQ profiles to know, like, you know, how how much bass do you want?
How boomy do you want it to be?
How strong do you want it to like, you know, puncture whatever?
And I found that it was weird.
When I was using the cheaper subwoofer, it's under my computer desk.
This is where I listen to music mostly, so it's under my desk.
And when I was sitting in my chair, the volume it would take to sound good at my chair level above the desk, and therefore the desk is between the subwoofer and me, at that same volume level with the cheap subwoofer, somebody sitting on the chair, the lounge chair behind me,
they they had a kind of a more direct earshot to it because the desk wasn't blocking it as much and it sounded way too boomy if you were like not sitting in the desk and for whatever reason whatever the design was that's how the cheap ones and then when i when i upgraded to the kef that problem went away and it was i was able to get a like a pleasing subwoofer strength at desk level that didn't also sound super boomy to the rest of the room
um so that there's there's lots of advantage to this people in apartments like them because you can make them like less less boomy down low and you know make it transmit less to your neighbors anyway i love this ridiculous subwoofer but it is so expensive and i didn't even pay full price i it was on sale one day and i picked it up but it was still like i can't believe i spent this much on a subwoofer but there is a difference in those ways that being said
This was, I mean, I paid almost twice as much as whatever I paid for the Sonos sub a million years ago.
And the Sonos sub has many of those same benefits, much of the same quality.
The only downside of that is that the Sonos sub has no line in.
You can only use it with a small number of Sonos products.
I did look at the Sonos sub until I realized, hey, what am I doing?
I can't use this.
It's not a stereo component.
the sonos sub is it is great and it's great for its price uh but yeah you can only use it with the you know a sonos amp or a couple of sonos soundbars you know if if this is the correct subwoofer the kc62 that's the one okay um i can tell you that it is very neat that on the back the eq slider is for room wall corner cabinet or apartment which i really enjoy yes it's so good
i really dig that but also i can tell you why marco armand bought this subwoofer and it is because there are four dip switches on the back why are they there who knows but that is huge marco energy to be able to fiddle with dip switches in the back of a subwoofer so i understand now it's the high pass filter that's why it says hpf above it i didn't even notice that yes yes yes fair enough
That is very funny.
So that Kef subwoofer falls into the category of subs that are kind of made for – they say it like for stereo use.
And what they mean is if you're hooking this up to – for example, you have bookshelf speakers and you're connecting your phonograph, Casey, to it or whatever.
Yeah.
Or your Mac.
That's what mine is.
I have two bookshelf speakers and a subwoofer as a footrest and a bass.
If you're in a scenario where you have stereo sound and you want to augment the stereo sound with a subwoofer because your speakers don't have giant woofers on them, that's what this is for.
A breed of subwoofers have features that are like, hey, we'll sound good in that scenario because we have all sorts of stuff on the back of the sub that lets you tweak the way it's blended with the other speakers.
for home theater applications uh the receiver does all that right and so you don't need those features in the back in fact when you're in a home theater scenario what they tell you to do for your subwoofer is the crossover just set it to maximum because you're not basically you're saying the sub just play what you get and the actual crossover is done in your receiver and it figures out the correct cost for us over with your speakers through sound calibration all the crap right like that um and
you basically the receiver has the smarts so it just needs a sum to essentially sub to essentially be dumb speaker so it was good that i could shop in the category of subs that are less expensive because they don't have like fancy ios app controlled dsps to adjust like that's all in my receiver i already paid for that right that's all in my dirac blah blah like so the smarts are there this just needs to be dumb um the thing with subwoofers though as i was talking about marco's small one the reason i was looking at that one i don't have a lot of room for a subwoofer
uh there's not a lot of room for anything in this room i don't have a lot of room physically i don't know how a lot of room mentally family wise because i mean one of the good things about the sono sub is it's relatively small like you can you can hide it somewhere you can tuck it behind something quote-unquote good subs
tend to be large larger than you think larger than anybody wants in their house unless you have like a dedicated theater room where you can hide it with a plant or something and i couldn't do that right actually they make good plant stands like my my sonosub upstairs here um i believe it has two plants on top of it uh and because it's just a big rectangle and actually the the little keff one the top is a little too rounded you can't really put stuff on top of it but i mean it's fine it's a foot rest yeah yeah it's kind of marshmallowy yeah yeah yeah but the sonosub is great nice flat top
Don't put anything on top of a sub unless it is force cancelling slash horizontally opposed because otherwise it will shake off.
Yes, exactly.
Put your crystal collection up there.
Yeah.
So my previous sub, because it was part of the world's tiniest 5.1 system, was, I mean, not tiny, but I came to think of like, oh, this is how big subwoofers are.
So I'll just find one at the same size.
The answer is no, you won't.
Like the KEF is actually smaller, but every other subwoofer, almost every other subwoofer is bigger.
And that led me down the very quickly diverging fork in the road of subwoofers, which is...
sealed versus ported sealed subwoofer is a subwoofer that has a big giant speaker cone in it and it looks like a giant speaker with a big giant speaker cone right ported looks like a big giant speaker cone but there's a hole in the speaker lots of speakers are ported if you see a stereo speaker and there's a hole in the front or the back of it that is a port it allows air to flow in and out in subwoofers the ports are tuned to be resonant at a particular frequency it makes the subwoofer more powerful at lower frequencies
ported subwoofers tend to go louder lower some people might say they tend to be boomier it depends on how you adjust them but most importantly ported subwoofers are bigger because ports take up space because the ports in a subwoofer are not just like the little tiny slots like they are sometimes in a speaker or one little tiny quarter size hole like they are in a bookshelf speaker or something the ports are big they take up room there's a plastic tube in there for air to go down that is a particular length and shape for tuned for its use
And so ported subwoofers are the size of many fridges.
They're just massive.
And I could not fit one in my room.
Despite the fact that my cheapo sub for my existing 5.1 was a ported sub.
But it was a ported sub with an 8-inch driver in it.
And, you know, eight inch driver is not big for a subwoofer, right?
You can find, you know.
I would call that mid-sized for us.
I mean, you can get the bigger, but like, I mean, look, my little Keflin is only 6.5, I think.
I know.
Well, that's part of why the Keflin is so expensive and amazing.
Yeah.
I think the Sonos is also six and a half inch, something like that.
But I mean, that's fairly small for a subwoofer driver.
that that's why the sonos and the kef get such good reviews like can you believe this thing has this much base and it has a six inch driver that's why that's maybe why it costs so much money but it's also why they get such good reviews it's like wow they managed to get good base good clean base out of it and we say clean we mean that if you look at the frequency response diagram it's not just like a giant peak around the resonant frequency of the port and then you know really low everywhere else
Sealed subwoofers, on the other hand, are much easier to make behave like a regular speaker.
Some people call them more musical, quote unquote, although you'll find many debunking videos in this.
It's saying like, look, it's just a big speaker and it can have a frequency response that is flat within the range that it is used or flat-ish within the range that it's used.
If you're using it to augment, if you're listening to music and using a subwoofer to augment the low frequencies because your bookshelf speakers have smaller drivers, get a sealed sub because you won't have any boominess and it will blend in nicely with your speakers.
But for my purposes, the important thing is that sealed subwoofers are way, way, way, way smaller.
So I had a choice.
Can I find a ported subwoofer that has good reviews and has good sound that I can fit in this spot?
Or can I find a sealed one that I can put there that takes about the same amount of room?
Polk and the other brands I discounted on did have subwoofers that were, I think they had both ported and sealed.
No, I think mostly just ported.
And they were all bigger.
And they weren't particularly well reviewed.
And I said, you know what?
I want to get a good subwoofer.
And I want it to be small.
And one of the most popular subwoofer brands is the aforementioned SVS.
And they make a 12-inch sealed subwoofer that has good reviews, has good frequency response, doesn't have any features that I don't need.
Because they make a pro version that has a bunch of features that I don't care about that cost like $100 more.
It's like, great, I can save money.
I don't need the iOS app and all the DSP stuff.
We got my receiver.
Let me get the cheap one.
I didn't know if I would like or not like a sealed subwoofer, but I'm like, I can't argue with the sizing.
And it's a well-regarded brand.
It's good branding, good reviews.
I'm like, okay, that's what I'm going to do.
So I got the SVS SB1000, which I don't even think they make anymore.
I think they just make the Pro.
But the Pro is just basically this with an iOS app and some more fancy buttons on the back.
It's basically the same physically.
And it fits where my old sub went.
And I have to say that I can definitely tell the difference between a sealed versus ported sub.
Because unlike when you're listening to music, where the sealed sub is great, when you're watching movies, that boominess that people complain about, sometimes in a movie, you kind of want that.
If you've been in a movie theater, seeing an action movie, you're hearing some boominess.
Is that perfect and ideal?
And if you measure it in a microphone, you're like, oh, it's too boomy.
the bottom line is that's what movie theaters sound like there's there's there are resonances there's the room amplifies certain frequencies you find boominess and part of the experience of movies is very often that big low rumble and a single 12 inch sub just does not have the rumble that a eight inch ported sub did
uh and i could tell that it's cleaner i can tell that it's better music sounds way better and in fact most of the audio sounds better and i can and the 12 inch sub does go down to the same frequencies as you know these a ported sub it just doesn't have as much oomph down there and there's no like resonance at the at the port level right
so and the sbs by the way wasn't cheap it was it was i think it was more expensive than my center channel elac thing oh wow no i got i got i bought it from their outlet store again casey casey power that's right that's right find a bar because i was like i'm shopping the outlet store find the ones there's sbs is so cruel though they they sell all their speakers in like uh kind of like a faux wood finish and also a like glossy piano black or piano white and
and they charge 100 more for the glossy finish such an apple move such like a oh no maybe a porsche move like a hundred really different finish on the speaker is plus 100 on a 400 product that's amazing i could not obviously i could i bought the cheap i bought the cheap wood grain black one from the outlet store it's you know factory refurbished you know five-year warranty like it is it is from the brand so i'm anyway that's what i got um
The good thing is my fancy receiver, like most decent receivers, can support more than one subwoofer.
That's why I was asking Marco about his.
Now, I have.
I still have.
And MotherMond subwoofer is often recommended because you get all sorts of dead spots in the room.
Like that's when you were forgetting, like when I sit in this chair with the subwoofer, it's too loud.
Subwoofer is definitely.
So if you just have one subwoofer in a room, there are going to be spots in that room that are way louder or way less loud than other spots.
It's just it's inevitable.
Right.
um having multiple subwoofers is a way to kind of fill that in to try to make it more even right so you can have two subwoofers at less volume than you have the one and you'll have a more even distribution of you know where the subwoofer goes so i did try hooking up my old eight inch ported sub in addition to the sealed one that definitely brings back the boom let me tell you um and so you kind of get the best of both worlds
I was using Top Gun Maverick as my test thing or whatever, and that was a great demonstration that I spent a bunch of money on my speakers, and they sound better.
Like, for movies.
For, you know, Top Gun Maverick, you know, jet planes flying overhead, missiles are going off, there's music, right?
And I also played a bunch of... I played a bunch of music from Apple Music.
I played the...
a couple of the newly released singles from bands that i like that were in like dolby atmos multi-channel and that sounded surprisingly good in a way you know i hate spatial audio listening through airpods but the like the tracks that are mastered for multi-channel audio playing on my multi-channel system sounded really good and then i played some stereo tracks too to hear like the front and left to right and getting filled in by the sub
so overall i'm pretty happy with the sound but i feel like there's more i need to do with the bass so you know i do i did find cleverly secretly don't tell my wife oh no she's listening to this now she's gonna know but she i have to say she didn't find the subwoofer that hid in the room the second that i hid in the room so i feel like if you didn't find it once you find it can you really complain that you don't want it there because you didn't even find it
anyway i do have a place for the second subwoofer but my second subwoofer is you know what 10 15 years old very cheap and it makes a very low humming noise when it's plugged in oh no that's no good it has always made that noise is it like a 60 hertz ground loop kind of hum or is it just like like you know just amplifier noise
I know what you're talking about.
I don't know enough to know if I could say I don't have perfect pitch when it comes to the ground loop hum.
You can't mistake it when you hear that sound.
I think that's what it is.
I can record it and see for sure.
But I think that's what it is.
And it has always made that sound.
And the volume is really low.
And because it is like on the floor behind stuff, you tend not to hear it.
And I've never mentioned it to anyone.
But...
It does make that sound, and I was happy to get my fancy new sub, which does not make any noise when it's plugged in.
Like, good audio components shouldn't, as you would imagine.
And I was like, wow, it would be great to have that hum gone, right?
And also, by the way, my wife did notice this.
When you adjust the volume on the receiver, occasionally the old sub would make a little boop.
every time you want the volume go up and down right like from interference or who the hell knows it's really old it's really cheap like it's not super high quality component you know like i i it has had years of good service right um but she did notice recently that's been doing that it's probably been getting worse over time so i don't want to have my old sub hooked up to my fancy new system so i thought maybe i could just like flick it on when we watch movies and then turn it off
But it makes the hum whenever it's plugged in, even when it's turned off.
Which, again, lends credence to the theory that it's, you know, ground loop, 60 hertz hum type stuff.
So, I am looking for a cheap, small ported sub that fits...
or this one is currently hidden to augment my good fancy 12 inch sealed sub so the project is ongoing and by the way calibration wise i did a very rough calibration and then got covid again and had to or had a covid resurge in my body and had to retreat back to my room so i haven't even fully calibrated this and i've learned a lot more about calibration
Most of it just confusing and sad.
But anyway, so that's the story of my setup here.
If you take anything from this, please look in the show notes to links to these various audio forums and review things I've seen.
In particular, the problem with center channel speakers video is worth watching because this is something I had never heard people talk about before.
And the reasoning and science behind it and the pervasive acceptance of it within audiophile circles led me to believe that it's not just one person's vendetta, but it is just a problem with the industry, which is no one cares about center channels.
The audiophiles don't care about it.
It's just the home theater people.
And home theater people are pissed that they can't find good center channels.
Although it's not that you can't find it.
Like there are ones with good spread.
There are more of them if you're willing to buy something the size of like a small child.
Like they get so big.
And I always thought to myself, where are people putting these?
And then I watched all the YouTube videos of these audiophiles doing it.
They put them on like not on milk crates, but basically on milk crates in front of their giant screens.
Like it's like a small child sat on top of its own private piece of furniture, tilted up.
And they're so huge.
You can't put them in any kind of cabinet.
They're just they're like they're like bigger than my XDR, like internal.
of width and then they're really deep and they're just so i mean if you think about when you go to the movie theater you ever look on the wall and look at those speakers and think about how big they are that's what people are putting in their homes right and just picture one of those on its side even monoprice makes this like massive center channel that if you look at you're like oh that looks slim you can you fit that no it literally does not fit in any of my furniture it's just they're just huge so you can get good center channels but not if you're like a reasonable person who wants to not have a little altar for your speaker in front of your uh
television again my room is not a home theater room it is just like the main living room of my house so i can't do that so anyway check out the center channel speaker check out the different measurements that they do on it and understand what they're talking about and it is like kind of a a bad spot on the market and once you go through that down that rabbit hole it is fun to look at like you know whatever speakers are looking for if you're looking for bookshelf speakers or like computer speakers or whatever to see what the options are because there are a lot of surprisingly good options for not that much money that are going to be a million times better than whatever you're using now
uh and then if you want to go whole hog you could get something like marco did with that fancy little tiny sub like it's good stuff like that exists because you know there are people trying to fill this market of like so you want good sounding speakers for your computer and you don't want them to be like you're having two mini fridges on your desk huh you know but people are willing people are willing to find them like even like what do you do you have kef speakers on your computer
yeah i have the q150s here and at my tv i have the q350s now in in their defense they are not made to be used this way like at all they're not like marco is doing a little bit overkill but even the 150s i feel like that is not that big like they you can fit them on a desk and not feel ridiculous
Yeah, the depth is what really – the depth is – But a desk has depth, right?
Yes, but like it's funny.
When you actually look at speaker audition rooms and high-end stereo stores and everything, they're placed way out from the wall.
Most speakers are designed to be at least a foot away from the wall.
Well, it depends if they're ported and it depends if they're rear-ported or front-ported.
true but like most yeah most goods most good speakers are designed to be to have a decent amount of space between them and the wall behind them and in reality nobody has their room for that in their rooms and so nobody ever sets them up that way well the home theater people do because you see where they put them they're like that's like three feet from the back wall it's like yeah this whole room is just for theater
What everybody always tells me, please, before you write in, I know on my desk I'm supposed to be using studio monitors.
I know that.
I don't care.
I love the way the Q150s sound, and I know it's not correct, but it's what I like, so you're going to have to deal with it.
uh kef was one of the brands they said that you can basically back all the way up against the wall the non-ported kef speakers uh that you maybe it's because the cases are so big that no matter how far you push them against the wall they're not really that close to the wall um but that was one of the the selling points yeah so uh i oh and and i did the other thing i did is i did actually uh overbuy some stuff because i didn't know if i was going to like the elac or whether we would fit so i also bought a polk center channel which as it turns out i think i'm not going to use because i think i do like the elac one um
So I will probably be returning and or reselling that one.
Well, I'm glad you're happy.
I'm glad you've gone down this road.
My goodness, what a journey, though, as it always is.
And we didn't even prepare the way.
We skipped all that.
I mean, I won't talk about this now, but I'll save a few years.
The project is not done.
I have the speakers on stands.
I have the speakers on stands, but they're not supposed to be on stands.
It's supposed to be a piece of furniture that one of them is supposed to go on.
that's going to hold my blu-ray player which can no longer fit them you know like there's a whole you know tile puzzle thing going on there but the piece of furniture is the wrong height so i have to cut it down so i have to go to home depot to buy some threaded rod and cut it with a hacksaw and like that's all that's all in the future i'm still working and then calibration oh calibration plus with the multi-subs uh
They'll make more updates in the future.
But anyway, I just wanted to fill everyone in.
I did get new speakers.
They do sound better.
My journey continues.
I am very happy for you.
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You can join at atp.fm slash join.
We will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U
I forgot to thank the person who gave me the discount.
I did thank them over email and everything, but thank you again.
Despite my complaining about, oh, I have all these discounts, I don't know what to do, and despite the fact that it basically led me to buy all Polk speakers, in the end, they're good speakers.
There were discounts on good, reputable brands, so I'm very happy with the speakers I got, and I don't know what I would have done with the discount.
I would probably still be fretting.
If we know any KEF sales reps, let me know.
Once I had the discount, I was like, hey, does anyone have an SVS discount?
Because those subs are expensive.
I was like, you just get mad with discount power.
There are, like to Marco's point, you bought yours on sale.
A lot of times speakers do go on like very deep sale or in the case of SVS, you can shop in their outlet store and it's like hundreds of dollars off stuff for like open box or like factory refurbished or whatever.
if it's from the manufacturer and they guarantee it like as a just same as a new product there's not a lot of risk in buying it and you save a lot of money yeah even even just like on amazon sometimes like like like the keff speakers you'll occasionally catch them on sale on amazon for like 40 or 50 off like i i don't know why and they're legitimate like i because they have huge margins that's why
Yeah, I guess that's why.
And cap speakers are expensive.
But yeah, that's what you'll find.
You will actually find them discounted, especially if you like buy like last year's model, like the new one comes out and it's got a different piano black finish or whatever.
Get the last year's one.
They're still good speakers.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, similarly for me, and I think I kind of made the passing mention of this on the show when I was talking about my Sonos setup, but
I was able to get a steep discount on my Sonos stuff, and that's why I was able to go hog freaking wild.
Like, there was no way that I was going to spend the kind of money I spent, which, I mean, I think the full retail price for my setup was something like $3,000-ish, and I spent way less than that.
Way, way, way less than that.
So I was very lucky, and I am very appreciative to the person that was able to score that for me.
Yeah.
I can totally sympathize with people.
If you're paying full price for all this stuff, which I do for almost everything I buy, I just happen to get lucky on the Sonos stuff, it gets expensive fast.
Home theater stuff, I don't know if you've noticed, John, but home theater stuff gets pricey fast.
real quick but other things like you can't like it's it's best to just wait like not don't wait for like black fly friday or whatever like wait for the that particular brand of speaker to go on sale because it's not like you know even the friends and family discount that i described when you get an apple friends and family discount it's like you know five percent off fifty dollars back on your phones like it's like you know not that it's not not it's not nothing but it's not significant um
Whereas the friends and family discounts on these speakers or even just the sale price on Amazon when they want a clear inventory, it's so much less than the regular price.
It feels like no one should ever pay full price for speakers, but just wait for them to go on sale because the discounts are so big and their discounts don't make any sense because the new model, the speaker comes out, it's not twice as good.
Pay half the price when they go on 50% off sale when the new speaker comes out.
After reading reviews, obviously, and blah, blah, blah.
I will say, though, one nitpick I have or one nit I have to pick with you, John, on this topic is people and maybe I think it's mostly your fault by constantly telling me how good a center channel is.
But people keep telling me from from you to our friend Ben Thompson to many others.
Oh, just try a center channel.
You got to try it.
And because I have the Sonos amp set up and the Sonos sub, what it would take for me to try a center channel.
So I have Sonos amp powering two Q50s, two Q350s, excuse me.
And a Sonos Sub.
There is no way to use the Sonos Sub with any left and right channel speaker setup, as far as I can tell.
Because the only things that can power it are the Sonos amp, which only supports left and right channels and no center, or a Sonos soundbar.
And as far as I know, you can't connect separate left and right speakers to a Sonos soundbar.
You can't even use Sonos' own wireless speakers.
You can use them as rears.
Like, if you have a Sonos soundbar, you can get two other Sonos speakers and use them as rears, but you can't use them as front, left, and rights.
It's the most frustrating limitation.
I think your KEF does this.
One of the features that a lot of subs have is they say basically, hey, just send me the sub, your left and right channels, as well as the sub, and then you connect your left and right speakers to the sub.
Yeah, Sonos could have done that if it was like lots of subs do that because like we know you don't have a way to connect all this stuff up to just send all the music to the sub and the sub with its fancy stuff will figure out how to distribute the audio and then your left and right will be connected to the sub.
But yeah, Sonos, there was the interview with like the CEO of Sonos talking about their new speakers that actually have line in on them because they basically said is, hey, people are buying record players like dummies.
And they want to connect their record players to their speakers.
And the record players, like you can buy like a Bluetooth dongle and stuff like that.
But people say, hey, I have this phono output.
Can I just plug this into your speaker?
And so the latest Sonos speakers actually do have a line in on them.
still they're not like stereo components well they probably don't have phono preamps though yeah yeah well i i think i think they do i think they said specifically that whether it figures out or there's a switch right you know yeah what we're talking about is the record players because they're record players and super old put out output at a different level than you get from other sources so your your thing that is getting the input needs to know hey this is this is phono input this is from a phonograph this is from the 1900s right
Yeah, well, because what most people don't know is that record players did not output regular line-level audio the way we know it in more modern terms.
Records were mastered with a special EQ that basically reduced the version of the sound that's encoded on the record has way less bass because large bass frequencies encoded there would actually make the needle jump out of the track.
Yeah.
And so they called it the RAA curve, and they had this whole custom EQ curve that records were pressed in, and then the record player, or the amp you were running it through, would run it through a circuit that would undo that curve and make it regularly.
It would try to fix it, because if you listen to the audio as it comes out of the record player, it would sound even worse than it actually does.
Yeah, if you put your ear up to the needle as it's moving, you can hear this, like,
little tiny tinny version of it and like it sounds horrendous like you know if you actually amplify that and so there's a like you can't if you just take the raw output from a record player and plug it into a regular amp it won't sound right you need a special phono preamp that does that conversion
um and so i'll look it up i wonder if do the new sonos era speakers actually have that built in i mean he specifically said he said it was for that it could be that he's assuming people modern record players have i think that's correct that's the thing so yeah most like if you go out today and buy like a modern hipster record player they all not only i mean first of all they all have bluetooth on them but
But second of all, they also all have built-in phono preamps.
So this is not a thing you have to worry about with, quote, new record players.
But if you have your parents' old record player from the 1960s and 70s, you will have to deal with this.
On the flip side of that, fancy receivers still have phono input that understands actual phono input.
That has not gone away.
That is still a component of all top of Navy gear.
Yeah, but...
marco you and i are in opposite situations i couldn't look at the sonos sub even though it is small and it's a good sub and it would fit because how the hell am i gonna hook that up and you can't look at center channels because how the hell you're gonna hook that up so this is a separate world like to for me to try a center channel i would have to buy a receiver like and and redo that whole setup because like or a different soundbar i couldn't no i couldn't use the sonos amp or
Or the Sonos Sub anymore.
I have to get rid of both of those components, which I love, and then replace them with the receiver, which would be this giant thing that would take up more space, would have its own remote, would have its own controls.
That's why I love my setup.
It's super simple.
The Sonos Amp does not have a remote control.
It just takes volume from the TV through HDMI eARC or whatever.
And so the volume is controlled by the TV.
It automatically switches inputs.
It's wonderful.
It's like the small box allows me to plug in passive bookshelf speakers and a wireless sub almost directly into my TV.
It's wonderful.
And so, yeah, to try a central channel would be somewhat involved.
Yeah.
I mean, you could get a Sonos soundbar and then you would – oh, no, you wouldn't be able to use your left and right channels.
You're right.
Never mind.
Now you know how much Marco loves soundbars.
Yeah, that's the other thing people complain about.
In general, soundbars demand to be your left and right.
They're like, no, I'm a soundbar.
I will not be your center channel.
Well, because then otherwise, you know, that that ruins the illusion that they're anything but a trumped up center channel.
Yeah.
I mean, that's the part of the I mean, the center channel, the soundbar and center channels have some of the same problems that soundbars have to be slim to fit where they fit.
And that means the drivers in the need to be small.
And that means they need to be augmented by a subwoofer.
And it's just.
It's difficult.
At least subwoofers, soundbars at least, are engineered to try to sound good because it's not like they're an afterthought.
That's the whole product.
The soundbar is the product, so they try to make them sound good.
Whereas center channels in 5.1 or 7.1 or whatever systems, it's always just like...
an afterthought speaker it's almost like kind of like the mac pro where they didn't want to spend the engineering resources all the resources go to the left and right you know things the big tower speakers like to get them to sound good to get them to have a good dispersion pattern with no dead zones and carefully tuned or whatever and then they say okay uh we need a speaker for the center and slap something in there
And before you ask, one of the things people think is, well, what if you just take a left or right speaker, like one of the good ones of the engineer, and lay it on its side?
That tends not to work well because, again, the dispersion pattern is made for it to be vertical.
Once you lay it on its side, it makes everything all cattywampus.
But I did look into it.
The other problem is that...
even bookshelf speakers, are pretty darn big.
And so at least center channels tried to be slim-ish.
Like, a bookshelf speaker that had the drivers that the size of my center channel does laid on its side wouldn't fit, because they would arrange them differently there, so...
It's a tough situation.
Real-time follow-up to go back to the Sonos line-in discussion.
I was thinking about it, and I was like, I feel like I had to cross this Rubicon at some point.
So I'm looking at my Sonos port, which is not the same as the speakers, but presumably would work.
It's an amp without the amp.
Yeah, exactly.
And when I was setting up the turntable coming into the port, because the port has in and out, and so the port is what's also driving my port speakers.
Well, the port drives the amp, which drives the outdoor speakers.
Anyways, in the port settings, there's line in, which you can set what the name is and whatnot.
And you can also set the source level, which runs from low, or excuse me, level one, which is labeled as low,
2 is considered AV component.
4 is labeled as AirPlay.
Excuse me, 6 is labeled as Mac computer.
There's all 1 through 10.
8 is labeled as portable player or PC.
And 10 is high.
And you can set the source level based on that.
So I think it basically can be either phono in or regular in.
But you're talking about levels versus the actual EQ change.
If it does not say it has a phono preamp, it doesn't.
Oh, no, that's a fair point.
That's a fair point.
Yeah, I'm honestly not sure.
I'm trying to look at the documentation.
I'm really honestly not sure.
I mean, like the Sona stuff is not AV equipment.
Every AV receiver has a phone input, which is hilarious when you see all this stuff in the back, but they all have it because it's just like that's the same reason they have giant knobs in the front.
It's like it's just what you do.
yeah and that's the whole world that i don't want to be in if i don't need to be yeah the world of receivers it's better than it was i mean the receiver i got wasn't that that expensive and it has like every feature under the sun i could have gotten a worse receiver and still been fine i just wanted to have a little overhead um
setting aside the inability to buy receivers at all because apparently they couldn't manufacture them and there's a lot of consolidation in the industry but and there's definitely room for improvement there but they're way better than they were when i bought my last receiver when it was still like the stone age where like the on-screen displays look like vcrs from like you know the 1980s they are better than that mine isn't much better than that some of them are like sony actually finally made a new receiver like you thought there was you thought sony was out of the blu-ray player business and the receiver business but suddenly after i think might be 10 year gap some insane year gap
They made a new receiver.
And it's good.
Surprise.
Modern technology.
You can make a better receiver than you made 10 years ago.
Congratulations, Sony.
Who'd have thunk it?
The other thing I didn't mention is I put banana clips in everything.
Nice.
Big upgrade.
Oh, how did that go?
Pretty well.
I also bought new speaker wire.
I didn't want to rewire everything because, I don't know, I just was crawling around.
and basically i didn't rewire did you get the like you know never contested oxygen you know mind from the depths of the sun like no no so when i bought the new ones i'm like look i want i want better speaker wire mostly because i was talking about how i'd made the runs too tight and there wasn't a lot of slack and i wanted to fix that problem and it's like well i'm there i should get better wire because i had like i forget what i think i had like maybe i had 18 gauge maybe it was 16 i forget but it was it was cheap speaker wire um
I decided to rewire, but I didn't rewire everything.
I didn't rewire the back surrounds because, again, who cares?
They're small speakers.
Those are the wires that run the longest and I have to move the most furniture.
I didn't rewire those, but I rewired my front left and right and my center.
My sub already had a big, thick sub speaker going to it, so that was fine.
I bought wire with one of those sheath on it for in-wall use.
Even though mine aren't in the walls, just because the sheath was white and it would blend with my baseboard that's also white, instead of being like, you know, speaker wire color, speaker wire brown.
It could be the same color as your own ones, for all we know.
Right?
Speaker wire brown does not blend with my baseboard.
It does blend with my hardwood floors, but anyway.
So I bought white sheathed 14-gauge wire, which is probably overkill for speakers that are like three feet from my TV, but whatever.
Then I rewired everything, and the wire is thicker.
Obviously, it's 14-gauge wire.
As the gauge number goes down, the wire gets thicker and it's got the sheath on it.
But it let me sort of get clean connections to the new banana clips.
And that all worked out pretty well.
I'm happy that I did the banana clips because now I can easily connect and disconnect the speakers.
And I don't have to worry about like metal fatigue slowly making them come undone because they're screwed into these little posts or whatever.
And I put banana clips on the back surrounds as well.
So that was a big upgrade.
Nice.
Highly endorsed banana clips.
My recommendation for people's speaker wire needs is the first time you need to make your own speaker wire lengths for whatever reason, just go buy a spool.
Yeah, that's what I bought.
I bought a spool.
Yeah, buy a spool of inexpensive, cheaper, you know, speaker wire, you know, Amazon, Monoprice, whatever.
You will never need more than that.
Like, that will last the rest of your life.
Unless you're me, because that's part of the reason my runs were too short.
I measured for my 5.1-inch system when I first installed it.
I measured 15 times.
I'm like, this will be enough wire.
But it's kind of like, you know, the...
the shore of england or whatever shore of scotland or it's got lots of little kinks in it and so you're measuring all this stuff you think you measured it all but did you account for the vertical runs did you account for how far it has to go into your entertainment center and i bought like like i think 100 foot spool and i ended up using pretty much all of it and you know i made a couple of the runs too short so when i bought another spool i bought 100 feet of it but i didn't do the back surrounds with it so i had
plenty left over and now i think i may have gone too far in the other direction where i've got some like coils as slack where i'm like i've got all this extra wire what am i going to do with it so i may cut them down farther but that's that's the beauty of having the banana clips the banana plugs and a spool of wire you can just cut splice you know you make it any length you want if you make a mistake you can always make it shorter you can't make it longer but you can always make it shorter and i do have plenty left on the spool so i'm pretty happy with how that went in my two days between covid
You did a lot in those two days.
I did.
Basically, on the first day, I spent the whole day just crawling around on the floor, removed everything from the entertainment center, just crawling around back there, pulling out all the old wires, putting everything in.
It was refreshing.
If you can imagine the back of an AV receiver with, you know, five, six, six pairs of wire.
I mean, I do the math wrong all the time.
It's 5.1, right?
Well, it's five speakers plus you got the subwoofer.
But anyway, each one of those is like this little speaker wire and it's split.
And then like the little, the little stranded, you know, wire that's twisted and shoved into a little hole and screwed down in it.
And they're all so close to each other.
It's just such a mess to just rip all that out and to have plugs.
Plug, plug, plug, plug, plug, plug.
It's so much nicer.
I feel so much better.
This is like a dream.
I should have done this ages ago.