Moved the discussion from
Voila thread :
Hi guys,
ok, so your BOOM is giving me the power to max out my MBP speeker's loudness. But are there any safety features (filters) inside of BOOM that could prevent an accidental overpowering and bricking of my speakers? Or do you think that wouldn't be necessary?
Best regards,
The Wizard
Comments
When we first thought of Boom, we wanted it to be as easy as moving the Volume slider to get that extra boost to your MBP speaker. Boom functions a lot similarly like your VLC player, but much simpler to use and boosts the audio of any music or video file, irrespective of the player or source.
Boom thus boosts the volume of the system audio to a suitable level to improve the audibility of music or video being played on the system. It can also help improve the audibility while you chat. We have provided you with a volume slider provided (in addition to the system's volume slider), so that you can set the volume to a suitable level. We recommend that you maintain an appropriate level so that you don't harm your ears
You might also want to know that we have put the application under intense testing in different scenarios and we have not been able to see any possible damage to the speakers.
Although, you might know the scenario of a defective soundtrack that is not loud enough (so it wants to be played in VLC as you mentioned or be BOOMed from now on) but has a very small wave band (maybe around 20.000 hz) where its ridiculously loud but unhearable by most of us. Or a short spike in loudness somewhere in the middle of a track that will hit us by surprise ;-). That way - so I feared - already VERY loud sound effects could reach - at least biologically - inappropriate levels, if not the clipping area of internal or external speakers. For that reason, I wished BOOM would not only enhance the whole baseband to higher levels, but would also allow us to add loudness filters of our subjectively preferred altitude (for example 'cut off output peaks at 90/95/100/...db') to avoid the negative effects of the given scenarios.
Best regards,
The Wizard
ltexaco
I don't know, what BOOM is doing in idle state, but its constantly using 8-10% single core processor time.
That's actually my only concern but a real argument against BOOM...
The Wizard
Could you please compare the CPU utilization of other applications on your MBP and your iMac?
For example, play a video using Quicktime on the iMac, note down the CPU usage. Then play the same video in Quicktime on the MBP, check the CPU usage. Please post the CPU utilization values that you get.
The idea is to find out if there is a difference in the CPU utilization values being displayed for other applications as well in different systems.
I shut it off and relaunched Excel and it was as snappy as I expected. I've had some laggy app launching and didn't know what to attribute it to, but it may be the current version of Boom.
MacBook Pro
2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAM
10.6.7
500 GB HDD
It's 'calmed' down after a bit, and now is only at 11%, but it's still the most CPU intense app 'running'.
I was reading a PDF and my fans started kicking in. I went to Activity Monitor and Boom and Boom Daemon was using ~30% combined.
Forced Quit those two Boom Processes and fans are off and system is snappy again.