Music on the XO

[Albert Cahalan]

Jean Piche writes:

> dont need a discussion about music's influence on culture but I think
> everyone will agree its serious business in the education and
> socialising of a child, increasing manyfold in adolescence.
...
> Even when
> there is quality, I am not certain what to think of Nigerian children
> being fed a diet of DJ Spooky, no matter how much I personally enjoy
> his work...

It's competing with songs like "I Go Chop Your Dollar". :-(

> A head's up on the XO audio subsystem: The speakers have a severely
> biased frequency response. We have recently performed a thorough
> analysis of the audio response curve of the machine and there is a
> spectacular 12dB peak between 3000 and 4500 Hz, this on all models.

Please share.

> The solution we have implemented in TamTam  is to simply apply a
> reverse notch filter on the audio signals we send to the speakers.

Details?

> This works well and provides a more pleasant listening experience,
> but inevitably reduces the dynamic range. It does nothing per se to
> protect the speakers becasue you can still crank up the volume to
> casing distortion. Furthermore, our solution only works with the
> speakers of course, since the line out/headphone output produces an
> acceptably neutral signal. Thus, to make it sound good in the
> speakers, we make it sound bad in the earphones. Unless there is a
> signal we can access that tells us when the line out jack is
> connected....  Anyone know?

The hardware documentation says you can tell.
(but I haven't seen how)