[alsa-devel] Speaker burnout

[Takashi Iwai]

At Tue, 31 Mar 2015 12:14:20 -0700,
Nikita N. wrote:
> 
> Dear Torsten,
> 
> > Nikita's, tone here on the list. First of all, why are you complaining?
> 
> as matter of fact, and as already said, we are not blaming anyone.
> Also, our complains are now definitely over.
> "The Ubuntu community is built on the ideas enshrined in the Ubuntu
> Manifesto: that software should be available free of charge, that
> software tools should be usable by people in their local language and
> despite any disabilities, and that people should have the freedom to
> customize and alter their software in whatever way they see fit."
> If Mr. Maarten see fit this software as he really wishes, nobody can
> complain, as long as the identity of the owner of the software is well
> clear and known.
> If further issues will rise, the Linux community will know the owner
> identity, and contact him directly in the most appropriate way.
> 
> > As you can see, many people now are trying to figure out what to do to fix this.
> We are very happy about that, and again we apologize if our tones has
> been matter of misunderstanding.
> We are now sure a proper solution will be found.
> By now, waiting for a more stable solutions, we would like to suggest,
> if possible, please add a very simple popup, only a single one when
> alsamixer-text and/or alsamixergui are run, with such similar message:
> "Caution: incorrect settings might cause damage to your audio devices".
> That would save us from doing it ourselves, at import time.
> Thank you for your attention, and please keep up with your outstanding
> achievements.

Well, if we were selling a microwave oven and dealing with a customer
who places a poor cat into our product, then we might need to put such
a sticker on it.

However, alsamixer is just a basic tool like a screw driver.  A screw
driver (as far as I know) has no warning sticker showing "this tool
might cause damage to your precious machine."

BTW, Chromebook is essentially a "big" embedded device.  And, the
audio driver for embedded devices usually provides the all possible
buttons and knobs for manual adjustment.  Some of them are known to be
dangerous to play with, and they are usually hidden under some layers
in Android or Chrome OS, only the safe setup are provided via UCM
profile or such.  But once when you play directly with the hardware,
you need to know what you're tweaking.  Something serious like this
can happen.  It's why everywhere a text "at your own risk" is seen.

This is the way we went through over 20 years ago for PC components.
Now it's back as a different form.  Interesting...


Takashi

> 
> -- 
>   Nikita N.
>   nikitan at operamail.com
> 
> 
> On Tue, Mar 31, 2015, at 06:47 AM, Torsten Schenk wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> > 
> > I also followed the discussion.
> > First of all I have to agree to Maarten that I dont' like your,
> > Nikita's, tone here on the list. First of all, why are you complaining?
> > As you can see, many people now are trying to figure out what to do to
> > fix this. But instead you keep blaming, accusing and offending
> > Maarten. He is right that a mixer application just allows controlling
> > those parameters the hardware tells to be manipulatable. So the tool
> > CANNOT be held responsible. Popping up warnings will be annoying for all
> > the users that NEED to set the volume to a high level and would be
> > overkill if just very few devices are to be addressed.
> > 
> > Regarding the technical side of this: Since it interested me if this
> > happened to other people, I found this post:
> > 
> > http://marcin.juszkiewicz.com.pl/2012/12/10/how-to-fry-speakers-in-your-chromebook/
> > 
> > and the previous post on this site.
> > So it seems that on a Samsung Chromebook you can definitively burn your
> > speakers. One comment inside these post I found noticeable:
> > 
> > > I’m guessing that a path was set up from MIC1 (wired to DMIC in) to
> > > the left speaker output. Playing the digital mic input as analog at
> > > full volume seems like something that might cause speaker failure, and
> > > wouldn’t necessarily be audible while it is happening.
> > 
> > So this would indicate that not the volume level causes the damage but
> > a bad audio routing.
> > 
> > Regards,
> > Torsten
> > 
> 
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