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Are you plugging in your external speakers too?

IngerMan

IngerMan

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Feb 21, 2011
2,016
905
Michigan
I have my external speakers plugged in to my Dell Monitor. But I have had a few occasions that I lost sound watching video. If I turn off my monitor and back on usually it fixes it the first time.

I am wondering if it would be better to have my external speakers going to my Mac Mini vs the Dell Monitor. I am not sure what the benefits are for one over the other?

My setup is a 2018 MM with a TB3 cable going to a Sonnet eGPU then eGPU HDMI cable to the Monitor. External speakers to the Monitor.
 
IngerMan said:
I am wondering if it would be better to have my external speakers going to my Mac Mini vs the Dell Monitor. I am not sure what the benefits are for one over the other?
Click to expand...

Yes. Your speakers wouldn't lose sound again due to the direct speaker/Mini connection and you'd have speaker control that's independent of your monitor.

The simpler the connections, the fewer things that can go wrong.
 
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IngerMan said:
I am wondering if it would be better to have my external speakers going to my Mac Mini vs the Dell Monitor. I am not sure what the benefits are for one over the other?
Click to expand...

The immediate difference is that if your speakers are plugged into your monitor, your monitor controls the sound, and if your speakers are plugged into your mini, your mini controls the sound.

If you want decent sound, you'll buy a DAC, plug it into your mini, and plug the speakers into the DAC. You can get a DAC that will provide better sound than your monitor or your mini for about US$100 and up. Of course, that also kind of depends on how good your speakers are.
 
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IngerMan said:
I have my external speakers plugged in to my Dell Monitor. But I have had a few occasions that I lost sound watching video. If I turn off my monitor and back on usually it fixes it the first time.

I am wondering if it would be better to have my external speakers going to my Mac Mini vs the Dell Monitor. I am not sure what the benefits are for one over the other?

My setup is a 2018 MM with a TB3 cable going to a Sonnet eGPU then eGPU HDMI cable to the Monitor. External speakers to the Monitor.
Click to expand...

Take some external speakers and they will clean your doubts .
Mac mini and monitors’s speakers are bad and can be useful only for notification.
 
I did the change this morning plugging my external Bose into the Mac Mini. It is nice having the volume control back on my Das Keyboard. I will report back if I have any drop outs.

My original setup was with a 15" MBP and I was limiting the cables going to the MBP. I just kept the same setup when I setup the Mini but it makes much more sense to be using the Mini instead of the Monitor.

Thank you for the help.
 
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jacklivehere said:
one more thing I did is , increase bitrate for external headphones to 96K 2ch from default 48k.
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Cue up MacRumors participants who will chime in that nobody can hear the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz audio :)

That said, there probably isn't a lot of point in doing this unless you are listening to uncompressed audio (e.g. FLAC files) via a good digital to analogue converter and pretty high quality speakers or headphones.
 
F-Train said:
Cue up MacRumors participants who will chime in that nobody can hear the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz audio :)

That said, there probably isn't a lot of point in doing this unless you are listening to uncompressed audio (e.g. FLAC files) via a good digital to analogue converter and pretty high quality speakers or headphones.
Click to expand...

I have no idea what this do interms of audio quality, but I thought higher bit rate may be better and given its supported, I just changed it :d
 
F-Train said:
Then you have just inadvertently put yourself in the middle of what is, when it comes to audio, a religious war :)
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Ha, I almost replied to that comment the first time around, but refrained because it's just arguing that never goes anywhere, and this is just one of those things where we'll agree to disagree, but...

I don't see it as "religious" war as that implies that it's one version of "faith" vs another version of "faith". On this topic, it is scientifically proven that "normal" human ears cannot distinguish between "playback" of 48khz vs 96khz samples of the same audio... i.e. playback audio at 96khz and then downsample to 48khz and virtually no one can tell the difference in double-blind tests.

However, as I understand it, there are reasons for 96khz (and higher) in audio production (including playback after applying various filters, etc.) where it does make a difference.
 
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Hi @ixxx69 ,

I'll pursue the religion analogy. I'm an agnostic, which means that I'm not interested in telling anyone, least of all people like 96kHz proponent Neil Young, what they can and can't hear. The true believers on the opposite side of your true belief would say that you are engaging in pseudoscience :)

Now for a bit of real life application. When I make a video, I record voice at 48kHz and sound effects at 96kHz. The reason for the higher rate for sound effects is that I archive these recordings and in some cases may want to heavily manipulate them. For the same reason, it is now routine for professional sound effects recordists to record at 192kHz. I don't do that, partly because I don't record sound effects professionally and partly because the storage requirements get pretty onerous pretty quickly.

It is my understanding that recordings of musicians are now also routinely made at high rates, but I don't purport to know the reason.

When it comes to listening, I do purchase uncompressed, 96kHz recordings when they are available, provided that the original has a high dynamic range (e.g. classical music). I don't feel a pressing need to justify why I do it :)
 
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F-Train said:
I'll pursue the religion analogy. I'm an agnostic, which means that I'm not interested in telling anyone, least of all people like 96kHz proponent Neil Young, what they can and can't hear. The true believers on the opposite side of your true belief would say that you are engaging in pseudoscience :)
Click to expand...

Neil Young is 73 years old. It is a fact that he can't hear frequencies above 24kHz. Anyone who understands psychoacoustics and the basics of sound reproduction who claims you can hear the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz audio after mastering is trying to sell you something, or is falling into the classic trap of mistaking boundary interference effects for actual differences between playbacks. RE: moving your head even an inch to the left or right or your headphones a centimeter off between playbacks has a much greater effect (by orders of magnitude) on the final perceived waveform than the difference between 48kHz and 96kHz could have even in theory.

F-Train said:
It is my understanding that recordings of musicians are now also routinely made at high rates, but I don't purport to know the reason.
Click to expand...

It is to reduce the accumulation of aliasing (and other errors) when running through a complicated effects stack. Having a higher sampling rate also gives certain classes of filters better "information" to work with and improves their latencies.

F-Train said:
When it comes to listening, I do purchase uncompressed, 96kHz recordings when they are available, and I don't feel a pressing need to justify why I do it.
Click to expand...

A better reason to use 96kHz formats is that they often come with 24-bit dynamic ranges (vs. the 16-bit dynamic range of CD quality 44.1kHz audio). Even though in theory 16-bit is almost always enough (especially with a good dither), 24-bit gives very dynamic passages a lot more headroom to work with when mastering. So practically there's justification for the better format with SOME music assuming the listening environment is conducive i.e. very quiet.
 
Hi @rmdeluca ,

You're my favourite MacRumors poster, but like I said, I'm an agnostic. I don't care who is right and who is wrong about this, or about the respective rationales, and I am certainly not interested in debating what Neil Young can and can't hear. The subject is irrelevant to my life, and when I watch people debate this, I just feel bemusement.

I don't know Neil Young, but we went to the same school and we know some quite famous musicians in common. All in all, this is not high on the list of subjects that we're likely to discuss if we ever meet. Somehow I don't see myself saying, "Well Neil, you're an altacocker* and you can't hear worth ****" :)

* Yes, the Yiddish would fit the occasion.
 
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I have a webcam sitting on top of my monitor, I found that the monitor speakers gave feedback and thus echos during phone calls and facetime. I had to switch from a Logitech 920 to a 615 (cheaper) and plug speakers into the mini and set them on the floor to get rid of feedback.
 
Hi. I am new to MacRumours as I have a brand new Mac Mini. Bought yesterday. Long time Windows user; new to the Apple game.

So far only one issue which is audio related. I have a set of PC speakers plugged into the headphone jack. They are creative.

There is an issue when I wake the Mac up the speakers are not detected. If I hit the audio controls I get the little circle with a line through it sign which I assume means an audio device is not detected. If I remove the speaker headphone connection and plug it back in then it resolves the issue. I don't really want to be doing this everytime. Likewise I don't want to be turning the speakers on and off every time.

Is there any other setting I can change to resolve this?
 
@Janusian


I am sure this will be solved. I will just ask the obvious. In Sys Preference, Sound, Output do you have External Headphones selected, Shows-- Type; Headphone Port?
 
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I plug into the monitor and the audio selected is display port. Volume can be controlled by the speaker or the computer, sound is not controlled by my monitor. Seemed easier to me to connect this way, and started doing it with my old 2015MBP. I haven't experienced your issue luckily. I use display port to USB-C as info, and Bose Desktop speakers with the little desktop widget to control them without using the keyboard.
 
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headphone jack-> splitter -> audio amp -> speakers
splitter -> powered subwoofer.

Too old to hear anything above 15KHz. Checked that via Audacity generator.
Never understood FLAC in the era of CD's. Their 44.1KHz sampling wave knocks an 11KHz sine wave into just 4 samples. That's not a lot of quality to start with. Hard to tell a sine wave from a square wave with that few samples.
 
Partron22 said:
headphone jack-> splitter -> audio amp -> speakers
splitter -> powered subwoofer.

Too old to hear anything above 15KHz. Checked that via Audacity generator.
Never understood FLAC in the era of CD's. Their 44.1KHz sampling wave knocks an 11KHz sine wave into just 4 samples. That's not a lot of quality to start with. Hard to tell a sine wave from a square wave with that few samples.
Click to expand...
Sounds the lyrics of a talking heads song
 
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Partron22 said:
headphone jack-> splitter -> audio amp -> speakers
splitter -> powered subwoofer.

Too old to hear anything above 15KHz. Checked that via Audacity generator.
Never understood FLAC in the era of CD's. Their 44.1KHz sampling wave knocks an 11KHz sine wave into just 4 samples. That's not a lot of quality to start with. Hard to tell a sine wave from a square wave with that few samples.
Click to expand...

Close to same setup for me, going to old Large Advent(TM) speakers I got in 1975. I can't hear the high notes so well anymore either, but I can still appreciate old-school acoustic suspension bass.
 
zandorf said:
old Large Advent(TM) speakers I got in 1975
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Those were decent speakers. You know, they now sell kits to replace worn speaker rings? If you are not there yet, you will be, and decent replacement speakers have moved WAY up market. The install is pretty easy.
I replaced rings for the 12" woofers in the Infinity speakers downstairs. Sounds very nice now that speaker parts are not grinding against each other. Plus, if I crank it, I can really annoy the neighbors.

Upstairs, I'm stuck with a wimpy 10" polk "subwoofer". It works and sounds reasonably good. polk 1" tweeter and 5.25" mid range fills the sound in well. That seems to be about the best you can do nowadays without spending $700 a speaker. Most people are into home theaters instead of music, and it really shows in some of the high priced yet cruddy speakers that have most of the market now days.
 
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