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Pismo Sound Issue

J

J English Smith

6502
Restoring another Pismo...interesting, there is normal sound via headphones but not through the built in speakers. Odd for the speakers to be blown but the sound card itself to be OK? Anything else I should try or look at re the speakers? I did a PRAM reset and PMU reset; nothing changed.

The original hard drive was fried on this one but the rest of the unit seems to be OK...

 
By not normal sound, how do you mean? Is it distorted, garbled, sounds like someone circuit-bended a Speak 'n' Spell...? Can you post a sample recording?

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

 
No, I mean I get good sound via the headphone jack, but nothing coming out of the speakers, and mute is OFF.

Seemed kind of odd to have both of the speakers blown, but I suppose if it took some kind of power hit, anything is possible. I bought this one expecting the logic board to be fried, but it was the hard drive, it was making sounds like an old wheezing Buick.

 
Okay, it is possible that the speaker's connections have come loose and just need to be reseated. Another thing will be to double-check and see that the DC-In/Sound board is attached and installed properly; it's the circuit board with the connection that the battery charger plugs into. If that was plugged in improperly or any of the pins bent, you wouldn't be getting any sound through the speakers; even for that matter, you wouldn't be getting sound at all through the headphones. But still double-check it anyway.

The only other possibility is that there is something wrong with the headphone jack. There are 4 separate connections coming off the rear of that jack. 2 of those connections are tied in with the circuit that actually control where the sound feeds to: headphones or internal speakers. The other 2 are obviously for left and right channel stereo sound. The headphone jack contains a normally open, momentary switch, that closes whenever a pair of headphones or external speakers or any other 1/8" plug source is plugged in. That sends a signal to the controller chip on the DC-In/Sound board to cancel out the internal speakers and utilize the headphone jack. If something happened to that headphone jack and the momentary switch contacts were pushed in too far, that can cause only the headphones to work and not the internal speakers. To fix that problem, you'd have to replace the DC-In/Sound board.

You can still get good used replacement DC-In/Sound boards online through eBay, ifixit.com, dvwarehouse.com, DayStar Technology, pbparts.com and wegenermedia.com. The latter 2 were the cheapest at $49.99 and $39.99, respectively. That's what I did when mine broke. I tried home-brewing my own fix, but it wore out/shorted out after a year. So I just went and bought a replacement instead from Wegener Media.

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

PS: if it turns out to be the speakers themselves, you'll need to replace the entire top case (contains the speakers, wrist rest and track pad for the mouse. Ifixit.com carries a used good replacement for $24.95 (G3 Pismo Upper Case). They also provide free tear-down and reassembly manuals for the Pismo. Don't worry, this model is a cinch in most cases.

 
Thanks, ph! I will give that one a good teardown in August at the same time I do another one with a cracked top case. I've been amassing Pismo parts, I may even have an extra sound board. The Pismo is great to work on, yes, I would rate my technical competence as very average and I did a full teardown of one this spring that had a bad main board, and had a successful operation for that one.

I buy most of my used parts from TonyZZ on eBay - no relation. He does have good pricing and ships very, very quickly.

I bet it is that condition you describe, where the sound is being bumped to the headphone port. Either that or it took a power zap...

 
I buy most of my used parts from TonyZZ on eBay - no relation. He does have good pricing and ships very, very quickly.
Click to expand...
I bought a Power/Sound board for my wallstreet from him, great source of parts.

 
I've rotated back to this machine again in my Pismos and may do a teardown soon to see if I can fix the Airport card issue and the sound issue. One odd thing is that when I go to the Sound control panel, the only option presented is "Built In Headphones" - the built in speakers do not even show up as an option. Is that consistent with the speakers being unplugged from the sound card? I think the sound card is working, or I would not get sound through the headphone jack - which I do. Could this be a software issue rather than hardware? Hmmm.

The Airport issue is also interesting, I think the machine sees the card in the slot but does not recognize it, but when a Motorola WiFi card is in the external slot, it recognizes it as an Airport Extreme card and works fine.

 
I still think your sound issue is due to a bad DC-In/Sound board. I don't think the Pismo has any other way to detect if you have internal speakers connected or not. All that is controlled from the earphone/Sound Out jack on its built-in momentary switch. Another thing you could try is using a compatible USB external audio device, like a Griffin Technology's iMic. Plug that into your USB port, change your sound control panel to send/receive audio through that device, and see that it works. If so, then it's the Sound Out jack on the DC-In board.

Regarding the Airport card issue, try trashing the preferences file for that device, remove the card, restart your Pismo, restart again with the card installed and see if it recognizes that time. If not, download the drivers from Apple's Support page and reinstall those. Either way, that should work.

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

 
Somewhere around here I have an original Airport with similar symptoms.

In my case, the card is definately detected by OS 9, X, and Linux. It actually seems to work for a short time after power-on, then goes effectively deaf. At that point, Tiger and Leopard both tell me that the card is off, but trying to turn it back on does nothing.

In my case, I suspect that something has failed or is failing in the radio section of the card causing the radio to stop working once the card warms up.

JR

 
I had a similar weird problem with an Airport card in a Pismo. The card worked fine on battery but plugged into the mains it went "deaf" half the time. Turned out it was old house wiring. If it didn't work, I would rotate the mains plug 180° and it would work again. Go figure. It drove me batty.

 
On the Airport issue, tonight I swapped that card into another Pismo and it works just fine. So the problem is definitely confined to this machine. I put in another known good card and this machine does not see that one either.

Phreakout, I looked for a Preferences file related to Airport under user/library/preferences, but did not see one. Is that called something unusual? Or is it located somewhere else?

I wonder if I should just do a clean install of OS 10.4.6 and rebuild from there?

I'd like to rule in/out a software fix for the card detection before I go for a full teardown to the logic board...I could live with the sound issue on this, but having to use the Motorola card is not ideal.

Thanks for the help, guys!

 
Okay, I guess since the Pismo didn't successfully connect to a base station via the Airport card, it didn't store the results and additional settings as a preference file. Phoo! So it may be both hardware and software related. What about the ribbon cable running from the Airport card slot to the logic board? Is it pretty secure to the connector? Also, check and see if the card shows up under the system profiler (Apple Menu > About this Mac > More Info). If it shows up or has a listing of Orinoco as the brand name, then the hardware may be in working order and were back to this being a software issue. At that point try reinstalling the driver for the Airport card.

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

 
Phreakout, I get a kick every time I see your footer! Wasn't that about some guy wanting to boot multiple machines from the one drive or something silly? Two Mac Pluses if I remember correctly?

 
jsarchibald,

I take it you're talking about your quote in the last line of the signature. Maybe, but iirc, the situation was from a post about a Youtube video of someone who killed a Mac (I'm unsure of which model, laptop or desktop). By kill I mean take a perfectly good working machine and :disapprove: >. To us, we would have screamed bloody murder against the destroyer for that type of abuse; especially when there is absolutely nothing wrong with said Mac and it was all for entertainment and sophomoric behavior. :lol: :o)

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

 
ONE DOWN! Phreak, it was indeed the cable on the Airport card! Typing this from the beastie...Airport card firmly re-tucked in its innards. Silly me, I thought the external card and the internal card would be on the same cable. So, that problem solved. The sound card issue may have to wait until I do a teardown to replace the screen on this one (there is an exterior side crack). But now I don't have to worry about grabbing the Motorola card for this one. Thanks for the help! J

 
No problem. It's good to know that this was in fact a loose connection aka hardware issue and is fairly easy to fix. Mine works fine, although I may have to find a better web browser than Firefox, since it eats up resources like mad and I can only go up to the latest version of 3.6.x (25 as of this post). Another problem involves the hinges. I'm still using the original hinges and they have worn out. If I lift up the display as normal, there's quite a bit of loose "play" (about 1/4-inch) and the screen can very easily close up or open all the way flat without anyone touching it; a strong wind could blow from either direction and cause the display to fall over. I checked on ifixit, and they want ~$30 bucks for the replacement part...geez!

I'm also toying with possibly playing around with a new install of another lean *NIX distro install; something less RAM hogging, yet current then OS X Tiger. Any thoughts on this, anyone? I'll put a feeler in the other *NIX forum area of this site if I have to.

73s de Phreakout. :rambo:

 
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