This isn’t totally QA related, however I think it is worth sharing. Several months ago I replaced my older G3 iBook with a G4 iBook after the G3 failed. Almost immediately I plugged in my headphones and got mono sound from the left channel only.

This was extremely disturbing, I fiddled for some time, noted that the speakers in the iBook itself was outputting in stereo, and continued having the same problem with many sets of headphones. However this problem didn’t happen when I plugged in a simple external amplifier.

Stumped, and never spending very long using my iBook for audio without working on something else at the same time, I continued to experience the issue and got frustrated. At one point I even contemplated sending the iBook in for service with the applecare plan I bought when I purchased the iBook (yes, I’m frustrated that the macbooks came out soon after I bought it).

You can probably tell by now what the mistake is.

So today I’m out buying some equipment to service my upcoming LinuxGames.com podcast (yeah everyone has a podcast, sue me), and other communications I do over Skype. I get home, plug it all into my iBook and go to set my iBook audio to output and input from the USB soundcard in a plastic shell (thanks to our friends from PPA, intl.)

So this is where I notice the Sound preference pane in System Preferences, with the Balance set all the way to the left.

The simple amp “solved” the problem by mixing both channels together, I think, and that combined with none of my headphones working was the logical jump which had made me believe that the problem was the headphone jack in the iBook.

I don’t think I need to explain anything else now, though obviously it all works fine at this point, and I’m left wondering how I missed the sound preferences panel every other time for the past five or six months.

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