Screwy MacBook Pro Speaker - REVISITED

• Chris Liscio

It's actually quite common that laptop speakers are unbalanced, but these ones are really noticeably so (Note: I plan to add graphs for my PowerBook for comparison, but I haven't had much time to capture measurements — sorry). I hope that folks didn't take my last MacBook Pro speaker post as dissing the MacBook Pro too much. More than anything, I wanted a great case to explore using FuzzMeasure, and seeing how the MacBook Pro just recently hit the market… </p> <p> Anyway, using the (wonderful) MacBook Pro disassembly guide found at iFixIt, I will show you exactly why this problem exists. It will not be corrected by software (I have no idea why I thought that — clearly I was delirious), nor do I think it will be ever corrected (without some clever technician hacks). </p> <p> If you enlarge the first picture on page 10, you'll notice that the left speaker has some sort of enclosure near it, and the right speaker has no enclosure to speak of. It's hard to see clearly from this angle, so we'll delve deeper. </p> <p> On page 13, note how they built what looks like a little transmission line enclosure to enhance the bass on the left side. Cute! </p> <p> However, the last picture on page 11 shows clearly that the right speaker's just resting on the logic board — with no enclosure to speak of! Without any enclosure, you can't hope for a speaker that small to act like anything but a tweeter, which is exactly how it sounds. </p> <p> So, it would appear that the imbalance is by design, and we won't get any fix for it. If the right speaker's buzzing, I suspect the only solution would be to add some sort of dampening material between the right speaker and the logic board (hence my calling it a technician hack), but the low frequency response will still be poor. </p> <p> Gotta make sacrifices to make a product sleek! Anyway, listening to music through both speakers at the same time sounds quite decent, and this design is actually quite ingenious in my opinion! </p> <p> It's set up similar to older home theater subwoofers, which intercept the left audio channel to play lower frequencies, while your main bookshelf speakers handle the higher range of the audio spectrum. In fact, most of the Bose home theater stuff follows this same principle — surround the listener in tweeters, and do all the work in the woofer. Oh, and charge 'em a bundle for it. ;) </p>