My only disappointment with my MacBook Pro has been the burst of white noise that I sometimes hear on my headphones and external speakers. It seems to happen as the audio chip is powered up and down, but that’s strictly a guess as to the cause. I’m no audiophile, but the noise is aggravating. My old iMac G5 never had this problem, though it did make a nasty pop every once in a while.

I posted a question to the Apple support forums, searched the web, but found no solutions. Part of the problem is that everybody uses different terms for it, and a search for “MacBook Pro Noise” gives articles about other unrelated (and in some cases, much more disturbing) sounds that emanate from some MBPs. So eventually I resigned myself to just live with it.

This morning’s software update (Apple Audio Update 2007-001) got me pretty excited, but alas, it doesn’t solve the particular noise problem I’m having. It seemed promising at first, but I can still hear the noise on my Klipsch speakers. It’s hard to say for certain, things may be slightly improved now, but definitely not resolved for good.

This problem makes it nearly impossible to use the laptop for any soundcard-based amateur radio programs. The noise corrupts the data that the computer is trying to send in the audio stream. I haven’t tried using Boot Camp yet, but that may be the next step. If that doesn’t work, I might need to buy an external sound board.