So today, after so many years of service, my PB G4 12" speakers started to sound distorted. I almost cried. I use this little silver beauty every day for watching youtube via Invidious in bed, which has become part of my daily routine since the covid-19 quarantine days. I know all Apple laptop´s speakers die sooner or later, since two of my three Intel MacBooks has suffered the same fate, but i believed PPC machines were somehow more resistant (my 15" PB and my TiBook are both ok). So i was eager to find a solution that doesn´t involve replacing the speakers or opening the machine (12´s are a real pain to tear apart). Here´s the workaround i`ve found: i thought that if i could somehow put an equalizer audio unit on the built-in audio output, i could filter the exact frequencies that make the speakers distort. I would lose some bass, surely, but we´re talking about tiny laptop speakers here so i wouldn´t mind. If i could regain some clarity, that would be more than enough. I have Sound Flower installed, so routing the audio to an eq wasn´t a problem, but i needed a host application for the plugin that doesn´t eat all my precious processor cycles. Logic 9 and Garage Band were automatically out of the game. After some googling for audio units hosts for PPC Leopard in the style of the famous Ugly VST Interface (not full fledged DAWs) i found out about Apple´s very own app: AULab. This is a tool that was originally included with XCode, so i had to register at Apple Developer site and finally i was able to download a .dmg of XCode 3. After a little search with Pacifist inside the packages, AULab was installed and ready to use. And guess what, it worked. My speakers are sounding loud and clear again. Hope this helps anyone with the same problem that wants a quick fix. You can save the AULab document with your settings, and put that on the login items of your user account, so every time you fire up your Mac the eq will still be there and you can forget about it. It barely uses any resources, but keep in mind that my PowerBook is the last revision (1,5ghz) and has the ram maxed out, so your mileage may vary. Here is a screenshot of the workaround:
Last edited:
