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Has anybody received a truly silent nMP?
- Thread starter Riwam
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And your suggestion is to go to each of those people's homes, take away their Mac Pro's, go into a sound facility and measure noise levels using a professionally calibrated dB meter?
That would be objective. Are you up for it?
I've got access to one at work. Rents out at around $1k/hour I think, I nominate theSeb to pony up!
Hey, after a few hours that nMP won't look so expensive either
That's what I suffer from and have yet to hear the whine so far though it may be masking it. Had one here on the bench plus another 3 nMP clients.
Since its high pitched, most likely not heard easily by those of us who are 35+.
Anyone care to answer wildmac?
Yesterday I claimed that all nMPs do this and I took it back as that's not a proper conclusion since I don't have these macs. What I do know for sure and has been proven is that some people can't hear the whine on the same machine that some can. I did this with my Roomate he can't hear it.
Only when people start reporting their replacements no longer have this issue will I feel comfortable that there are macs that do not exhibit this.
Only when people start reporting their replacements no longer have this issue will I feel comfortable that there are macs that do not exhibit this.
What a truly generous and selfless gesture.
You will certainly be inundated with offers.Wow, interesting how human senses works
Did you listen with decent head phones?
The sense of hearing is fascinating, especially with high pitched sound.
Energy conveyed via sound behaves similarly to electromagnetic radiation, it increases with frequency. Because of this, hair cells which respond to higher frequencies are more likely to be damaged or destroyed over time. This explains why most people steadily lose sensitive to higher frequency sound as the age. Remember in the 90s when some ass-hats started marketing devices which would emit high frequency tones to keep teenagers from loitering in certain areas but which were meant to be inaudible to older people?
It makes sense that you and some others have reported that they can hear a sound while another person in the room may hear nothing or find it unobtrusive.
I am curious to know if this affects all systems or only a subset.
I am also curious to know if the 50Hz AC used in many non-US power grids exacerbates this issue.
This is a bit off-topic, but I find it very interesting. Because of how power correlates to frequency, the difference between the threshold of audibility and the threshold of pain decreases to the point where if one could detect a tone at that pitch the quietest detectible sound would actually cause damage.
This suggests a thought experiment. If a person was born with hair cells capable of detecting an extremely high frequencies, as soon as they encountered that sound it might damage the cells permanently. So, there might be sounds which many people are born capable of hearing, but which once heard, could never be heard again.
If they ship to me I promise to hook it up next to some extremely expensive Rohde & Schwarz kit to analyse the exact frequency of the whine. After finding out about this they even put their nMP back together sharpish but their PSU is utterly silent. They ran it through the analyser and found nothing. My mates opinion of the silent power supply is not bad - high praise indeed but he is on the RF/analogue side of the business so thinks it's a batch of components inside the PSU which may not be sourced solely from one supplier and the coder side reckons programming might stop it making a racket.
Until there's proper testing which I imagine Apple are doing 24/7 we don't know if it's a recall or an EFI patch!
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You don't necessarily lose the ability to hear frequencies as you age, but your sensitivity goes down. However it generally goes down across the entire range, but since we already have less sensitivity to higher frequencies those go down proportionally. It also varies among young people - especially these days - as so many of them listen to loud rock music which often reduces their sensitivity.
In other words it all depends, and asking people for their age isn't going to tell you much here.
What a truly generous and selfless gesture.
Indeed. I am eagerly awaiting the PMs.
went to a dead silent electronic frys in the a.m. who had a nMP setup and stressed the gpus a bit and what do you know..whineee..this is not looking good.. salesman thought i was crazy when he seen me with my ear in the cylinder...the coil whine does exist maybe a poll is in order to see if some or if not all have coil whine.
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I am 69 and can hear the recorded noise files in this post
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The frequency of the recorded noise files some people put here in this forum cannot be too high.
I can clearly hear the noise and am 69 years old.
Therefore it must be below 12 to 13 KHz in my humble opinion. Maybe even lower.
People at my age would not hear higher frequencies than that at all.
Accordingly speaking of children's sensitivity or that of dogs, as some people mentioned, is nonsense.
The noise is real in some machines and the frequencies are not so high that some people hear them while other cannot because of age.
If they don't hear any noise, then that particular nMP does not have the noise problem. Obviously only some machines have it.
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The frequency of the recorded noise files some people put here in this forum cannot be too high.
I can clearly hear the noise and am 69 years old.
Therefore it must be below 12 to 13 KHz in my humble opinion. Maybe even lower.
People at my age would not hear higher frequencies than that at all.
Accordingly speaking of children's sensitivity or that of dogs, as some people mentioned, is nonsense.
The noise is real in some machines and the frequencies are not so high that some people hear them while other cannot because of age.
If they don't hear any noise, then that particular nMP does not have the noise problem. Obviously only some machines have it.
My nMP is truly silent to my ears, my GF's ears, and those of her 18-year-old daughter. Even when running a GPU benchmark. So yes... Some machines don't have it.
Why would anyone respond to that? Only reasons would be to refute or agree. Who cares?
Good recording. Mine makes that noise, but I'd never have noticed if not for this forum...I have to put my ear right up to the computer to hear it. I have a LaCie d2 and LaCie 2big right next to my nMP and they're both far louder.
FWIW, it's not that high-pitched. High-pitched to me is something like the 15.75kHz noise that the flyback transformer in old tube TVs would make. Back in the day I could just "feel" whether someone had a TV on in their house because I could hear that damned tone.
THAT'S the dreaded "coil whine"? That's what mine sounds like, it certainly doesn't sound like a coil or capacitor that is singing. It's sounds like the fan spindle or some such. Coils/caps are much higher frequency.
Regardless I can't believe the excitement is over this, that's inaudible unless my ear is right on top of it, as that recording sounds.
Every owner of a nMP has the right to be entirely satisfied.
".........".....................................
If someone does not feel annoyed, then the problem is not existing for him.
This is true, regardless if his machine has or has not this noise.
If other people however feel annoyed by that sound, then it's their right to ask Apple to eliminate it.
Pleasure like discomfort are individual.
Since this is a very expensive machine, every owner has the right to be entirely satisfied with his own nMP.
This is not a matter of unjustified "excitement" but with customers of Apple being entirely satisfied and I believe they have that right.
".........".....................................
If someone does not feel annoyed, then the problem is not existing for him.
This is true, regardless if his machine has or has not this noise.
If other people however feel annoyed by that sound, then it's their right to ask Apple to eliminate it.
Pleasure like discomfort are individual.
Since this is a very expensive machine, every owner has the right to be entirely satisfied with his own nMP.
This is not a matter of unjustified "excitement" but with customers of Apple being entirely satisfied and I believe they have that right.
Fan spindles aren't affected by people moving their mice, electronics however are. Also, you can't solely rely on a recording with a simple Snowball microphone that has been severely amplified to really tell you how the sound is experienced in real life.
Your hearing isn't as good as mine, that's fine, but for people with better hearing this is very audible, even at long distances (for me it's as intense at 10cm as it is at 150cm), hence the "excitement".