Possible speaker issue development?

[kingston73]

I have a 2017 macbook pro which has been trouble free until yesterday. I noticed yesterday that playing video or music through the speakers it started to crackle randomly and progressively got more frequent. I hadn't rebooted the macbook for over a week so I restarted and that seemed to resolve the issue but I'm wondering if this is the early start of a mechanical issue of some sort?

 

[jrstanford]

I just purchased a recycled A1425 MacBook Pro Retina with this issue of the left speaker suddenly being distorted. I followed all the suggestions across the web and finally thought about hooking up my bluetooth speaker to see if I got distortion that way. Sure enough, clean as a whistle. All the other ways I continued to have the distortion, so I am pretty sure I just need to replace the speaker and be done with it.

I have not seen that suggestion anywhere I have gone to seek out assistance, so thought I'd share it. So can anyone point out a flaw in my logic here? I'm thinking that even with it being bluetooth, the left speaker is the left speaker. So if I moved the slider over it would have continued to be distorted if it was the OS (running Catalina), but since it cleared up immediately with the bluetooth speaker, that was a pretty good indicator that the speaker is probably blown on the laptop?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or ideas.

 

[Sanpete]

There are several threads about the OP's issue, which has been going on for years without much clarity about the causes. Some think it's caused by overloaded CPU cores, which may be why restarting helps, for a while.

I just purchased a recycled A1425 MacBook Pro Retina with this issue of the left speaker suddenly being distorted. I followed all the suggestions across the web and finally thought about hooking up my bluetooth speaker to see if I got distortion that way. Sure enough, clean as a whistle. All the other ways I continued to have the distortion, so I am pretty sure I just need to replace the speaker and be done with it.

I have not seen that suggestion anywhere I have gone to seek out assistance, so thought I'd share it. So can anyone point out a flaw in my logic here? I'm thinking that even with it being bluetooth, the left speaker is the left speaker. So if I moved the slider over it would have continued to be distorted if it was the OS (running Catalina), but since it cleared up immediately with the bluetooth speaker, that was a pretty good indicator that the speaker is probably blown on the laptop?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts or ideas.

Makes sense, and since it's only one speaker, it's more likely mechanical.

 

[jrstanford]

First, thanks for the response. It was appreciated.

Second, yes, I was spot on. I got the new speaker set and installed it just now. As I was removing the left speaker (on the right with back cover off) I noted the rubber gasket surrounding the woofer portion was falling away from the housing. Going back, I found a YouTube video which showed this exact issue, so yes, it is very common, apparently.

The gasket lifted away cleanly on one side and you could the copper wire winding underneath. At least the logic in testing in this case was good.

Thanks again.