Chuck Destroyed my Amplifier!

[Inventor]

Well, it wasn't really ChucK's fault, it was mine. I don't remember exactly what I did, but whatever it was I did it at full volume on my Mac. I remember making this Gawd-awful screeching sound by mistake and quickly hitting the ctrl-c, but it was too late. At first I thought only the speakers were blown, so I tried the headphones - yep, the same clicks and pops are there.

You would think that a Mac, with all their audio and artistry emphasis would be fairly indestructible and indeed I have blasted music at full volume for three years almost, but today was the day. Most of the audio quality is just fine, but this choppy transistor-popping sound overlays all of it.

I'll make do with this for a while, but eventually I'll have to either get some USB speakers or bring my Mac in for service. It just goes to show the power of Chuck, three years of hard rock couldn't hurt the amp but one second of wayward ChucKing destroyed it! Rock on ChucK!

[kijjaz]

Hmm.. oh yeah, synthesis programs has destroyed my old iBook G3 onboard speaker also hahahaha.
It can produce sounds, but so distorted.

After that, I became more careful on chuck.
Sometimes I have a "master track" for everything.
and use it as a limiter (by using Dyno master; and master.limix(); and set master.gain)

dac clipping is so powerful heheh.

[Kassen]

Oh, my! I never heard of anything like that!

I would say it's a Apple design error. Sure; any amp can be blown given a hot enough signal but Apple prides itself on integration; they know what format of data arrives at the DAC, they know what the DAC is and they know what the amp can take. If the amp can blow it clearly needs some sort of protection.

Right now prankster noise artists might make a soundfile that would do this and anybody using a Mac at full blast to entertain a small party (I've seen that done many times, likely it's not that uncommon) would end up with a broken computer. I think that's bad.

Not to make light of your loss but, erm, after all of the joking disclaimers about how unstable ChucK is and how dangerous using it is this is the first time I ever heard of something actually breaking! This should be entered into the Big Book of ChucK Legends!

Also; even modest external soundcards should have a much higher sound quality then build in ones. It's kinda like getting a two person bed at some point; it doesn't seem like a big deal but after you get one you never go back. I'd go that route, warranty will have passed now (right?) and repairing such a component of a laptop motherboard likely won't be cheap.

[Inventor]

HaHa, the joke's on me! This morning when I got up I noticed a bunch of RAM being used up even though no applications were running so I shut down the Mac and rebooted. Now the pops and clicks are gone!

I was so sure I had blown the amp that I posted it in jest, but now I see the joke is on me, it was something, possibly ChucK, using up tons of RAM and not giving it back! You are so right about Apple's quality, Kassen, I should never have doubted it. The amp must have been protected when I made that squeal!

Just goes to show you should double check something before you post it! Oh well, no harm done i guess! Please accept my apologies for any confusion that I may have caused.

[Kassen]

Good to hear! (and no need for apologies at all)

I'm not a big advocate of Apple's taste in build in DAC, btw. I'm sure it serves for casual usage but many people also use them to feed sound directly to a PA and at that point some of the weaknesses become apparent. For some reason my ears are very "allergic" to DAC's that have slight issues with their anti-aliasing filter and as soon as you start using sharp clicks, high frequencies and so on Apple's build in DAC's misbehave, to my ears.

I wouldn't call that a Apple issue as build in sound cards can't be expected to work perfectly in demanding situations like that. Build in soundcards are meant to be affordable, small and modest in power consumption, it's not fair to expect them to perform like professional, expensive, large products with their own PSU. I have other issues with Apple (and with MS, and with Linux, and with many manufacturers of hardware) but I resolved not to debate those in a ChucK context, to me ChucK should be about similarities, not differences.

I would, BTW, predict that you'll blow the little speakers before you blow the amp, I never heard of anyone blowing the headphone amp of a CD player either, for example, but blowing (cheap) headphones isn't that hard.

ChucK or the OS should, BTW, free the memory used after it's shut down. If that doesn't happen then that's a bug, that's why it reports "cleaning up" upon shut down. If you can reproduce this it's worth a mail to Ge. Why memory allocation would cause crackles isn't clear to me, OSX seems to have a link between available free memory and CPU usage, that might be it.