Am I the only one with a blip/pop noise?!

I have my MBP 2.2 Santa Rosa over 4 months now, it was an ex-demo model, so I have no idea really how much it has been used or turned on. Anyway I have no problems what so ever with it, except for the 'Plink' noise. My wife's MBP 2.4 Penryn makes the same noise, its a little harder to hear on hers because the fans on the penryn model seem to be a good deal noisier then on the santa rosa. So there you go, until Apple address this I'm just going to live with it, I can't afford to be without a computer, and I don't fancy doing the software bodge.
All that said I will be replacing my HDD for a 320GB Fujitsu in the next couple of weeks, it will be interesting to see if the noise persists. I expect it will, but will keep all informed.

Thank you so much for your response...it makes me feel more at ease. I love this thing and would hate to have to resort to my old PC laptop again. I think I have gotten more used to the noise. I too plan on replacing my HDD in a few weeks, but I have no idea with what (I'll leave that up to the fiance). From what I've read on here, the Fijitsu model seems to be popular so I will suggest that.

I am lucky enough that a lot of the clients I work with are apple users, so much so, that at times I have to remind myself that this is the exception rather then the rule. Anyway, I have asked a number of them if they have experienced this noise and so far a few have and the majority haven't. Now this proves very little, because my wife didn't notice her MBP made this noise until I pointed it out to her (now she hears it all the time, and thanks me for bringing it to her attention). I guess my point is that I figure this issue is present in most MBP to various degrees, some folks pick up on it, whilst the majority of people are ignorant to its presence. The way I see it, unless you work or use your machine in near silent environments, you won't be able to hear the 'plink'. Right now I'm in a room with air-con hum, a number of computer fan drone and no body else, closed door, a relatively quite room. Yet I can't hear the HDD noise.

If I'm truly being a cynic, I expect Apple are completely aware of this issue, there is no simple fix, it doesn't hurt the machine (just the user), so unless we all band together and present a class action complaint, nothing will be done about it. At this stage I have resigned myself to living with the problem. To be honest, Depending what the new MBP looks like when it comes out later on this year I might sell this puppy for one of those and it will be interesting to do the "quite room" test on one of those.

bump

sorry MAXL221, bump is all you can say? then stop it, we got it_

trying to keep it in most recent topics discussed

Okay!

glad to find that it isn't just me. I purchased this laptop a few days ago and wasn't impressed to hear a random pop coming from what seemed to be the left speaker. I've read pretty much the whole thread... it seems like everyone has more or less a handle of what's going on...

What i keep coming back to is that what if isn't hard drive at all. I appreciate that the case is supposed to be shielded against radiation but I beg to differ!
My question:
1-Is there electromagnetic radiation coming from the magnetic connection of the power supply.
2-is what I generally believe to be a higher frequency blip/pop from the left speaker area happen when i'm connected to the power supply as opposed to battery.
3-is there a way to tell if fluctuations in the power supply catalyst a blip

from reading the start of the posts and the dates and how long the page was I thought for sure there would be an answer by the end. I will eventually try the fix although i'm a PC convert (after a life of dedicated and entrenched PC infrastructure. Although, I can't say that I wouldn't expect any manufacturer of anything to be flawless or without quirks.

Still undecided as to whether to return it for a later model or ????

Chris

I now got my 4th MacBook Pro, every single one of my trials had the problem with the headphone-out. The latest one is from week 25, nothing solved there. I dunno what to do.

Some time back I posted saying that I was going to have the my original 120GB fujitsu HDD swapped out for a 320GB fujitsu HDD. Well many months later and I have finally got the work done by an authorized apple technician, I initially was hoping that perhaps the drive was defective and that it was it causing the blip noise, but this new drive makes the same noise, all be it a little less noticeable. the 120GB that I fitted into an external enclosure is now as quite as a mouse!

As I said before I never found this noise as disturbing as others and never wanted to do the head parking software thing, so I am happy, and also 'cus I've 200 gigs of free space on my HDD to fill up with who knows what, yea!

My advice live with it folks!

{quote:title=dawnrazor wrote:}My advice live with it folks!{quote}
No. Such a deviant operating noise is simply not acceptable. I love Apple products as much as the next guy, but this issue I cannot just bow down and "just live with".

Apple needs to address this issue NOW instead of pretending it does not exist.

Thought I'd try to find out just what sort of sound people are talking about here, so I scrolled back through the (vast) thread and found a couple of urls for links to people's own recordings of it. Trouble is none of them currently seem to work!

My guess (after a quick read of the thread) is that quite a few different noises may be being assumed to be "the same thing" here.

Could people suffering the problem or problems, if possible, make a recording and post it somewhere, with a link in this thread, so we can get a clear idea of what people are talking about? Yours sounds particularly worthy of a "hearing", gloom909! Any chance of a sound bite?

Unfortunately (or otherwise) I don't seem to have this issue myself so it is hard to know what to suggest to resolve it.

Cheers

Rod

Message was edited by: Rod Hagen

Ever since I purchased my MacBook Pro 1.5 years ago, this problem was never resolved by a firmware or software update. And from what I can tell, the latest 2008 models also have this problem.

Try this: http://www.bluesalamand.de/noise.mov

I played that "pop"-sound and recorded what came out of the headphone-out. At the beginning you can also here the sound chip awake. After each sound played, the beeps change randomly. At the very end, you can here the sound chip fall to sleep with a "blubb".

Thanks, Nuex.

Interesting the periodicity of the primary "pop". Pretty much every 6 seconds for most of the recording.

Doesn't sound like an HD head parking or the like etc etc to me, but I wonder what might occur with this 6 second cycle? Something that gets polled at this sort of interval would seem likely. A third party drive monitor of some kind, maybe? A printer driver? Or the optical drive? Not sure why any of these would produce a "pop", but it has to be something that is regularly done. Anyone watched to see if Activity Monitor throws up particular things with this sort of time interval?

Mmm. I'm intrigued. Definitely don't hear it on my own MBP, though.

Cheers

Rod

Like a lot of MBP owners, I just wondered if one day there would be a fix for the now famous "hard drive head parking noise".
I had an OEM 120 GB Fujitsu hard drive in my MBP (15", C2Duo 2,16Ghz), that ran smoothly and I never noticed such a clicking noise. But in a desperate need for space, I decided to change it for a 320 GB WD Scorpio, after reading good feedback from (PC :-)) laptop users.
But then I discovered this annoying head-parking noise, from the very first days of use.
So far I relied on the Hdapm fix with some good results : no more noise when set at 254.... but a much higher HD temp (as high as 44° C). I used to live with it, preferring a quite & hot MBP to a noisy & colder one.
A few month later, I tried a Windows software on my BootCamp partition, called HDDLife (14 day free trial) : this software allows to enable the Automatic Acoustic Management, resulting in a bit smoother drive. And there's also an Advanced Power Management setting, with the same effect as the hdapm fix (no more noise when set at full performance).
But I also noticed there was an indication concerning the APM support on my hard drive : "function not supported".
So I tried to uncheck the "Enable APM" feature, restarted under MacOs : still no noise.
Then I changed the hdapm value for "default", restarted again and.... STILL NO NOISE !
10 minutes later, the temp went down to 37°C.
I restarted another time, tested it with & without AC adapter plugged in : I so far don't hear this annoying noise anymore, and my MBP is quiet AND cold !
I hope this could help some people (Everything you need is a BootCamp partition)
Please provide feeback if it works for you !