Mac mini distorts audio badly

Lemme make a guess, have you been using the visualizer for awhile? At the apple store was the visualizer running? I'm thinking the macs were overheating.

If you don't hear distortion after a cold boot then it's a good indicator your mac isn't cooling itself properly.

Mine sounds absolutely awful as well. I was thinking that mine might have been bad. I've tried several different outputs and it has sounded terrible with all of them. It sounds completely flat. Kind of like a laptop speaker just louder when using bigger speakers.

Does anyone have an update on this? I'm trying to figure out if mine might have bad hardware or if the sound on all of them is this horrible. Is this something that might be fixed with a firmware update?

I have been listening to music all weekend on my new mini thru some cheap boston acoustics MM220 speakers i bought. I would not go so far as to say that the mini sounds horrible...but i would also not say that is as clean as i expected, even from these cheap speakers. The titles of my preset that i created yesterday is called "almost listenable".

words i would use to describe the sound would be muddy...honking...lacking in vocal detail. I am going to try outputting sound thru USB to see if there is a difference. But i could be hearing the crap speakers...or it could be the mini..hard to say. Let me play my iPod thru the speakers tonight and report back.

I am playing thru my iPod right now...natalie merchant tigerlilly with no EQ and it sounds pretty decent. I can just hear how boxy and muddy these speakers are. But there is no distortion being introduced by the iPod.

I will switch back to the mini in a bit and see how it compares un eq'd.

I also have a xitel am1 to play thru the USB port....

I chose tigerlilly over smashing pumpkins because it is acoustic and more likely to show differences in SQ. I think I hear more vocal detail than i remembered hearing thru the mini...

I listened to the xitel for a few minutes and determined that it sounds pretty similar to the iPod...but where as i could have listened to the iPod all night without feeling like i needed to EQ anything, i found myself wanting to use the EQ to try and open up the sound more.

Now listening thru the headphone output and to be honest it sounds ok...maybe not quite as open as the iPod, but certainly acceptable and i don't see anything here that would tell me there is an audio problem with the mini.

But lets go back to the your original post and add "rock" EQ to the mix....I will say before i turn it on that i found that EQ settings felt wonky to me on the mini yesterday...if i pushed anything to hard it would distort badly..

On to "rock"...with tigerlilly it just pumps up the base somewhat and makes the vocals louder...but it does not distort or sound unaceptable to me...


On the the iTunes store to test "blew away"...
does not sound great to me...but is that the recording or the mini? You say its the mini...I will try the same song tomorrow at work on my 24: imac and report back.

Cliffnotes...i heard nothing that says the mini has an audio problem...sorry.

That *****, I'm using a pair of Creative HS-400 earphones and I don't hear crackly distortion. I tried the same song in iTunes, but without the eq setting (no eq option in the View menu wth?!).

Oh right. I forgot to mention that plugging my iphone into the same speakers results in better sound. There's definitely something wrong here.