Headphone output pulsing/popping

Hi guys,

like all of you I am pretty happy with my products. I've got two blackbooks, my girlfriend has two whitebooks, plus iPhones, iPods, a few Shuffles and the newer Apple TV. I guess you could call us suckers. But recently we've both had problems with our iPhones - every time we plug them into any kind of stereo system there is a low-frequency sounding pulsing, you can't listen to music on the stereo or plug them in for anything, because this sound destroys any listenable quality. I myself am an audio engineer and can't seem to work out what's wrong, and I often use my phone to play music over sound systems I've installed to test everything out.

My first thought was that we'd updated to a new iOS and that Apple wasn't happy with people using non-Apple systems to play music, now that we have the new "Airplay". But I realised this was probably a bit silly, as the noise +doesn't come up when listening through headphones/earphones+.

I've tried searching to find what the problem was, several times by Google, but it's a hard thing to search for as it usually comes up with about 308230958 other things.

Can anyone help us out???

blackbook, Mac OS X (10.5.8), iPhone issues!!!

Posted on Nov 30, 2010 4:55 AM

Reply
2 replies

Dec 14, 2010 4:47 PM in response to dndersen

I just experienced this exact same issue with my 3GS when I found this post....only to find no resolution.
My issues went beyond this, as when I use my headphones during gym time, only the right channel is audible.

After going to the Apple Store, I found the solution to be quite simple: Just clean out your headphone jack with air. You should also consider using a paperclip or something similar to get deeper so that you get everything "foreign" out of there.

The interference you're hearing is from the debris that has collected inside the headphone jack. After clearing the stuff out, everything went back to normal.

Hope this helps.

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Headphone output pulsing/popping

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