The whole MacBook Pro and the broken audio thing finally just drained me, so I threw in the towel and took it into a Genius Bar to have them take a crack at it.
Simply put, I was defeated before the battle even began.
I got to the Apple Store about 5:30 PM, 45 minutes before my appointment. Since I have the song that the audio issue is most noticeable on uploaded to my webserver, I could just pull it down to any of the store computers and replay it.
I got on one of the 15" MacBook Pro's, pointed it at my webserver, and played the song. I plugged my iPhone earbuds in.
And, holy shit! The computers were defective! The store computers were defective! I tried it with a current-gen MacBook, and an iMac. Both had the same problem! This meant it had to be a 10.6 problem.
At that point, I was due up at the Genius Bar, and I already know this was probably outside their scope of support. I knew defeat when I saw it.
The guy was really kind about things, though. He let me do whatever I needed to reproduce the problem. I plugged in my external drive and booted Snow Leopard. He got out some really high-grade Bose headphones, which worked flawlessly. Even cranking the frequency to 96000 Hz didn't make the problem appear with the Bose 'phones.
So I let him listen to the song with my earbuds. And he noticed right away.
He got me a replacement set of Apple 'buds, then I left.
Sure enough, when I got home, rebooted into Snow Leopard, and tried the audio again, the pulsating started right back up with the Apple earbuds.
I...I don't even know where the problem could lie at this point.
There's three different scenarios that could be at play here:
1. The pulsating issue is still there with the Bose headphones, but the noise canceling tech might be making the pulsating much less noticeable.
2. It's totally a driver issue with 10.6.
3. It could be the hardware. Either in the headphone jack or the 'buds themselves.
To test out #3, I'm going to buy a throwaway pair of earbuds tomorrow to see if the pulsating happens again.
#2 is already proved by rebooting into 10.5.5/Windows 7.
#1 is definitely plausible at this point, but that will be proved by testing #3.
If anyone reading this has anything they can chip in to help, I'd greatly appreciate it. Assuming that the problem lies completely in 10.6, I'll be phoning AppleCare *and* filing a bug report with Apple.
UPDATE:
I got some Panasonic Digital Monitor cans for about $30 from Fry's. These are the kind that seal over your ears so you can't really hear anything other than the music. I tried replicating the problem with these and it didn't seem to reappear. (And these do NOT have noise canceling tech)
But, this issue happened with the HTC earbuds I tried, and my Apple earbuds.
I'm beginning to believe this might just be an issue with earbuds. I'll have to wait until my next paycheck, then I'll buy a cheap pair of earbuds and re-test.
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