Simon Sellars: Sleepy Brain Archives

Do-it-yourself soundproofing. Photo: www.g4noise.com

It begins with a slow cycling noise, the heavy drone of massive turbines gearing up to complete some Herculean task. This sonic undertow – insistent and full of ominous bottom-end harmonics – ensures that writing my notes is a horrendous, teeth-gnashing exercise. Disorienting stress extends to nausea at the root of my stomach as the turbines whip into regular peaks and troughs. At their loudest – a piercing, invasive whine that could be used as a “smart” weapon of war – I’m driven from the room to take refuge at the end of the building, where the hideous banshee wail is still nightmarishly audible.

Am I in the engine room of some mighty ship of war? Am I in the subterranean workspace of a secret government facility? Or am I standing perilously close to the engine of a super-duper jet plane? Well, actually, I’m in my study at home, working on my new Apple Macintosh G4, one of the “Mirrored Door Drive” (MDD) models released late last year. The noise is simply the Mac’s power supply and cooling fans going about their business.

When I first used the machine, I deluded myself that the situation was acceptable, although I needed to play music while I worked in order to mask that “slow cycling noise” at the edge of consciousness. Then, during summer as my G4 heated up, the “piercing, invasive whine” kicked in, my stress levels increased and my productivity decreased – I could only work with earplugs, or with even louder music to drown the sound. I even experimented with putting the G4 inside a cupboard, power leads and extensions snaking to the safety of my desk.

This was clearly a serious design flaw – I was positive that Apple would be aware of it and that they would be doing everything in their power to rectify the fault (thereby maintaining their reputation as a feel-good company “for the people”). This was not the case. Not only did Apple refuse to acknowledge the MDD models over-the-top noise levels, but they were deleting threads on their official discussion forums that dared to even mention the issue. Suddenly, the gap between Microsoft and Apple didn’t seem so great anymore.

In my quest for solutions, I came across G4noise.com, an American Internet discussion group and forum designed to provide support for those who had bought MDD G4s, had experienced the problem and were getting no joy from Apple. Methodically collating information from hundreds of affected users, G4noise.com calmly and patiently applied a blowtorch to Apple’s corporate policy, backed by incontrovertible reams of hard data, analyses, petitions and testimonials. Eventually, Apple admitted the problem – largely prodded, it would seem, by G4noise.com’s agitation – and offered to replace the flawed power supplies with quieter versions. But here in Australia (or at least, in Melbourne), we are still waiting to receive our replacement power supplies. Time, then, to revisit the intriguing history of G4noise.com…

The group formed when San Francisco filmmaker and designer Richard Hoefer constructed a new $15,000 editing bay around an MDD, but couldn’t stand using it because of the noise from the G4. Hoefer didn’t feel capable of carrying out modifications to the power supply (with the added danger of voiding Apple’s warranty) so he looked to Apple for a solution. The company did not acknowledge there was a problem and closed his case. Meanwhile, Hoefer saw that other MDD users had been positing similar experiences on various discussion forums and decided to get a pressure group together comprised of multimedia professionals as a way of grabbing Apple’s attention.

Before Apple offered the replacement policy, G4noise.com published online all sorts of innovative fixes and modifications from frustrated users, including ample doses of surreal humour (in order to live with this racket, MDD owners need to develop thick skins and finely honed senses of the absurd). A feature of the website is the section where users are invited to send in videos about their relationship with their MDDs (affectionately dubbed “leaf blowers” by many for the offensive sound they make). These are well worth watching: some are mini-dramas of courageous human endurance, some are tragic and sad, and others are screwball comedies of ridiculous proportions.

For professionals working in the audio and video industries, the problem is particularly frustrating. According to Phil Lefebvre, who took over G4noise.com leadership after Hoefer burnt out from devoting 50-hour days to it, “the machines are too loud to use in a recording environment and the high-pitched whine is very difficult to dampen, since it is such a pure tone. The audio noise problem renders these machines unusable with internal audio cards. There is some sort of RFI/EMF interference with the built-in audio circuitry, and even PCI audio cards installed, that makes them useless for audio recording.”

Lefebvre is voluble when discussing related health issues. “The high frequency noise can impair concentration, induce headaches, interfere with ability to sleep…even induce nausea,” he says. “In general humans are more easily annoyed by pure tones – like the frequency spikes generated by the MDD power supply and case fans resonating – than ‘white noise’. For example, a baby crying is annoying while an air conditioner blowing is tolerable, even at the same decibel levels. The whine of my MDD affected me so bad I feel sick just listening to a recording of it.”

The whole incident has put a nasty dent in Apple’s carefully cultivated public image. In recent years, as we all know, Microsoft has been portrayed as the Evil Empire of the computing world, with double-dealings, damaging court cases and an apparent lack of regard for customer rights. Conversely, Apple’s image has been warm and fuzzy, the discerning “anti-corporate” computer of choice for kids, educational establishments and hip creatives alike.

Has Lefebvre lost the faith? Regarding the MDD problem, he takes umbrage with Apple for its “lack of communication, its secrecy, duplicity, even prevarication. It could be because Apple is a big corporation, where one hand doesn’t know what the other is doing. It wasn’t hard for conspiracy theorists to infer more nefarious motives, and the silence from Apple allowed those rumours to fester.”

Lefebvre believes there is now little difference between Apple and Microsoft. “Both act like monopolists trying to figure out how to be competitive,” he says. “Apple is a monopolistic hardware company that makes some competitive software; Microsoft is a monopolistic software company that makes some competitive hardware. Both have good and bad points, triumphs and abuses. Both are trying to make a buck in this brutal business. The main difference is Apple sucks at that right now, while Microsoft succeeds at it.”

In a recent interview with Wired’s Leander Kahney, Hoefer said he wanted Apple to acknowledge that G4noise.com was in some way responsible for changing the company’s policy on the defective MDDs. Kahney quotes Hoefer as saying, “There’s no way in hell this would have happened without our lobbying efforts. Obviously we got their attention. They responded to the outcry. There’s no way they did this out of the kindness of their hearts.”

Lefebvre’s view is more even. “We had no two-way communication with Apple executives,” he says. “G4noise.com sent letters to several executives, but only got courtesy responses. We were never contacted to consult on the problem. Many of us contacted Apple support individually to lodge complaints, and G4noise.com encouraged more people to do so. I know that Apple tracks these complaints, which is what got them to quieten the 2nd generation MDDs.”

Ultimately, Lefebvre thinks that Apple views G4noise.com as “somewhere between a blister on the foot and a pain in the ass. I don’t doubt that our negative publicity hurt sales, though the poor
price/performance ratio was probably the main culprit.”

But as the saga winds down into its final stages, it seems there are reports of customers who are less than happy with the replacement power supplies. A German company, Verax, has even developed a rival power supply, which it claims is even quieter than the Mac replacement and which it plans to sell at a reduced price. And then there are us poor bumpkins Down Under, who are yet to even receive the Mac solution. Whatever happens, you can be sure G4noise.com will be right in there, agitating, stirring the pot and bringing together people all over the world in the name of Positive Consumer Action.

For Lefebvre, this “ability of widely dispersed people to unify and organise is one of the things the Internet is all about. I’ve been online for 20 years now, since before the Internet was even public, and I take this kind of action for granted. If anything, I don’t think the Internet has yet reached its potential to fully inform and mobilise the world’s masses. G4noise.com is just one more step in that direction”.

Keep watching.

– Simon Sellars

..: Links
>> www.g4noise.com