I want my 44hz iSub working again!

December 2, 2006 12:51 AM

Just bought me a spiffy new 17" iMac but MacIntels don't support iSubs?

Ok, I finally decided to grab my first MacIntel, and took advantage of this excellent sale at The Apple Store on Regents Street in London yesterday. I walked out the door with a very sweet, very, very snappy 1.83 Ghz 17" iMac, I've been moving stuff over and everything so far works fine but my iSub.

It's a known problem, but I was curious if anyone here had heard of or even better, deployed a solution?

While I know Apple would gladly sell me a new iSub and speakers, I'm frugal and would much rather use what's been working fine since the summer of 2000.

A few more items of interest: the iSub doesn't show up in Preferences, but it does in System Profiler. I've got two G3 iMacs and the iSub works fine with each of these. It works fine on my G4 PowerBook, and on my G3 iBook (yeh I know, but I like Macs, what can I say?).

This is clearly a peripheral that is not supported on a MacIntel. Which is a shame, as this is a standard, USB peripheral.

Can anyone help?

posted by Mutant to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

Response by poster: Agh forgot to add - I already know about the headphone driver hack that some folks are using, but I'm not interested as all it does is fool the iMac into thinking the iSub is a set of external speakers.

So the internal speakers are turned off, and all sound is diverted through the iSub. Hardly stereo, and quality would be suspect as all sound would be diverted, not just low notes that Harmon Kardon designed the iSub to reproduce (down to 44Hz!).

Also I'd find this a little disconcerted as my iSub is on the floor under my desk.

Thanks in advance for any help!
posted by Mutant at 1:01 AM on December 2, 2006

Best answer: Actually, it really isn't a standard USB peripheral - it relied on a custom Apple USB sound driver as well as software crossover support for the computer's own speakers. Unless you're up to reverse engineering the PowerPC driver and using that knowledge to write your own Intel driver, I think your only other option is to physically rewire the iSub, turning it into a non-USB subwoofer. The forum thread to which my link points has a discussion of someone's plans to do just that, but they never did post how their experiment turned out. If you really want a subwoofer for your Mac I think you're better off selling your iSub to someone with a PowerPC Mac and buying yourself a new subwoofer.

If you really like the look of your iSub, Apple will sell you the Harman Kardon SoundSticks II, which, unlike the iSub, connect via speaker jack instead of USB (and hence are compatible with your Intel Mac).
posted by RichardP at 1:38 AM on December 2, 2006

The SoundSticks II sound nowhere near as good as the original firewire one, fwiw.
posted by armoured-ant at 4:07 AM on December 2, 2006

The iSub didn't work for the longest time with MacOSX. One day it magically worked. I'm not saying that you (or I, once I upgrade to an Intel machine in the room which has my iSub) will have that luck, but hey - it could happen.
posted by tomierna at 8:23 PM on December 2, 2006