Frequent intermittent audio rumble plagues my Mac Mini

April 14, 2020 9:38 PM

My Mac Mini (late 2012) intermittently makes a sort of rumbling sound which *seems* to come from the internal speaker. This noise seems to be unconnected to whether other audio is being played through the Mac's system. The speakers plugged into the headphone jack are Creative desktop speakers with a subwoofer on the floor. Nothing plugged into mic jack. The only audio devices showing on the System Preferences are the built-in ones (headphone and mic jacks and HDMI). Any clues?

I use this machine for video-editing, as well as your basic all-purpose office and home stuff. I was editing a video for about 5 hours last night and by the end of it the rumble was driving me a little batty. Anyone got a clue for where to look to fix this?

Late 2012 Mac Mini, fitted with SSD, running latest MacOS. Still goes fine in all other respects. Programs used iMovie, Hindenberg Journalist, Office 365 stuff, Spark, nothing special really.

posted by ademack to Technology (3 answers total)

This could be electrical interference being picked up by the speakers. In particular, try physically separating the speaker wires from any other cables, especially power cables.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:06 PM on April 14, 2020 [1 favorite]

Oh, I missed that it seems to be coming from the internal speaker. If that’s the case then my suggestion won’t help.
posted by mbrubeck at 10:08 PM on April 14, 2020

Best answer: For a weird rumbling noise from a machine of that age, my first suspect would be the fan. Especially if the noise was noticeably bad after hours of video editing.

If you're comfortable doing so, I would pop off the bottom cover and run the machine on its side or upside down for a while. The fan is right underneath the cover and it should be pretty obvious whether it's the culprit.
posted by ZaphodB at 11:29 PM on April 14, 2020 [3 favorites]