Ok, so last Saturday I got the “Digital Out Only” and the Red light of Silence out of my MacBook.  I wrote about it a couple of posts back.  Anyway, I finally found the magic wand for this problem, and you’re not going to believe it.

The problem mysteriously went away after I posted, and everything was hunky dorry till this evening.  I wanted to install my eVGA USB tuner on Vista on the MacBook, and the damned light came on with no sound.  I’d been going over everything I’d read on the interwebz in regards to this issue, and one thing kept sticking in my mind.  And that was the idea of a switch somewhere in the out jack that triggered the sound chip to go into digital mode.  Everyone on the net kept saying that it was a tiny micro switch that detected something, thus switching modes.  Then it hit me as I sat in silence.  It’s a Mac, made by Apple.  The same Apple that is plum ate up with shiny, glass, aluminum, accelerometers, and magnetic reed switches.  Basically what most PC’s are not.  Knowing that the antenna for the tuner had a magnet in it’s base, I had the idea that maybe the reed switch for the digital switch could be persuaded to act right if I gently probed with the antenna base’s magnetic field.

Maybe it was forethought, maybe just blind luck, but Apple put the hard drive on the other side of the laptop from where the out jack is located.  I gently waved the base back and forth inching closer to the  jack.  Then the light started to flicker, so I got a tad closer and a wave or two later (still ~2-3″ from the jack) the red light went and stayed off.  Sound then came forth from the internal speakers.

WooT!  I’ll keep yall posted if the light comes back on and if this trick works reliably.