by Reader Kenneth Walsh’s Mac has gone strangely quiet. He writes:
I woke my MacBook Pro from sleep today and when I tried to play an iTunes track the Mac made no sound. I then noticed that the sound icon in the menu bar was gray. I went to the Sound system preference and it showed Digital Out in the output area and no listing for the Mac’s internal speakers. What the heck?
The background on the issue is that there’s a small sensor switch inside the headphone port. When you insert a headphone jack, the sensor understands what’s what and changes the sound output setting to Headphones. If you insert a jack for digital audio output, the device changes to Digital Out. When you remove the jack completely, it should read Internal Speakers.
The spirits tell me that there’s a very good chance that you recently had something jacked into this port—a set of headphones or a cable leading to powered speakers, for example. When you removed the jack, something in the port prevented the sensor from tripping correctly. That’s why you see Digital Out instead of internal Speakers.
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