Ableton Forum

Hi everyone,

So I bought this MBP in 2009, Intel Core duo 2, 2.53ghz, 8G ram (added myself) running OSX 10.6 snow leopard (I think).

My issue is that when I playback audio through the headphone jack from software like Ableton Live 8, VLC, iTunes etc the sound sounds horrible: over compressed, super bassy, sounds like it’s ‘playing double’ as I can sort of hear a very short delay. Very bad. I already checked EQs, etc. Same issue for both software. Also It didn’t used to be like that. It kind of just appeared a couple years ago. I have played small gigs straight from the headphone jack and it sounded fine.

However, when I play audio through the headphone jack from internet apps like Youtube, Soundcloud, etc, everything sounds fine. So this tells us that it should not be a hardware issue.

Also on ableton live I playback everything through an external soundcard, no issue there either. The issue happens only when playing audio through headphone jack from software playback only. As a result I never take my MBP out as I can’t take the audio quality from headphones when working on tracks.

I searched about this topic which brought me to the Utilities>Audio midi settings.Everything looks like it should. iTunes and Ableton Live 8 suite are updated to their latest version.

What do you reckon I should do? Reset to factory settings? OS update to Maverick? But then isn’t my MBP too old for the latest update? Also read about a PRAM reset.

Thank you very much for your help and your time!!
Cheers
Le Filou

http://www.soundcloud.com/le-filou

Um... nice tunes on that soundcloud page

I have an MBP 2009, I run Mavericks without a problem.

And I have no problem with sound through the headphone jack.

What are your audio settings within Live? CoreAudio?

Thanks for your compliments and feedback about Mavericks working on a 09 mbp
I guess I'll just upgrade to Mav. as it's not an Ableton specific issue.
Audio settings in Live are Core Audio indeed.
Cheers!

Hope it works.

It may make sense to ask Ableton Support if the problem does not get better.

As I said, headphone jack sound should be perfectly fine on a 2009 MBP running Live.

Hmm actually I just found posts on other forums about people having issues with mav/yosemite os upgrades on MBP 09. They have in common a Ram upgrade. Did you upgrade yours?

Yes, I doubled my RAM some time ago. No problem.

Awesome, I will try that out then
Thanks for your help!

I very much doubt that an OS upgrade will deal with the problem... But let us know how it goes.

I tried resetting the PRAM, to no avail. I haven't tried the OS update. I did realize that iTunes had the audio enhancer on which didn't do the already mysterious echo-y sound any justice. So i'm back to square one. I guess I'll just leave it like that... Thanks for your help anyway.