"This Song Will Break Your MacBook's Speakers"

A security researcher damaged his MacBook speakers by playing a loud song and a loud sound for 40 seconds. In a recent experiment, Hector Martin, an independent security researcher who focuses on Apple products, said he was able to damage his MacBook Air powered by the company's M2 chip. Martin said he used Dan Worrall's song "I Won The Loudness War" as well as a 40-second "sine sweep," which is a vibration shaker test that tries different frequencies to see how a speaker responds to them. Martin stated on his project's GitHub page that the tweeters pose the greatest risk of damage, and that damage occurs relatively quickly, even with only 40-second sweeps. If this is thermal, it implies that even short-term power fluctuations are dangerous. A tweeter is a component of a loudspeaker that is designed to play high audio frequencies. Martin revealed that the 40-second sine sweep was enough to damage the left tweeter, while playing the song was enough to damage the right. Martin carried out his experiment on a MacBook Air, on which he installed Asahi Linux, a version of Linux he is developing specifically for use on Mac computers running Apple's own processors. He wrote that he believes playing "I Won The Loudness War" on a MacBook Air M2 running MacOS will cause damage. The purpose of this experiment was to determine how MacOS protects its speakers from damage, and then transfer those techniques to Asahi Linux. This article continues to discuss Martin's speaker protection research. 

Motherboard reports "This Song Will Break Your MacBook's Speakers"