One thing that made iMacs appear more elegant was the lack of "cable mess". Steve Jobs talked about this frequently and this was one of the reasons that he so greatly favored all-in-ones. It makes sense, why should computer speakers need another cable for AC power to power an onboard amp (complete with its own powerbrick for DC conversion) when you have a power supply in your computer and a cable already connecting to it. You could either have the amp in the computer and then output the amplified sound to the speakers or keep the amp external, but use the computers power supply to power it.įor my project, I wanted to make it as similar to the original iMac G4 as possible. To do this I had intended to internalize the griffin powerwave's board with the DC power hooked up to the an internal 12V line. However, this board was a tight fit and I already had a USB audio adapter for use with the internal microphone and did not want to add a second. So I opened up and tried internalizing the smaller Griffin iFire which connected via a standard 3.5mm audio jack and FireWire. Although my computer did not have a firewire 400, this is used only for power. So I connected this to the internal 12V and hooked the iFire to my turtle bay usb audio adapters headphone port via a 3.5mm cable. Unfortunately the shape of the board did not lend itself to sit flush against the round rear ports of the iMac. Although Griffin made an extension cable for these speakers, it seems to be long extinct. So, using the port on the original iMac's motherboard, I fashioned an extension cable. I cut the connector from a broken set of Pro Speakers and was surprised to find 6 wires, instead of four wires. It seems that the ring on the base (the black wire) and the extra connector area on the pin itself (the red wire) are used to send some "signal" in addition to the 2 channels (white/blue and brown/yellow). I then used a multimeter to find where on iMac's port each wire connected to (I used the connections at the bottom of the picture. The solder points on top in the picture that I labelled indicate where these connections were routed next. It turns out that due to power limitations of my power supply, I started to see signs of strain (USB ports not working etc) when I hooked up the ifire to a 12v molex (via the power cables in the firewire) internally, so I decided to scrap internalizing the speaker connection. I thought it was interesting that this $20 mini amp pictured here sounded exactly the same as the sound from these speakers when the iFire or Powerwave provided the amplification via the minijack connector. When I looked to see what the cost of these long discontinued items are online, I found that the asking prices are even more outrageous than when I grossly overpaid for these several years ago. Used iFire's (initially $40 or so) seem to go for as much as $300 and the Powerwaves $200+. For anyone who wishes to use these speakers with a different computer, simply cut the speakers free before the "circle", strip the 2 wires, and connect it to a mini amp. If you already have an iFire or Powerwave, there is no reason to do this, but buying one for as astronomical amount is not worth it. In retrospect, this is one of most unnecessary, frustrating, proprietary features that I have seen apple incorporate for very little reason. It seems that apple went to a lot of trouble to make sure that people could not use these speakers with non-apple hardware. I completely understand why they did not add an amplifier to these speakers. By keeping the amp internal they simplified the setup allowing for completely translucent speakers to be connected via one cable to the computer without the need for another AC plug.
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