Notes

Things I've figured out

Small things I worked out, mostly the hard way — saved here in case they help someone else. Audio rabbit holes, mountain bike epiphanies, the occasional AI-pairing trick.

A running list, very short for now: just the one entry below to start. Some of these took me years to figure out, some took an afternoon and a good conversation with Claude. More will follow as I have something worth saving.

01
Audio

Adding a subwoofer to the Apple Studio Display

A subwoofer on a hardwood floor
The kind of bass the Studio Display can't quite manage on its own. Photo: Unsplash.

Here's a thing that bugged me for a long time. My Apple Studio Display has six speakers built in, but the bass is — for obvious physical reasons — thin. I'd already paid for those speakers and didn't want to add a separate speaker system. I just wanted to plug in a subwoofer to fill in the low end.

It is not, it turns out, straightforward. I tried splitting audio with macOS's built-in Audio MIDI Setup years ago and could never get it to work cleanly. This time I asked Claude to figure it out with me — and I now have a functioning setup with the Studio Display handling mids and highs and a sub doing the low end.

The setup

The goal: send everything to the main speakers, and also send a copy to a subwoofer plugged into the headphone jack. Let the subwoofer's built-in crossover handle the bass filtering — no software EQ required.

Tool: Loopback by Rogue Amoeba (about $99, and worth it).

  • 1. Create a virtual audio device in Loopback. I called mine Loopback Audio.
  • 2. Add two monitors to it: the Studio Display speakers, and the 3.5mm headphone jack (where the subwoofer is plugged in).
  • 3. In System Settings → Sound, set Loopback Audio as the system output.
  • 4. That's it. The subwoofer's hardware crossover handles the rest.

Because I sometimes work with the Studio Display and sometimes from the laptop alone, I made a second Loopback device called Studio Display + Sub that uses the Studio Display speakers and the headphone jack. I switch between the two in Sound settings depending on what's plugged in.

Two gotchas that almost made me give up

  • → A constant hum from the headphone jack. Turned out to be a ground loop from the laptop charger — running on battery confirmed it. Fix: a $10 3.5mm ground loop isolator from Amazon. Done.
  • → Max volume felt weak. Loopback's per-monitor sliders had defaulted to 31–55%. Expanding Options on each monitor and pulling the sliders to 100% fixed it.