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. 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. 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. The solder points on top in the picture that I labelled indicate where these connections were routed next. 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. 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 cut the connector from a broken set of Pro Speakers and was surprised to find 6 wires, instead of four wires. So, using the port on the original iMac's motherboard, I fashioned an extension cable. Although Griffin made an extension cable for these speakers, it seems to be long extinct. Unfortunately the shape of the board did not lend itself to sit flush against the round rear ports of the iMac. 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. Although my computer did not have a firewire 400, this is used only for power.

So I opened up and tried internalizing the smaller Griffin iFire which connected via a standard 3.5mm audio jack and FireWire.

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. 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. 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. 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. Steve Jobs talked about this frequently and this was one of the reasons that he so greatly favored all-in-ones. One thing that made iMacs appear more elegant was the lack of 'cable mess'. Griffin iFire Adapter (Powered by Firewire) I had been lucky to obtain both a Griffin Powerwave and a Griffin iFire which accept the apple mini jack and never gave this connector much thought.

I had always known that the apple pro speakers had a proprietary connector (the apple mini-jack) and lacked an amplifier in the speakers themselves, but I didn't realize exactly how they worked until I was completing my most recent project and decided to incorporate these speakers. Other speakers just don't look quite right next to the iMac G4. Similarly, the apple pro speakers, sometimes called the orb or eyeball speakers falls into the same category for me. Although this is no longer a critical feature and it uses a huge amount of space in the dome, the disc tray emerging from the oval slit in the otherwise featureless dome is something I always associate with the iMac G4. There are a few 'extra' features of the iMac G4 that I have gone to great lengths to incorporate because I felt that these were important to the design of the iMac.

Power supply for mac pro 2012