Halloween!… and stereo balance

Today, I watched TV, saw many pumpkins, people in costumes, and George Bush — and all this convinced me it was Halloween. Since today is a good day for weird things, here is another. For no apparent reason, the stereo balance of the sound output on my iBook regularly goes to the left. Not by much: just enough for me to notice after a while.

And while I just said “regularly”, I haven’t been able to find any regularity into this unexplained phenomenon. My guess is that there is a bug in Mac OS X Tiger that does this. It could be linked to me often plugging and unplugging external speakers, but I’ve never been able to link the problem to a single thing yet.

Since the difference is hardly noticeable without music playing, and the only way to confirm things are unbalanced is to open the sound system preference pane and look at the balance slider, and since I seldom goes there, I never notice immediately, and thus never found the cause. Maybe someone has a solution.