Leopard and its non-intuitive volume change

Ok, so I have finally figured out why I hear my email screaming in the night.  Well, screaming deserves a little explanation: I use sample of a Jawa from Star Wars for new email notifications (the little scream of excitement when they zap R2D2—sounds a little like "Ooteedee!").  In my new apartment, my office is right next to my bedroom; I can easily hear the sounds from my computer in my bedroom.  Anyways, the last thing you want when you are drifting off into sleepy land is a screaming Jawa telling you email has arrived (and let's face it: email at that hour is usually spam anyways).

So, I took the obvious approach to solving the problem: I pressed mute on my keyboard.  Problem solved, right?  Not quite.

I have my MacBook hooked into a computer stereo speaker system.  One night, I heard some interference from my iPhone and thought it might be the cheap Radio Shack cable I used to hook it in.  So I unplugged the cable and went back to bed.  Just as I'm drifting back to sleep, I hear a screaming Jawa again—but I had hit mute.  What the heck?

I get up again, and hit mute.  Finally, silence.  I wake up the next morning, and I hit unmute (still not hooked into the stereo), and sounds resume.  Later in the day, I realize it isn't plugged into the speakers, so I plug it in.  No sounds.  Huh?  I try unmute again, and then I have sound.

Now maybe I'm just incredibly slow and stupid around bed time and when I get up in the morning (well, I know I'm slow and stupid in the morning), but it took me a few days to finally figure this out.  And I'm pretty sure this is a Leopard change, as I never remember having this much trouble back with Tiger.  Here's the deal ...

As near as I can tell, Leopard is trying to be helpful like the iPhone.  With the iPhone, if you set the volume while listening to the headphones, you'll notice that the volume setting will change if you unplug the headphones.  This is because the iPhone can tell when you have headphones plugged in and when you don't; so the volume for headphones and the volume for the speaker are kept separate.  This is good, when you think about it, as you would probably have the speaker louder than the headphones.  You wouldn't want your headphones to be blasting at the same volume.

It turns out, Leopard does this too.  Again, maybe this happened in Tiger, but I never remember this happening.  As I remember, mute was mute—period.  No matter what was plugged in or not, mute meant no sound.  Well, Leopard tracks volume—along with mute—based on what is plugged in (or not) into the headphones jack.  So you can set the volume level while you have something plugged into the headphone jack, unplug it, and then the volume level is now different.

Perhaps there is some nice feature here that I am missing.  But there's one flaw with this approach: mute should be mute should be mute.  I can't ever imagine a time where you would like to mute your computer sounds, only to have the sounds resume when you unplug it.  Usually when you choose mute, you want mute, regardless of whether your computer is plugged into headphones or not.  I could see the separate volume levels being useful, but not the separate mute settings.

Maybe I'll go create a radar ticket and see if Apple thinks it's a feature ...