Apple Sound Museum
Mac Chimes of Death Museum: Failure sounds played by Old World ROM Macintosh during POST failures from 1987-1998, accompanied by Sad Mac icon and error codes.
Chimes of Death, also known as Chords of Doom. Failure sounds played by Old World ROM Macintosh computers when the power-on self-test failed between 1987 and 1998, accompanied by the Sad Mac icon and hexadecimal error codes.
The Macintosh II was the first Mac to use death chimes. Earlier compact Macs (128K, 512K, Plus) only silently displayed the Sad Mac icon on POST failure, while the Macintosh II introduced a loud and eerie upward major arpeggio, starting a failure-sound tradition that lasted over a decade.
The Macintosh IIcx death chime continued the upward arpeggio style of the Macintosh II but with a softer tone. The IIcx was the first compact-chassis model in the Macintosh II line, and its failure sound was adjusted accordingly.
The Macintosh IIfx death chime is considered by many Mac enthusiasts to be the most 'deadly' sounding, with a deep mournful quality. The IIfx was the fastest Macintosh of its era with a 40MHz 68030 processor, and its failure sound carried a gravity matching its performance.
The Macintosh LC (Low Cost) death chime was developed from the IIfx's chime. The LC series was Apple's affordable Mac line for education and home users, and its failure sound, while derived from the high-end model, had a slightly different character.
The Quadra AV series death chime was completely different from the solemnity of earlier models, using a 'funky' bongo drum rhythm. The Centris series also used similar bongo drum variations. This was the most 'playful' death chime in history.
The first NuBus-based Power Macintosh models (6100, 7100, 8100) used a death chime that sounded like a car crash — probably the last thing users wanted to hear when their computer crashed. This sound was only used on the 1994 first-generation PowerPC models.
The PCI-based Power Mac death chime was considerably more restrained than the first NuBus models. After PCI architecture became standard in 1995, the Sad Mac icon was no longer displayed, but the chimes persisted to indicate hardware failures until being replaced by beep codes in 1998.
The Performa series death chime used a six-tone F minor chord, similar to the Quadra series but with a more digitized sound. Performa was Apple's consumer product line, and its failure sound was the death chime most commonly heard by home users in the mid-to-late 1990s.