Sound heard with 'audio=disabled'

[Nancy-Salpepi]

When testing phetsims/balloons-and-static-electricity#543 with MacBook Air (m1 chip) iOS 11.6 + Safari 15, the first item I interacted with produced a sound and then all subsequent sounds were muted.

Please turn your volume up in order to hear:
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/87318828/137906239-e780f3fb-af1b-47a9-a8c0-b9d9eed60368.mov

[jbphet]

This issue is closely related to #61 and the possible solutions may help with #97.

A quick solution for this might be to not hook up the audio signal chain to the audio context at all if audio is not enabled, instead of what we do now, which is to have the master gain level turned all the way down.

[jbphet]

@Nancy-Salpepi - This issue has been around for a couple of years and it hasn't been addressed, mostly because it hasn't risen to the top of my priorities. Can you test again and see if it is still a problem? Sometimes these things go away with new releases of the browers.

[Nancy-Salpepi]

@jbphet I tried several sims with ?audio=disabled and I can no longer reproduced this issue with macOS 14.1.2 and safari 17.1.2 (or chrome).
Closing!