MacBook Air no audio output device found ???????? *please help*

I cant understand how could be a "cable" problem. My MBA is with "no output device found" after I reinstall mac osx. I think apple should find a solution to help us. Or, if the problem is realy the cable, is time to recall.

AlexZulu: It's an internal ribbon cable that is rather fragile. It connects the speaker assembly to the logic board.

So far, I've noticed two potential points of failure with this design. It's a "folded" ribbon cable rather than a flat one, and the two folds in the narrow space of the original MBA case can get crushed and cause non-visible damage to the cable's conductivity. This may be because the original MBA design was not entirely rigid. The case bottom has some flexibility to it.

The second point of failure is the contacts on the logic board and sound card themselves. Instead of an interlocking jack they used a design that can loosen, weakening the connection. This hypothesis seems to be supported by the fact that, if the audio flex cable (as it's called) is not actually damaged, unseating and re-seating the connectors on both ends can sometimes restore functionality. But over time, the connectors themselves can wear from too much wiggling.

I'm puzzled as to why they ever used this design, but I suspect it was revised in later versions as when the unibody MacBook Pro's came out, they seem to mostly use use flat internal cables with interlocking connectors that snap tight.

I am not sure what the correlation is to any of this but in using the RocketFish MiniVideo to HDMI out I was looking at the sound preferences and I lost all sound.

I was watching a youtube and also an espn video - no sound. I never changed anything.

For what ever reason I wanted to see if I could get any sound out of the system. I went to the preferences for sound and I simply clicked on a sound effect and it played. Returning to my you tube video the sound had returned - maybe this will work for some of you - maybe I am just lucky and or stupid. I have been called both - but I have my sound back!

Hey

I had the same problem on my MacBook. The sound just stoped working. I brought it to the apple store and they did a fresh install. After the sound worked with the headphones but not the internal speakers. so they replaced the logic board ($400). It all worked good until I restored from my time machine back up. My backup was from after the sound stoped working, so I tried one from before the sound issue. Magically it worked again. I then just restored my recent files individually (not OSX again)

About a week ago it stoped again. I restored from a backup and it's worked fine since.

So before you go to the apple store to get it fixed, if you have a backup try restoring to it. Then just copying your files back. If you don't have a backup you could try doing a clean install of the latest version of OSX, then putting your flies back on. The only thing with doing a clean install is you would lose your preferences (you wouldnt if you restored from a full time machine backup)

Drew

Okay so I checked on another forum because my headphone jack also had a red led light on inside (never noticed that before) and it said that my the 'Digital Out' is enabled and in order to disable it i should wiggle a matchstick inside to release the switch.

Now i know what you're saying " I spent over a grand for her and I have to fix my favorite child with a **** match stick" well i totally agree with you. It's crazy but it worked.

So before you buy anything or disect your infant... TRY IT!!! Hope this helps.

I have a 2008 MacBook Air. The sound icon disappeared and the sound just went out on it a few days ago for the first time. I went to this forum and tried various things that seemed to work temporarily like a safe reboot or even removing a line from my Library Preferences. But I am now thinking that those might have been coincidental because last night when it went out right in the middle of something I was really into, in frustration, I slapped teh casing and the sound came right back. It kept happening and I kept slapping it and the sound came back every time if I slapped it enough times. Never more than a few so nothing abusive here. Then, by chance I grasped it by its lower right corner and noticed that if I held the casing firmly together at that point the sound worked consistently. I know very little about computers and I live four hours from the nearest Mac store. But, logically, this seems like a wiring issue, so I am going to try the advice given by several of you to go to ifixit.com and try to replace the audio cable - first by going through the motions as though I was replacing it as suggested by one person, then, if that doesn't work, by ordering a new cable and replacing it.

I think mine, along with some others above, is definately a wiring issue (connections coming loose from time to time) as I lost audio recently after plugging in a USB SD card reader (which is right next to the headphone port).

I tried the restart while inserting some headphones and jiggling it on startup and voila it worked!

This happens from time to time and despite opening up the case and detaching/reattaching the audio/speaker cables and its fitment to the sound card. Somehow a loose, faulty cable connection,

i think.

My daughters MacBook air 13 inch had the sudden loss of sound two months ago and the sound cable and logic board were replaced under warranty. Two days ago it was back. No sound ! Tried

1. Restart

2. Safe restart

3. Resetting the pram

4. Repaired permissions with apples disk utility, Mac cocktail

5. Used onyx to clear the audio files

No joy and no sound!

Then I read a thread about sound loss in other macs and deleting the following preference file:

~Library/Preferences/com.apple.BezelServices.plist

Deleted the file and restarted the MacBook air and the sound was back!!! I hope this helps you all

My daughters MacBook air 13 inch had the sudden loss of sound two months ago and the sound cable and logic board were replaced under warranty. Two days ago it was back. No sound ! Tried

1. Restart

2. Safe restart

3. Resetting the pram

4. Repaired permissions with apples disk utility, Mac cocktail

5. Used onyx to clear the audio files

No joy and no sound!

Then I read a thread about sound loss in other macs and deleting the following preference file:

~Library/Preferences/com.apple.BezelServices.plist

Deleted the file and restarted the MacBook air and the sound was back!!! I hope this helps you all

a very likely fix:

open a terminal window (final "Terminal" application), and paste in this command, it will fix it:

sudo kill -9 $(ps A | grep coreaudio[a-z] | awk '{print $1}')

basically it kills the coreaudio process in mac and it will automatically restart, then fix the problem.

I am sure it is not hardware.

I had the same problem. No sound and no icon plus the youtube problem and the itunes does not work properly.

I tried everything: deleting these librery/user/preferences files, inserting a wood stick by the earphone hole... nothing happened. But there were something strange: when the system starts up, the icon illuminated and after finishing the start up the icon became grey.

I just rebooted the system and now the volume works.

Could it be a virus that affects the volume wire or something similar?

I fixed it with no changing hardware, then I am sure it is something strange. This is the reason I think it could be a virus.

Thank you very much to all of you

I can confirm that replacing the audio cable has worked for me. Huge relief ;-))

My symptoms (1st gen 1.80GHz 13" MacBook Air) were greyed out loudspeaker icon in the menu bar, no start up chime, no sound at all, no audio hardware showing in System Preferences. I followed the ifixit.com walk-thru, but reseating the cable didn't solve the problem. Replacing the old cable with a used cable bought from eBay.co.uk for GBP30 approx does seem to have worked though.

Fantastic news, as it makes the MBA usable again!!!

Problem solved/fixed!!!

ALL you need to do is just to reinstall the audio cable...

*Symptoms I experienced were the same as above: some videos (of particular format?) plays for up to 3 seconds then pause; audio output not detected, 35mm headphone jack produces no sound either.

And ALL I did was just a push on the audio cable...

*I almost went removing the internal harddrive and start computer to checkout whether it's corruption of OSX (because the hardrive is dying soon too (crashing and requiring 1-hr restoration via Time Machine about twice a month, classic issue of mba too i think)

<Edited by Host>

It was fixed but the problem come again.

If it is an audio cable problem in the Macbook Air as frequent as we can check here, why does not apple fix it by themselves?

It is clear that it is not neither a customer problem for bad use nor a isolated problem. APPLE should react and SOLVE IT.

I bought apple because of the final quality but I think I will come back to windows.... cheaper and they assume their mistakes...

I'm having the same issues. I was given a new macbook air for a birthday gift recently. First it started out as not being able to unmute itself, then after restarting it several times it just randomly cuts out. I'll be taking it in soon and if this is corrected for the long term I will be requesting a new one for the inconvience. Not to mention the amount of money that was spent for a "quailty" machine that can perform simple tasks.