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Level 1

10 points

M1 Mac Mini USB audio crackling

New M1 Mac Mini - USB 2.0 audio out into DAC has horrible crackling sound. It's utterly unusable.

It's definitely the Mac, and definitely the USB.

Headphone output is fine.

The DAC is fine, since it's happy with the iPhone, a tablet, and even the older (2012) mac mini. They sound great. No crackling whatever.

I've tried every option of the Midi audio setup's choices of bit rate / frequency, it makes no difference.

I'm concerned this is basically going to render my new Mac useless for enjoying quality audio. Do not want rice krispies in my music! Thanks if anyone knows what's causing the problem / how to fix.

Mac mini, macOS 10.15

Posted on Jul 25, 2021 11:12 AM

Best reply

Nicodemus88 Author

Level 1

10 points

Posted on Jul 29, 2021 5:35 PM

Thanks for the response.

From correspondence with the distributor, they thought it was a problem with the clock.

I took it back to the shop, and they did some checks, and then tested it with a higher quality USB cable, and it was fine.

Basically, this is an Audiolab M-DAC+, a high quality DAC that basically was not happy with a crappy cable. I expected a low quality cable wouldn't be great (it was never intended to be used long term, it's just what I had to hand at the time), but I didn't expect it would be so poor that it would completely mess up the DAC's ability to handle the signal reliably.

Lesson learned - cables matter.

Cheers.

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M1 Mac Mini USB audio crackling

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