how to solve greyed out volume control

What people meant by Console, is actually the Terminal Window, under utilities.

I fixed it finally, after the 3 coreaudiod commands, and the headphone trick, by sequentially playing music over headphones, than Airport, and finally Internal Speakers. Voila, the icon stays black, playing through the macbook speakers.

Incidentally, the 10.8.5 update solved this issue.

My issue was due to the Display link driver because apparently osx didn't have a proper usb 3.0 audio driver implementation, and DL used it.

It Was supposed to be an expected fix in the update, and seems to work for me.

Haven't had and issue since. Remains black.

Before I'd have to manually quit core audio each time.

Lots of suggestions here that seem to have helped some people. Unfortunately, not me. My old MacBook Pro died and our IT department swapped it for another (with my current disk moved to the new MBP). This MBP has the sound icon greyed out and there is no sound, unless I plug in headphones. With headphones plugged in, it plays sound through the headphones, and the sound icon is there, and the sound controls work. Unplug the headphone and nothing.

When headphones are plugged in, option-clicking the sound icon says "Output device: headphones". When unplugged, it says "Output device: digital out".

Yup, same (early 2011) model. Had to be to keep my 10.6.8 and apps running. I tried resetting the SMC and the PRAM and everything else (deleting prefs, etc.) before posting, to no avail.

What finally did work was just plugging and unplugging a pair of headphones over and over. I may try a blunt toothpick or compressed air if it happens again.

First try this and it worked for my MBP running OSX.

This happens when your digital audio out has switched on. You can insert a plastic toothpick (or a fine sewing needle) in the headphone socket/hole and try and switch it off. The switch should be at the 3 o'clock position and go towards the 6 o'clock position.

🙂

Nostradamus wrote:

First try this and it worked for my MBP running OSX.

This happens when your digital audio out has switched on. You can insert a plastic toothpick (or a fine sewing needle) in the headphone socket/hole and try and switch it off. The switch should be at the 3 o'clock position and go towards the 6 o'clock position.

🙂

Yes! Worked for me. Thanks

This seemed to work for me, despite the fact that I got the following errors/messages when running

sudo update_dyld_shared_cache -force

Errors in terminal:

update_dyld_shared_cache: warning, found two dylibs with same install path

update_dyld_shared_cache[467] updating x86_64 cache because current cache file contains a different set of dylibs

update_dyld_shared_cache failed: in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/iLifeMediaBrowser.framework/Versions/A/iLifeM ediaBrowser can't find dylib /System/Library/Frameworks/CoreGraphics.framework/Versions/A/CoreGraphics

Update: I'm actually still experiencing the sound cutting out every once in a while as I'm using headphones.. Maybe it has to do with these errors?

That must have been my issue. No PRAM reset or dylib fix (mentioned above) worked. I decided to see if my headphone jack might work. As I brought the jack close to the hole I saw red light, then I stuck in headphone jack and headphones worked and menu-bar speaker icon turned black. I unplugged the headphones and it was still black. I do remember seeing Digitial Audio Out was specified for the Output when looking at the Sound System Preference. Now it says Internal Speaker. How would that have been activated? The only thing I can think of is I plugged in an old iSight (side effect of plugging in an external ACD with iSight connected).

Hey guys,

I had no output from speakers, or headphones. And the System Preferences - Volume was greyed out.

I tried everything up to including a PRAM reset and nothing worked.

Took it to the company tech and after awhile he figured out what was wrong.

The inner head phone jack was dirty. He cleaned it with a qtip or a special computer cleaning device. Apparently there’s a internal sensor in the jack that will prevent the internal output from functioning if it’s to dirty. It’s not like a dropped the computer in a dirty pond. I would have never figured that out.

Anyways, that’s what fixed it for me with the same symptoms as listed.

🙂

I have never experienced this issue until recently upgrading to OS X 10.10 "Yellowstone".

A very excellent solution!

Thicot01's solution worked perfectly in this release. If you have not discovered already, where he wrote "console" you need to open "terminal."

I had not experienced this issue until recently upgrading to OS X 10.10 "Yellowstone." It happened a number of times within the first week.

However, Thicot01's very elegant solution worked perfectly.

NOTE: If you have not discovered already, where he wrote "open console" you need to open "terminal."

Happy listening!

Had the same problem. Read through every post in this thread to date and tried all the solutions multiple times with no success. Finally, something someone said pointed me in the right direction. I am running Yosemite on my mac book air, btw, never heard of Yellowstone. My problem was that I have two external monitors connected. When they were unplugged, the Mac internal speakers and the headphone jack worked fine. When the monitors are connected the sound output device was to my Samsung Syncmaster monitor and the volume control was greyed out at max volume. I then found I could control the syncmaster's volume using it's volume control. However, having it greyed out on the mac book air I believe is a recent development as I don't recall having this issue prior to installing Yosemite. I've had this monitor arrangement since OS Mountain Lion days. I suspect Yosemite doesn't support my old syncmaster monitor and Samsung doesn't have a Mac driver for it so it looks like time for a new monitor if I want volume control from the Mac.

Bottom line is if you are using an old external monitor you may be S.O.L.

I did not have to reset permissions. Both my user and group were "_coreaudiod" for that directory and the plist file it contained. Just ran the last two commands, clear cache, and restart daemon to fix the problem. Resetting PRAM doesn't sound like good advice. Thanks.

I Have the same problem after using headphone jack. After trying all the suggestions rebooting, Pram, disk repair etc all to no avail I realised it is mechanical problem with the jack. Fixed by moving headphone plug around in the jack until it sorted out . There must be a switch or something that gets stuck, I think.

I went to Apple Button > System Pref > Sound > Output

Then I changed the output to the built-in speakers

Then I plugged in headphones

Changed output to headphones

That fixed the problem for me. Hope that helps! 🙂