iMac late 2013 + Mavericks + USB Sennheiser - input freeze

Hi


Since Mavericks i have a problem with my USB Sennheiser Headset.


When i connect it directly to the iMac, every time i start FaceTime or mumble, after 30 seconds? 1 Minute? the microphone get very noisy/scratchy.


After i attached an old USB 2.0 Hub to the iMac and connect the USB Headset to the USB hub, the Microphone is ok.


But after that i had 3 times freeze of all input devices ( usb Mouse, wireless magick mouse, wireless keyboard) in 6 hours.

I need to hard shutdown the system.


Last time i saw this error message in the log.


24.10.13 22:56:03,000kernel[0]vtd[0] fault: device 0:20:0 reason 0x6 R:0x1305000
24.10.13 22:56:03,000kernel[0]USBF: 9437.472 AppleUSBXHCI::UIMCheckForTimeouts - HSE bit set:15 (1)


Someone have some idea?


Thx

René


(Sorry for the bad english)

iMac (27-inch, Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9)

Posted on Oct 24, 2013 3:51 PM

Reply
201 replies

Jan 9, 2014 8:45 AM in response to Peter MacLaren

Hi Peter,


I tried your referred fix from Entec.

Seems to have worked no problem, and I have yet to see it freeze again, so I assume the fix was successful.


However now in Logic Pro X my audio tracks, with my Blue Yeti Pro Usb microphone as input, don't have a record button in the track. It looks like it sees the microphone, that it has audio enabled, etc, but I can't set it to record!!


Any idea if it good be related. I used to have no such issue. I could previously record although I would get a bad background noise and the freeze problem after a while.


I tried outside Logic Pro X with a simple recorder and it had no problem seeing and using my microphone.

Any idea?


Why would Logic Pro X suddenly disable recording on that device?

I tried creating new tracks, even new projects, with same results.


Cheers

Eric

Jan 9, 2014 8:59 AM in response to elaurin03

Glad to see this Entec fix is helping, if only in part.


Interestingly I have seen an occasional artifact on the audio side on my iMac as well, in that my external USB speakers disconnect not often but occasionally, but can easily be re-enabled in the Sound Preferences panel. I am guessing this may be related to the other issues, although hard to tell!


So I suspect that while the fix solves the USB crash (in my mind the most important concern) it still is not a full solution to all the USB audio issues that have been reported. Hopefully the driver update in OSX 10.9.2 will address ALL these issues.

Jan 9, 2014 4:04 PM in response to fisihh

Guys, I have to admit that I don't completely understand a lot of this discussion. I'm just wondering, how certain are people that this is a software and not a hardware issue? If there is a non-negligible possibility that this is a hardware issue, we're still within our 30 day window and could return this iMac and wait for a model that doesn't have this problem.

It would be nice to be able to get this answer from Apple but they're playing dumb...which is really disappointing because we had higher expectations of Apple...

Thank you.

Jan 9, 2014 7:09 PM in response to Ddori

You obviously missed part of the discussion.

It was said that people running Mountain Lion on the same hardware didn't have that issue.

As well, running Mavericks from an external drive, on the same hardware, didn't show the issue.


It was even said that running the beta release 10.9.2 was fixing the issue.

All that proves that it's a software problem, not hardware.

Jan 9, 2014 8:03 PM in response to elaurin03

Well Software on a particular hardware set up.


I ran with my Thumb drive as the boot Disc and had no issues, unfortunately doing this broke half a dozen minor things .


I reformatted and did a clean install of mavericks split the fusion Drive using the SSDD as the boot drive and had the problem as well contrary to other reports. But all the other minor issues caused by using the thumb drive where resolved


I reformated the split drives back to a fusion drive, did a fresh install again and used the USB driver mentioned above and 24 hours later have not yet had a problem.

Jan 9, 2014 8:09 PM in response to PaulB12

Hi Paul,


That's great (although it's too bad you had to go through 2 reformattings).


And are you a Logic Pro X user?

I did the Entec USB driver change, and I have an issue where logic pro X won't let me record with my USB microphone (which I verified is working in other little apps).


So I'm just trying to find someone with the Entec driver who has that working in Logic Pro.


Cheers

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iMac late 2013 + Mavericks + USB Sennheiser - input freeze

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