El Capitan and missing volume control for speakers

10.11.3 update, still nothing change. Problem remains.

This just became an issue for me with my iMac's internal speakers. Suddenly. After weeks of not having a problem, I turned on my iMac this morning, heard the dulcet G Major chord of a successful startup, and was about to respond to an iMessage when I realized I had no sound. I tried a random selection of applications, and it appears to be systemwide.

Touching the volume buttons on my wired keyboard made the volume window popup with a circle and slash instead of the volume slider, and the icon on the menu bar is greyed out. I have always previously been able to control the volume with both keyboard and menu bar icon. System preferences gives me one output choice—Digital Out—and says, "The selected device has no output controls."

Suddenly, two hours later, for no reason I can ascertain, the system preferences output choice changed from "Digital Out" to "Internal Speakers" and I once again had volume control. Please note: At no time did I have external speakers or headphones plugged into my iMac, so I have no idea why it determined that I did.

I have no idea whether this is a piece of the puzzle, but I've seen others have this volume issue and the only constant is El Capitan. Computers have varied and audio output devices have varied. Nor do I know why Apple wouldn't give us control over external audio output devices. That must be maddening. Good luck, everyone!

Same problem here and still exists after all these months. USB audio Microsoft Digital Sound System 80. Sometimes the name shows up, sometimes not. Never under El Capiten have the volume controls, grayed out all the time. It will give me sound though on a standard volume. Within some apps I can control the volume this way. All worked fine under previous OS systems.

Please Apple fix this,

BTW the Microsoft DSS80 still rocks! Never found a good replacement for them with Class-D performance and good subwoofer. Have 2 of them.

Same problem, using a MOTU 8Pre Firewire interface. Sys Pref shows the 8Pre but says it has no controls (not true). I'm having to make volme adjustments using my speakers' controls. I never had this problem with previous OSs from Lion to Mavericks (skipped Yosemite) and have updated the MOTU driver.

First, I was wrong about the speakers on my display (connected with DisplayPort). I booted from an external drive with Yosemite and there were no volume control there. But it is true for my USB DAC, in Yosemite the volume control works. (Now, I know some people argue that the El Capitan way is the correct way – i.e. you should not be able to adjust volume for external DAC – but for me it's a regression non the less.)

Second, I've found a solution, or rather a work around. The app Volume Mixer for Mac does what I want: once again I can use the volume buttons on my keyboard to control the output volume for my USB DAC. This app is far from perfect though, I've hade some issues with it and if you read the posts in their support subreddit there are a lot of negative comments. So be aware of that.

Thanks for the tip. Not only does Volume Mixer work fine but installing it also kicked the OS volume control into life. Strange.

However, when I try to use my MOTU interface for recording and output, Volume Mixer is disabled and so is the Mac icon. A dialogue box says that Volume Mixer must be the default output to work.

I just updated OS X to 10.11.4 and…

Still no success. 😟

I thought I had read somewhere that someone had success with 10.11.4 beta.

It wasn't a problem with 10.11.3, so why would 10.11.4 be a fix?

Well, some would argue it actually is a problem since something was working in previous versions of OS X and now it is not. Even though the change is intended, it still is a problem. (And a lot of us also experienced hissing noise and other problems with USB audio, also not existing before El Capitan.)

But anyway, that does not matter in this case, what matters is that some people claimed the betas of 10.11.4 hade changed this behavior so that volume controls again was working with USB DACs. But alas, the final version of 10.11.4 (the only one I've tried) does not change anything, still cant adjust volume.

I just wanted to clear things up a bit. I'm happy to inform that the update did work for me. I have an USB Creative X-mod external sound card and I wasn't able to change volume (see my other posts in this thread). After the update, I have a fully working device again 🙂

I guess the update didn't addressed all cases, but it looks like that at least some USB sound devices are working again.

That is great to hear, glad something is fixed!

I get the same issue, typically happens when I close my laptop, then when I open it back up again the audio functions are disabled on laptop keyboard, usb keyboard, as well as the audio controls on my Apple earbuds. Also when I have my Lightning port connecting my external monitor.

To get headphones working when this happens, is simply to plug/unplug (or vice versa) any device (headphones or aux cable) into the headphone jack. Seems to "wake up" the audio.

To get the laptop audio working to use the internal speakers, I have to go into System Preferences and make sure the selected output is NOT my external monitor (that does not have speaker capability or output!).

Updated to 10.11.4 and my Microsoft Sound System 80 is came back to work like a charm😉. Volume on keyboard still working. I'm happy🙂

Hi,

Still no volume control over my Cambridge DacMagic 100 after the 10.11.4 update. Have to use the knob on the monitors.

Anybody's got an idea how to circumvent this issue?

Thanks!

Another "me too". Have a Fubar III amp, which shows as a "Burr_Brown Japan PCM2702" in the Sound preferences, and I get the "The selected device has no output controls" message. I just upgraded from 10.10.5 straight to 10.11.4 two days ago. Tried the PRAM and SMC resets, shutting down, removing cables, turning devices off, removing plist files, etc. No luck.