El Capitan and missing volume control for speakers

I have just updated to OS 10.11 El Capitan. Upon successful completion of installation, my desktop speakers no longer have ANY volume control. I can not control the volume by the keyboard shortcuts on the keyboard nor by the volume control (which is now greyed out) in the menu bar. Note that I can select and use the USB speakers under the Sound portion of System Preferences, but I can not change the volume at all. Everything worked just fine BEFORE this update (which was a couple of hours ago). With the exception of the new OS, nothing else has changed on this computer.

Any thoughts on how I can correct this issue?

Mac Pro; 2 x 2.4 Quad Core; 14 GB RAM; OS 10.11 El Capitan

Speakers: Microsoft (yea, I know...) Digital Sound System 80

Posted on Sep 30, 2015 5:03 PM

92 replies

Oct 20, 2016 8:23 AM in response to foundryfire

i just upgraded to Sierra, and that seems to have corrected the problem for me.

Dec 13, 2016 4:09 PM in response to foundryfire

I upgraded from El Capitan to Sierra (10.12.2) and the volume control finally works again for my USB-DAC, the Pro-Ject USB Box (that shows up as "Burr-Brown Japan PCM2702")! 🙂

Unless this is just a fluke it does seem like the (IMHO) bad El Capitan behaviour has been corrected in Sierra.

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El Capitan and missing volume control for speakers