Janky USB-A behaviour with Elgato mics & audio out?

[Dom.S]

I’ve run into a weird issue with my Studio’s USB-A ports. I have an Elgato Wave:3 mic which uses a USB-C connector but ships with a USB-C to USB-A cable. I used that without issue on my iMac and have had it plugged in to my Studio’s USB-A ports since I received it a couple of months ago and it’s been fine – or so I thought.

Today I tried to use the monitoring feature for the first time since getting the Studio. That lets you plug headphones directly into the back of the mic to hear the raw mic audio while simultaneously sending the Mac audio through by selecting the Wave:3 as the output device.

As soon as I selected the Wave:3 my headphones were full of white noise and no amount of config tweaks seemed to help. As a last resort I tried using a USB-A to USB-C adapter with one of the TB ports and… it worked perfectly.

Are the USB-A ports under-specced in some weird way? I never had any issue with this setup on my 2015 iMac.

I do also run external speakers over the other USB-A port and they’ve been fine, so it’s not that all audio out over USB-A isn’t working. Maybe it’s the combination of input+output on one device that’s the issue? I’ve tested both USB-A ports and they have the same issue. My speakers work fine in either port so I doubt it’s a hardware fault with my ports.

Has anyone else run into something similar? The Studio is the first M1 Mac with USB-A so maybe the implementation is a bit half baked?

 

[BanditoB]

Are there software drivers installed for the Elgato mic? If so, are they updated to native M1 support?

 

[Dom.S]

Are there software drivers installed for the Elgato mic? If so, are they updated to native M1 support?

If I remember rightly you don’t need drivers for the basic input/output functions, but I do have Wave Link installed and the extension enabled, yep.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP:
"As a last resort I tried using a USB-A to USB-C adapter with one of the TB ports and… it worked perfectly."

Sounds to me like you've already found "the solution".

Fishrrman's rule 1 of Macs:
Use what works for you.
Don't use what doesn't work....

 

[Dom.S]

Yeah it was more that I wondered if anyone else was having issues with the USB-A sockets. I can spare a TB port at the moment but part of the appeal of the Studio was having a decent amount of IO without having to resort to often unreliable hubs. To then have reliability issues with built-in ports is a let down.

 

[BanditoB]

As always, I would recommend contacting the vendor, in this case Elgato, to see what they have to say and also, if necessary, Apple.