Hi guys,
as a 25 years Mac user and former SysAdmin I loved the idea of having a macOS VM on my unRAID Server and spent the last days making it fully capable of being my daily driver.
I struggled with different things on my way, including a very restive Quadro K2000 refusing to make GPU passthrough working, although working fine as a standalone card in another rig. I finally managed to make this grouch work via BIOS update, the last resort I was willing to give this card.
Anyway, there is one last thing that is preventing this setup from being perfect: my Harman Kardon Soundsticks (first Rev., with software controlled volume). They are showing up correctly in system devices on unRAID and macOS SystemProfiler displays them the same as on a baremetal system. But the sound is distorted and discontinuous. It sounds like the bandwidth of the USB port wouldn't be sufficient and therefore be interrupted.
I tried all the usual things:
check MidiSettings for sampling rate
put the Sticks on a separate USB port
try with 2.0 and 3.0 USB ports
uncheck all other devices in unRAIDs VM settings to make the USB controller exclusive to the Sticks
some other weird things I can't recall
But worst of all: the same setup is working completely fine under Windows!
I even daisy-chained the Sticks through a USB selector and an active hub and they still played perfect with Redmond-Ware.
Having read through several, mostly outdated threads in other forums, there has been no real clue about why macOS seems to handle the data transfer for this DAC differently. There have been some hints about timings, but no real information to make this work.
If anyone out there in this community has some idea that could help, I would really appreciate any answer here.
Thanks in advance, d.