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My M1 Mac mini, running latest macOS, has recently developed a microphone issue with my USB headset. The main symptom is a multi-second audio delay:

When I open System Settings and go to "Sound" -> "Input" and make some noises then the "Input Level" correctly moves in accordance with my noises for a couple of seconds, but then it repeats these first couple of seconds and continues from there.

Effectively, after the first 3-4 seconds there is always a microphone delay of these 3-4 seconds.

People I tried to hold audio-calls with also reported a bad sound quality in addition to the delay; strangely these issues do not show up with FaceTime, just with other applications!

The USB headset has worked fine on the same computer, connected the same way (via a USB hub in a keyboard) for months.

Connecting the headset directly to the Mac mini does not help.

Rebooting the Mac mini does not help.

The microphone in my crappy USB camera does not exhibit the same issue, it stays in "real time"!

Similarly the headset connected to a different Mac appears to work correctly.

The speaker part of the headset always works correctly, it is just the microphone that is showing the delay.

Not sure what else to try short of wiping the machine and installing from scratch.

Any ideas?

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    Do you have any way of testing the USB headset on another Macintosh?
    – IconDaemon
    Commented Mar 14 at 11:51
  • @IconDaemon Yes, I connected it to my MacBook Pro with M1 Max and latest macOS and did the same test in "System Settings" with the level-meter, it didn't exhibit the delay issue during the minute that I ran the test!
    – Seg Fault
    Commented Mar 15 at 8:17
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    Can you try a different USB microphone?
    – Allan
    Commented Mar 15 at 10:27
  • @Allan Already did, the one from my cheap USB camera works perfectly!
    – Seg Fault
    Commented Mar 15 at 17:49

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The microphone in my crappy USB camera does not exhibit the same issue, it stays in "real time"!

This definitively points to an issue with your microphone/headset. There's nothing in macOS that's going to overcome a hardware issue from a different vendor. You need to get a replacement microphone/headset.

The speaker part of the headset always works correctly, it is just the microphone that is showing the delay.

Your ADC has failed/is failing. The analog-to-digital converter takes analog audio (your voice) and converts it to digital. The DAC does the same thing, except in reverse - it converts the digital audio to analog audio to be played through the speakers. This could be one chip or two separate ones; either way, the ADC to USB function has failed and macOS can't overcome it.

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  • The microphone in the headset worked perfectly when I tried it with a different computer. And would the ADC really have enough RAM to buffer several seconds of audio for this failure mode?
    – Seg Fault
    Commented Mar 16 at 12:50
  • Things break. It could have worked perfectly 1 minute ago and stopped working now. For whatever reason, it is now out of sync. It needs to be replaced.
    – Allan
    Commented Mar 16 at 12:59

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