USB Headset Dropping Connection at Random

garlin · Apr 19, 2023

Now than ~~Plantronics~~ Poly is HP owned, Dell might agree with you!

jpjordan357 · Apr 19, 2023

garlin said:
Now than ~~Plantronics~~ Poly is HP owned, Dell might agree with you!

Lol. All I know is that the $15 cheap chinese headsets that look exactly like the Plantronics headsets, and sound as good, work without a problem. Dell did recommend Jabra though, just from the engineer's personal experience.

SalKan · Apr 24, 2023

I have tried both Jabra headsets and sennhessier with same fault though

akarlavage · May 9, 2023

@jmac88888 any update from the Dell Engineer that is working on your case? We have rolled out 30 Dell Latitudes 5420s, 5430s, 5530s and all of them out of the box have this same issue with the plantronics headset. People are literally going mad as we are a Zoom softphone operation as well. Thanks for any tips or tricks that have worked for you... PLEASE Dell fix this!

akarlavage · May 9, 2023

jpjordan357 said:
Lol. All I know is that the $15 cheap chinese headsets that look exactly like the Plantronics headsets, and sound as good, work without a problem. Dell did recommend Jabra though, just from the engineer's personal experience.

Any update from the Dell Engineer on this?

jmac88888 · May 9, 2023

Hi, unfortunately nothing on our end yet from Dell. @jpjordan357 any updates from Dell?

We have had luck downgrading from Windows 11 to Windows 10 22H2. The audiodg issues have stopped for us. Obviously not ideal, but it has allowed our trouble users to get back to work without issues. We have a ton of Optiplex 7000's so im hoping Dell comes through with a fix soon.

jpjordan357 · May 10, 2023

jmac88888 said:
Hi, unfortunately nothing on our end yet from Dell. @jpjordan357 any updates from Dell?

We have had luck downgrading from Windows 11 to Windows 10 22H2. The audiodg issues have stopped for us. Obviously not ideal, but it has allowed our trouble users to get back to work without issues. We have a ton of Optiplex 7000's so im hoping Dell comes through with a fix soon.

I'll be beta testing a new driver from Dell shortly.

MasterKiwiZ · May 10, 2023

jpjordan357 said:
I'll be beta testing a new driver from Dell shortly.

Hoping for the best! Have been following this thread for a bit, as our users are getting hit with the same issues on there Win11 XPS 9520s.

mxmilr98 · May 11, 2023

We stumbled across this forum with our new rollout of 5430's with Windows 11 started running into this issue. Only a handful of staff, but enough to halt our rollout until we found a mitigation. You would think these issues would be ironed out towards the end of the models run, not 11 months after the model is released and the 5420's with the issue.

Anyway, we have been mitigating this issue by installing the store app of MaxxAudioPro and disabling the microphone enhancements within the app as discussed. But the issue does come back unfortunately (albeit less frequently). Upon investigation, if you plug in another headset, it re-enables the enhancements. So as a part of the prep, we disable both the internal mic enhancements and a headset as it seems to apply the preset to a device, rather than a blanket setting. (It likes to re-enable the second you unplug the headset, so disable it again and it appears to stick)

I've tried to track down a registry key or file that controls this preset, so we can deploy a proactive remediation through Intune to revert the setting when it feels like changing, but I haven't had any luck.

Fingers crossed a driver update of some kind should fix this. This has been a huge headache and halted our rollout of 260 laptops until we had the mitigation under control. I swear i've been plagued with audio issues my entire IT career lol. Hope my findings help someone else out.

jpjordan357 · May 11, 2023

mxmilr98 said:
We stumbled across this forum with our new rollout of 5430's with Windows 11 started running into this issue. Only a handful of staff, but enough to halt our rollout until we found a mitigation. You would think these issues would be ironed out towards the end of the models run, not 11 months after the model is released and the 5420's with the issue.

Anyway, we have been mitigating this issue by installing the store app of MaxxAudioPro and disabling the microphone enhancements within the app as discussed. But the issue does come back unfortunately (albeit less frequently). Upon investigation, if you plug in another headset, it re-enables the enhancements. So as a part of the prep, we disable both the internal mic enhancements and a headset as it seems to apply the preset to a device, rather than a blanket setting. (It likes to re-enable the second you unplug the headset, so disable it again and it appears to stick)

I've tried to track down a registry key or file that controls this preset, so we can deploy a proactive remediation through Intune to revert the setting when it feels like changing, but I haven't had any luck.

Fingers crossed a driver update of some kind should fix this. This has been a huge headache and halted our rollout of 260 laptops until we had the mitigation under control. I swear i've been plagued with audio issues my entire IT career lol. Hope my findings help someone else out.

We tried that with the MaxxAudio stuff, and it had very little discernable effect. The best result so far has been not using Plantronics, though Dell tells me that other devices (like speakers and speaker bars) are showing the issue as well.

MasterKiwiZ · May 11, 2023

jpjordan357 said:
I'll be beta testing a new driver from Dell shortly.

Would you be willing to share the beta driver?

jpjordan357 · May 11, 2023

MasterKiwiZ said:
Would you be willing to share the beta driver?

I cannot at this time.

MasterKiwiZ · May 11, 2023

jpjordan357 said:
I cannot at this time.

No problem, waiting with bated breath.

Across5stars · May 11, 2023

Same boat here.

jpjordan357 said:
I'll be beta testing a new driver from Dell shortly.

Good luck with the testing @jpjordan357 - fingers crossed it works - I've been working with Poly on the workarounds but none of them seem to work, so have a pretty much useless Poly headset sitting on my desk that I am not able to use.

jpjordan357 · May 16, 2023

No good. Beta drivers failed to solve the issue.

stenderdub · May 19, 2023

This is the same exact issue we are having here.... can someone provide me links to where you are getting this Maxx Audio pro software and what versions of the realtek audio you are using? we are using these plantronics c3220 usb-a heatsets and either loose audio and the mic still works or other way....much appreciated !

Edit - I also would be curious if you had the dell optimizer installed. Did you uninstall it and use MaxxAudio Pro instead?

I have a weird scenario as well too that when we use Autopilot that includes all the dell BS, windows 11 is where we see the issue. When i image via SCCM windows 11 I don't see the issue. SCCM isn't installing the bloatware though. If i uninstall the optimizer on the Autopilot pc it still doesnt matter. Using the same realtek versions in both instances 6.0.9418.1

glasskuter · May 19, 2023

Whether it will help you guys or not, Dell released a new Realtek driver 6.0.9486.1, A55 this week for my Optiplex 7080. It's release notes indicate it is a critical update and that it does require Wavemaxx to be installed to have full functionality. You might want to look into it.

glasskuter · May 19, 2023

Let me correct my previous statement. You must have Dell Optimizer or Wavesmaxx installed for full functionality/

stenderdub · May 25, 2023

anything on this ?

MasterKiwiZ · Jun 1, 2023

Are you guys using Crowdstrike by chance? Trying to eliminate possibilities of the issue and we started getting the audio issues when Crowdstrike went live in our environment back in October/November.