wireless mic interference oddity

[Jason Davies]

Hi Smuggers,

I bought a Logitech H600 wireless headset in the endless quest to make
endless online teaching and meetings work better and at first it worked
really well. It has a radio unit that plugs into USB, rather than
bluetooth.

Then today we had a power cut (!) and my Mac pro went down, of course.
On restoring everything, there is ferocious interference on the headset
mic in particular but also the headphones. However, on my laptop they
continue to work perfectly. I've tried different USB ports, SMC reset,
PRAM reset, starting from a clone of the hard drive and several
restarts.

I can't think of anything else to test and am a bit mystified (using
different start-up disks shows it's not OS, and proving different
machines work shows it must be the Mac Pro but 'under the OS'. But what
is there to reset apart from SMC and PRAM here? (I guess I'm looking at
firmware but have no idea how to fiddle with that and am not sure I
should...)

Cheers,

Jason

[Paul R Owen]

Hi Jason,

Sorry, no solution, bit to avoid in the future suggest you invest in a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply). Also, do you have a surge protected on your mains supply. 

Personally I use APC units, these can serve both functions above and can also filter the Ethernet/phone line for lightening strikes. 

https://www.apc.com/uk/en/   Perhaps your Uni would buy it for you.

I’m not really paranoid.

Good luck.

Paul Owen

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[Jason Davies]

On 2 Oct 2020, at 16:11, 'Paul R Owen' via Sussex Mac User Group wrote:

> Perhaps your Uni would buy it for you

I need a GIF of someone rolling around the floor helplessly laughing...

Thanks for the suggestion, but given we have two offices now at home
now, it would have to be fairly large scale to be worth it. I've thought
about it but we're really not going to be able to afford that for the
extremely rare power-cuts. Most of our devices are battery-powered
anyway.

I do have surge protection in the plugs - I think the loss of power
hurts software more than hardware...

I've decided to just leave them alone for the weekend and see if they
magically work again on Monday. Works more often than it should, that
approach!


Cheers,

Jason

[Jason Davies]

In the unlikely event this ever proves useful to whoever stumbles across it, it seemed that the solution was to 're-pair' the connection between the nano USB unit and the headset. For some reason whether it picks up the pairing fluctuates when you plug it into new machines. The power cut must have somehow broken it for my Mac Pro.

To re-pair an H600, charge them up and plug in the nano USB you get with it. hold down the up volume button and the mute button for ten seconds until the LED flashes rapidly then leave it to pair (takes maybe 20 seconds).

This was mentioned in passing in a very odd YouTube video I came across by accident. Supposedly there is a utility that lets you interact with the headphones but it didn't show itself to me an a mac, if it still exists.

They are great headphones if you do a lot on online meetings, you barely notice you have them on and despite this oddity I find them more reliable and better sound than anything else I've tried.

Cheers,
Jason