12-09-2007, 09:01 PM

This is driving me nuts. I've had these wonderful speakers since last December and whenever I reboot, my PowerMac G5 doesn't recognize the USB speakers and I have to unplug the power from them, plug it back in, and the computer instantly sees them and all is good for awhile. I'm a relatively new Mac user (1.5 yrs) and the reason I'm not a good troubleshooter is because I rarely have any trouble! I believe I have followed the setup correctly, but something's not right.

Anyone else ever have this problem? Can you point me in the right direction to get this resolved?

Thanks! / ~Sam

01-06-2008, 07:27 AM

I have exactly the same problem with the Companion 5. PLEASE HELP!

01-06-2008, 08:58 AM

Welcome to Mac-forums, to both of you.

A few things to try to troubleshoot this issue in this Apple Discussions thread.

04-25-2008, 03:35 AM

I recently bought a Bose Companion 5 system for desktop use. Although it certainly doesn't compare to the quality of my $30K living room system, for $399 it sounds quite decent.

The problem has been that with my Mac Pro and Leopard I would occasionally and randomly suffer annoying dropouts and bursts of noise when importing or playing music with iTunes.

This is the top of the line 8-core 3.2 GHz Mac Pro, outfitted with 16GB of RAM and four 1 TB disk drives with a hardware RAID card in RAID 0, so I am certainly not suffering from CPU overload or inadequate performance!

When I was experiencing the problem, I had the Bose USB cable plugged into one of the three USB slots on the rear of the Mac Pro chassis. Also plugged into the adjacent slots were a Drobo disk drive array (at the moment powered off), plus a hub into which my Mac aluminum keyboard is connected.

After reading some other problems, including someone who had added a PCI USB card, I decided to try using the USB slot on the front of the chassis.

Voila! No more dropout problems! Yeah!!

OK, so let's troubleshoot this.

I reconnected the keyboard to the front USB connector, then reconnected the Bose in the rear. I had to reselect the Bose USB Audio as the Output device using System Preferences/Sound/Output. So far, so good.

Now connect the Drobo, still powered off. Still no problems.

Ok, plug the keyboard in directly, not using the hub.

Still no problem. Ok, now plug the keyboard in using the hub, in case I want to add another device.

Now I'm back to the original configuration, although some of the plugs may not have been inserted in the same slots. Yet everything is still working with no dropouts!

At this point, I don't know what is going on. Was it a loose/intermittent cable, or did reassigning the Output port make a difference.

Stay tuned -- more tomorrow night, after more testing.

04-26-2008, 12:02 AM

Well, so far tonight, no problems. Cable issues, or reconfiguration -- I don't know what I did to make the problem go away -- I didn't even have to sacrifice a goat!

05-06-2008, 02:34 PM

My friend had this same problem with the bose companion 5 usb speakers. A very helpful guy at the Bose store told him to buy the Monster icable for the car, and plug it into the headphone jack on the sound control hub of the speakers and the other end into the jack on the front of the G5. He has had no more problems.

06-08-2008, 04:33 PM

Will this work with just a regular Macbook?