At long last, I am happy to provide a solution to the USB audio problem I’ve had for 6 months with my Framework 16.
The symptoms of my issue:
Whenever I would plug in a USB (A or C) device that had anything to do with audio (output or input; webcam with mic, conference mic, speaker, etc), all audio services would lock up. I couldn’t access the sound options in Settings (either wouldn’t open or was greyed out) and the quick settings menu (greyed out). This happened with two different USB-A webcams, a USB-A conference mic, a USB-C mic and a USB-A speaker.
After updating the BIOS and checking it multiple times, making sure that I had all of the current drivers installed, multiple times and switching out expansion ports, trying many different USB audio devices, changing out the main board, thinking I’m going crazy and spanning about six months of my life, I finally have everything working properly.
The culprit was AMD Audio Coprocessor. This past weekend I tried to do a fresh install of Windows 11 after which my USB mic and other devices (USB-C mic, USB-A webcam, USB-A mic) were working properly. I thought that I had it solved and that I could then proceeded to install the driver bundle and all of my apps. This was foolish because as soon as I spent the time to do all of that and tried using my USB mic I had the same results as before; the mic would not work and all audio services were suspended/locked up. So I decided to do it a little more intelligently. I reinstalled a fresh version of Windows 11 and created a restore point at which the USB mic was working. I installed the driver bundle and immediately the USB mic was not working. So now I was able to determine that something in the driver bundle was causing the issue. Instead of running the complete installer I unpacked the installer and painstakingly went through installing one at a time to find out which one it was. Through all of the testing, it only happened when I installed the AMD Software (Adrenaline). So then I installed all the other drivers and manually installed the graphics drivers (I have the discreet graphics card), and at this point everything was still working perfectly, but I did not have AMD Adrenaline so I was lacking the customization that comes with it. I tried installing it standalone, and again USB audio devices didn’t work. My brother was helping me troubleshoot at the time and found the following thread on reddit that seemed to address a similar issue: https://www.reddit.com/r/AMDHelp/comments/16xz5za/sound_system_malfunctioning_after_installing_amd/.
I did not delete AMD Audio Coprocessor (as suggested in the post), I just disabled it. Now everything is working great and I have AMD Adrenaline working also.
I just wanted to let the community know since I can’t believe I am the only one to experience the same issue. Interestingly, my brother who has almost the exact same configuration as me (below) has no problem using a gooseneck USB mic and he didn’t have to disable AMD Audio Coprocessor. It should be helpful for the support staff helping other customers and also in determining how to resolve in upcoming releases.
Framework 16 configuration
32GB RAM
1TB HD
AMD Radeon 780M (iGPU)
AMD Radeon RX 7700S (dGPU)
P1 - USB-C
P2 - HDMI
P3 - USB-A
P4 - USB-C
P5 - USB-C
P6 - USB-C
Numpad
Windows 11 Enterprise 24H2 10.0.26100 Build 26100
BIOS 3.03