USB Audio Device Preventing Sleep (Windows 10)

Question

Background

I have been having issues with my computer not entering sleep and also waking from sleep since Window 8.1. I had hoped that Windows 10 would resolve these issues, but unfortunately this is not the case. I had noticed that the problem would occur whenever my headset (Hyper X Cloud II) was plugged in, but it was not exclusively occurring when plugged in.

I recently got extremely fed up with my computer waking from sleep very consistently and decided once again to try and solve the problem.

Attempted Fixes

To start off, in Power Management:

• Disabled wake timers
• Enabled USB selective suspend
• Set the computer sleep time to 1 minute of inactivity to see if any changes had an effect

To identify the cause of what's keeping the computer from waking I used powercfg in an elevated command prompt:

powercfg -requests

Which returns the following:

SYSTEM:
[DRIVER] Realtek High Definition Audio (HDAUDIO\FUNC_01&VEN_10EC&DEV_0892&SUBSYS_1043860B&REV_1003\4&165326bb&0&0001)
An audio stream is currently in use.
[DRIVER] USB Audio Device (USB\VID_0951&PID_16A4&MI_00\6&3321d09b&1&0000)
An audio stream is currently in use.
[DRIVER] Legacy Kernel Caller

What I had noticed with my headset was confirmed by the USB Audio Device entry under system. If I unplugged my headset, both the USB Audio Device and the Legacy Kernel Caller entries were gone upon running powercfg -requests again.

The problem still persisted after unplugging the headset. So I then ran the following command to prevent the Realtek High Definition Audio driver from preventing sleep.

powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE DRIVER "Realtek High Definition Audio" SYSTEM

This did in fact allow my computer to enter sleep. Upon plugging in my headset again, the problem came back. So naturally I executed REQUESTSOVERRIDE again for the related headset drivers:

powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE DRIVER "USB Audio Device" SYSTEM
powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE DRIVER "Legacy Kernel Caller" SYSTEM

Unfortunately this did not fix the problem. To ensure that my REQUESTSOVERRIDE command took effect I ran:

powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE

Which did show that my override requests were in effect:

[DRIVER]
Realtek High Definition Audio SYSTEM
USB Audio Device SYSTEM
Legacy Kernel Caller SYSTEM

After this I tried:

• Using Device Manager and ensuring every USB port was permitted to turn off devices in order to enter sleep
• Uninstalling the Hyper X Cloud II device and reinstalling
• Confirming the powercfg -requests entries with powercfg -energy report
• Control Panel -> Sound -> Headset Earphone-> Advanced and unticked "Allow applications to take exclusive control of this device"

TL;DR

How can I prevent my USB Audio Device (in this case Hyper X Cloud II Headset) from preventing my computer to enter sleep?

I have used powercfg -REQUESTSOVERRIDE to remove all entries that come up in powercfg -requests and ensured in Device Manager that all USB ports are able to turn off devices to allow the computer to sleep.

Answer 1

I just realized that turning off Cortana's "always listening" feature seems to fix the problem.

Answer 2

For me, Realtek was fixed by disabling "Line In" under Sound > Recording. I have the Cloud II's as well and might return if I can fix that.

Answer 3

Same problem.

[DRIVER] USB Audio Device (USB\VID_10F5&PID_0296&MI_00\6&13d026f7&0&0000) An audio stream is currently in use.

But I don't think the audio driver is the problem. The problem is that an application is holding an audio stream open, even when it is not outputting audio.

Done some testing while spamming "powercfg /REQUESTS" while running different programs. Normally If a program is outputting an audio stream, then the sound driver makes a request to not allow the PC to sleep automatically. Then when the sound stops, the stream is closed, and then the driver stops requesting to hold sleeping.

In my case, however, a tab in Firefox 63.0.1 (64-bit) seems to be at fault. mega.nz site was constantly keeping an audio stream open, even when there was nothing audio related on the page.

Here you can see this bug in action.

Exhibit A. Browser open. No requests to hold sleep active.

Exhibit B. On home page of mega. No requests to hold sleep active.

Exhibit C. After log in. There is now an audio stream active. There is no audio file in this directory, nor is there any sound coming from the page.

Exhibit D. Setting the tab to mute and moving away from it still leaves the audio stream active.

Exhibit E. After closing the mega tab. audio stream no longer active. No requests to hold sleep active.

Try and find the program responsible for keeping its audio stream active, even when it is not producing sound.