There are as far as I can see three possible reasons for failure:
- Power issues on the USB connection of the Reverb G2. (Does anyone know of a device to measure the power consumption of a USB device?). My experiments indicate this is the case.
- MSFS kills the Reverb audio driver occasionally.
- The USB controller driving the connection has issues supporting the Reverb G2.
I found 3. by Internet research. It is i reported that some USB controllers on motherboards have issues with the Reverb G2 (and other devices, they simply suck). My MB has an ASMedia USB controller to drive the USB 3.1 Gen2 connections (anything else is driven by the CPU). The Reverb won’t work on those connections at all or may drop from those connections any time.
One can figure out wether the USB audio device driver is killed by looking at what is displayed if the Reverb drops out of MSFS and goes dark: is it just dark or does it display the volume indicator (possibly flipping values)? If the latter is the case, the audio driver had been reloaded. In my experience the Reverb willl resume operation after some time in that case. MSFS is very picky about devices changing on the system while it is running. It may freeze for half a minute or so if some device is going out or in of control, even if not in VR.
The other case I witnessed is complete blackout. The Reverb won’t recover friom this on its own. One needs to drop out of VR in MSFS, restart the WMR portal, and reenter VR in MSFS then.
- can’t be excluded from the list. If the Reverb appears to work fine with other VR games (like Half Life Alyx or Star Wars Sqadron or …), that is a strong indicator that there is a SW problem in MSFS.