Hi Peter,
do you remember which firmware version the M-1610 was flashed with before the update?
We are able to reproduce the behaviour, but it seems strange as we haven't touched that part for quite a while now. Might as well be a change in MacOS.
Some background:
In the initial AVB standard, or, for that matters, the control part of it, IEEE 1722.1, autoconnect wasn't specified. The only feature in there was "fast connect", that describes how every device should reconnect it's inputs on device start, so the entire system comes up faster, but handing control over to a centralized controlling entity thereafter. Unfortunately this feature was underspecified for standalone operation and left quite some details open. Plus it just didn't cover all use cases in the first place.
However, it was kind of agreed within the industry, that every device should reconnect its inputs as best as it can. To my knowledge, only Apple did it differently and tried to reconnect both directions.
Milan specified a more advanced autoconnect functionality later, that's what we have implemented on our devices. This worked pretty well alongside Apple's implementation.
Please note here that we do not officially support connecting to a Mac yet, as we are striving for full Milan compliance at the moment, which is partly orthogonal with what Mac OS expects.
So our devices reconnect their inputs, and it is expected that all others do it that way as well. When investigating this issue, I've found that Mac OS replies with "My inputs are connected to the M-1610" but it never actually tries to establish the connection beforehand. Now we just have to find out what we do different now, compared to the previous firmware your device was running...
Best regards
Marc