Mac mini Server (late 2012) refuses to sleep after updating to Catalina

[Furby2005]

Mac mini Server (late 2012) 2.6 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, 2.23 GB Fusion drive, connected to my living room TV by HDMI as a media centre. Default system sleep settings worked perfectly under Mojave. I've been running Catalina on it since the first Public Beta and sleep has never worked since then. It's now off the Beta programme, running the public release version of Catalina and scheduled sleep is still not working. I did a clean install of PB2 and again of PB6. Pretty much everything else is working fine and I think I'll really like Catalina but sleep is still refusing to work as it should. I've ditched the preferences, reset PRAM and SMC, clean installed, all to no avail. This doesn't seem to be a general problem with Catalina, I've not read any other reports of problems, so I/m at a loss as to what else I can do to restore the correct sleep behaviour. Any suggestions?

 

[Apples Apples Everywhere]

When I sleep my Catalina Mac mini 2018, it immediately wakes up. Worked fine in Mojave.

 

[Apples Apples Everywhere]

I finally solved this issue. First I swapped out my Mac mini with a freshly installed Hackintosh, but the same problem persisted. Then I disconnected my Klipsch speakers which have an integrated USB DAC, and the problem went away. I overlooked that at first because the Mac mini is under my desk and I forgot about the DAC. In retrospect, that's a pretty obvious thing to try.

In the end I guess I'm a little bummed that I can't sleep with these speakers which worked fine in Mojave, but after reading this forum I can say my problems are nothing compared to the troubles others are having and so I guess I'll call my Catalina upgrade a success.