I run into a similar problem. I have a power-hungry GPU (3080) and CPU (9800X3D).
All my audio equipment was on the same UPS (and therefore outlet) as my gaming PC.
The result is that any time a particularly stressful game would be open, I'd get buzzing in the speakers. (Especially if the framerate was at 360) If you ask audiophiles online they will swear up and down that a cheater plug, balanced cables, or optical isolation will fix it - that will not fix it. It's not a ground problem. It's not coming from the connection from the PC to the DAC - it's a power issue.
It seemed almost inconceivable to them that the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment.
I temporarily got a double-conversion UPS (converts AC to DC to AC again) and housed the audio equipment on that instead (separate from PC) Lo-and-behold the noise was completely gone.
However, those UPS are extremely expensive, and far worse they're very loud because the fans run constantly.
So, I went with a simpler alternative. Just get a power strip and plug all the audio equipment into that on a different outlet. That reduces it massively. You can also get some strips that are designed to reduce EMI, but I haven't felt the need as of yet.
If you're a bit handy, you can assemble a line filter using a part like this https://enerdoor.com/products/fin27/ for a heck of a lot cheaper than you can buy a filtered power strip.
Even if there's very little audio-frequency attenuation, it's possible for higher frequencies to produce audio-frequency intermodulation distortion, and filtering could reduce this. This is one reason "high definition" (ultrasound sampling rate) audio is a bad idea as a listening format.
In 2013 I bought out 2 Radio Shacks worth of ferrite beads when I was hunting down signal noise in my senior design project (CNC mill rebuild and update.)
All else fails, add more beads.
Also, I learned that you can make your own shielded flat cables with aluminum duct tape.
Who knew that they had a really good reason for using 48V signaling in the original machine controls from 1986?
Maybe you’re right. My experience is with radios, where it’s possible that high frequency noise is conducted into the RF section rather than into the audio amplifier. I know that in one case, both my transmitted signal and received audio output were absolute garbage (edit: because it was picking up noise from the vehicle ignition) until I added a choke to the power input wiring.
Well the OP’s electrical noise almost certainly is coming through the USB connection as their DAC has no external power supply. Extremely common.
Your problem of an AC power supply not sufficiently filtering out high-frequency noise from mains is exceptionally rare to the point that yes, I also don’t believe that was the correct diagnosis of your issue.
Pure sine wave UPSs are not that expensive anymore man. I think the biggest "desktop" pure sine wave cyberpower sells (1500VA/1000W, CP1500PFCLCD) is <$300 now. I have a couple of them, they are great.
It's not about pure sine wave - it's double conversion. Only double-conversion would actually isolate the equipment from EMI on the line. Without that pure sine wave won't do squat for EMI.
And one of those, even the cheapest ones, run for about ~$900. And they are LOUD.
Are they loud because they're double-conversion or are they loud because they're designed for server racks? When I search for double-conversion online I can practically only find rack-mount solutions.
They're loud because unlike a regular UPS they need to run continually to convert the power back and forth. That generates a lot of waste heat, which fans must remove.
I wonder if modern motor and power control tech could be adapted to make a desk-side motor-generator set that is efficient enough to rival an always-active, dual conversion AC-DC-AC UPS.
How efficient could a small AC->motor->generator->AC chain be with a modest flywheel mass to provide cycle-to-cycle stability?
Could it ever make sense to put one of these after a standby UPS so the output is always filtered by the motor-generator but the UPS only has to kick in for outages?
One advantage of a motor-generator set is that it's relatively easy to get high-voltage isolation using an insulating shaft. It might be possible to build something that could survive nearby lightning strikes to the incoming AC line. I don't think any standard UPS can do this.
The portable lithium battery "powerstations" double as great double-conversion UPS in addition to their intended outdoors (camping, beach, etc) activities, and depending on capacity go for less than 900 USD. It's only noisy when fast charging or providing high currents.
Definitely had various computer equipment plugged in to ours and it was great (I didn't specically test for EMI).
> If you ask audiophiles online they will swear up and down that a cheater plug, balanced cables, or optical isolation will fix it - that will not fix it.
Lifting the ground on my studio monitors absolutely fixed my noise problems. I run them off a MiniDSP 2x4HD, so other sources like EMI aren't really a factor.
The problem I have with a double conversion UPS is that it isn't an ideal sinusoidal source. It implies it is on the tin, but when you've got protected loads with PWM power delivery slamming around 1+ kilowatts, there's no way to guarantee a smooth waveform with a typical ~2500VA unit. Directly passing through to the grid could provide cleaner power under the most transient conditions.
Reminds me of my friend who has bought a shit load of 1.5v AA lithium batteries. The buck converters in those little bastards wreak havoc with every speaker around. His TV remote disconnects my Bluetooth headphones every time.
It's not about isolation though - it's about line noise. An isolation transformer will let that pass straight through (minus the usual filtering due to any transformer being an inductor), whereas the AC->DC->AC conversion gets rid of all of it by effectively acting as a perfect low-pass filter.
Sigh, it's almost like I had this conversation before.
My audio equipment is not connected by USB. It's connected by optical (TOSLINK) to an external DAC. TOSLINK is not great, but it shows that it is not a USB noise problem.
I got rid of the noise via the method I described in the original comment? Moving my audio equipment to separate power strip on a separate outlet. It didn't totally remove it, but made it quiet enough to deal with.
Don't mind them. I've had a similar thing happen, but with power line Ethernet. In your case however, I'd be at least a little concerned about the building wiring.
In many analog pro audio applications, it's actually recommended that a shield be connected at one side only, for this reason. By convention but not necessarily necessity, the bond is typically kept at the receiving end, as that's almost always a device with a grounded power cord (such as a mixer). Many DI boxes feature a ground lift switch as a convenient way to achieve this. But you wouldn't want to disconnect it at both ends, as then the shield has no effect at all.
Anyway, if you had problems with your unshielded cables that would be solved by a shield, but your shielded cables caused a different problem due to the bond at both ends, this technique of using shielded cables but severing the shield at one end of them would get you the best of both worlds.
Huh, I had no idea that cables would have their shield grounded at both ends... Single point ground is such a standard in electrical design that the guidance is generally "do otherwise only if you have the ability to make many prototypes to nail RFI issues".
If you're building an audio cable your signal will peak out at a few kHz, so the cable acting as an antenna and picking up a signal in the MHz range isn't an issue. Similarly, you're not transmitting anything significant either. But a ground loop can easily ruin your day.
If you're building a cable for multi-gbps data transmission, that ground loop noise might as well not exist - it's basically DC. But ground your shielding at only one end, and suddenly you're ruining everyone's wifi!
Building a device which needs high-speed data on one side, and analog audio on the other side? Good luck...
Ruled out the monitor(s)? There's been cases where they've backfed power, and they certainly backfeed EMI as well. And, it could also be tied to FPS- assuming gsync/free sync.
If you have a multimeter its probably worth double checking if the case is low resistance grounded to the end of the cord. I'm assuming you have checked already, but as a shock hazard it bares repeating.
I also have a splitter which lets you power an USB device from a separate power supply (i.e. D+/D- lines are connected to a host and +5V comes from a separate plug, ground is shared though). And optical TOSLINK is a nice option where available.
When I upgraded my PC to the same CPU, I had the same problem of crackling/buzzing speakers on my USB DAC (externally powered, but from the same strip/outlet) when the system was under load.
I had a hunch it was power related because my PSU was nearly 10 years old and probably with just barely enough wattage. I bought a new one and all the buzzing went away.
IIRC when I was researching possible causes, beefy Ryzen CPUs were the most commonly mentioned in various forums and reddit threads.
It depends some setups generate noise when you move a cabled mouse with a high resolution. I never measured it, but I would assume it is because of the high frequency signals of the mouse generates if it is actively used.
In that case more isolated cables and connections would probably help.
I remember 15+ years ago reading about certain laptops (Dell?) that you could 'hear' scrolling on websites, somehow the video chip was interfering with the sound chips. I had one at the time it was pretty weird.
Pretty common problem on builtin sound cards, even now. It's just very close to the noise source.
Shouldn't really happen on USB DAC, it should have enough filtering to get any interference injected by power, and enough shielding (and just being far away enough from machine) for other EMI
Yeah this is the main reason to use a USB DAC. I guess you get marginally better sound quality (more noticeable on expensive studio headphones that need more power to drive them) but better isolation/removal from the noise source is the main reason I use them. Especially relevant because in my travel I'm often in countries that don't have ground plugs in their power sources.
Quite a flashback. I switched to optical TOSLINK maybe about 20 years ago, which solved all those issues obviously. It's a bit weird how rare optical outs are on motherboards even today -- clearly less than half have them -- when it is such a useful interface.
Just ordered a hat for my Raspberry Pi with optical out, with a plan to make that my main music streamer. Excited to see if that works out!
I wish Mini-TOSLINK[1] had been more successful. It's allows you to put an optical and electrical audio output on the same 3.5mm connector (i.e. headphone port), which is helpful for saving space on crowded panels.
The trick is that your 3.5mm connector only needs to connect on the sides, so the end of the jack can be open for light to be transmitted.
This was seen pretty frequently on laptops for a while, but I think two things doomed it. One, most people just don't use optical. Two, there's nothing to advertise its existence. If you do have one of these ports, you probably don't even know you could plug an optical connector in there.
I don't foresee any Bluetooth need either for my desktop setup. But yeah I do see that many buyers would want that for headphones if nothing else, so it makes sense to include the chip.
I can hear when my Dell laptop uses the flash drive heavily. It sounds kind of like a hard drive, so I actually had to verify that I have a flash chip. Apparently it's a known issue; I've assumed that something in it vibrates due to EMF.
Noise is caused by changes in current. Any pulse of current will ultimately create EMF.
If power lines run anywhere near the sound lines, you are just asking to pick up interference whenever the computer does basically anything. It doesn't take too much of a pulse to be picked up. For a 3.5 jack, the voltage is anywhere from 0.002 to 0.5V. Even a pretty small induced voltage will be audible.
> A picking texture is a very simple idea. As the name says, it’s used to handle picking in the game, when you click somewhere on the screen (e.g. to select an unit), I use this texture to know what you clicked on. Instead of colors, every object instance writes their EntityID to this texture. Then, when you click the mouse, you check what id is in the pixel under the mouse position.
Unrelated, but why? Querying a point in a basic quad tree takes microseconds, is there any benefit to overengineering a solved problem this way? What do you gain from this?
I assume for the picking system you're rendering each entity/block as a different color (internally) and getting the pixel color under the mouse cursor?
"Color" is pretty much just "integer" to the GPU. It doesn't care if the 32-bit value a shader is writing to its output buffer is representing RGBA or a memory pointer.
It aligns with what appears on the screen accurately and without needing any extra work to make sure there's a representation in a tree that's pixel-accurate. It's also pretty low overhead with the way modern GPU rendering works.
What if you have a collision system where collision filters can exclude collisions based on some condition in such a way that their bounding boxes can overlap? For instance an arrow that pierces through a target to fly through it and onto another target? How do you accurately store the Entity ID information for multiple entities with a limited number of bits per pixel?
Entities that can't be picked, don't write to the texture, entities that can be picked, write to the texture their id. Whatever is closer to the camera will be the id that stays there (same as a color pixel, but instead of the object color you can think object id).
So you are limited at one ID per pixel, but for me that works.
Right, it's the same z-buffer problem of deciding what pixel color is visible, with a non-blending buffer update mode.
To be totally coherent, you have to draw the entity ID in the same order you would draw the visible color, in cases where entities could "tie" at the same depth.
A point in screen space is a line in world space after inverse camera projection, so this way you get the line-to-closest-geometry test in O(1), after the overhead of needing to render the lookup texture first.
It's funny that apparently "high performance" DAC doesn't handle the common issue every single USB audio device have to worry about - noisy power. From the vendor page (on MODI 5, no idea which one author has).
> SPECS THAT MATTER
> Distortion: inaudible; 100-1000x lower than any transducer (speaker or headphone) you're using
> Noise: inaudible; far below a typical headphone or speaker amp
The fact audiophiles talk about “DAC”s is really telling. Transparent digital-to-analogue conversion is a solved problem. Any computer or smartphone worth a damn has a DAC whose output is indistinguishable to the human ear from anything “better”.
The truth is that DAC is not the problem… everything else in the analogue audio chain is. Amplifiers are messy analogue devices. Speakers and headphones are incredibly messy analogue devices. Power supplies and power conditioners are messy analogue devices. And noise is not down to any one component, but is a whole-system design problem. A particularly cool thing about power supplies is that they often create noise that will be picked up by other devices on the same circuit.
Of course, when people are buying a “DAC” they are really buying a box of some kind that also includes an amplifier, but this naming choice surely contributes to people paying attention to the wrong specs.
I agree that you can have cheap and great DACs nowadays that far exceeds what a consumer needs but some manufacturers still insists in putting less than ideal ones, or fumbling their implementation, in all sorts of device. I've got a computer with a fairly recent motherboard that I'm using for an htpc and the audio output is much noisier and produced a less punchy bass than the now 20 year old (!) X-fi sound card I've been using for... 20 years. Too bad, I wanted to give it a respite but I guess It's gonna keep trucking for at least another decade.
I then proceeded to investigate that by using REW to produce measurements of each output and the findings confirmed my hearing, the motherboard audio was outputting 5db less, plus a noise floor 15 db higher than the x-fi, resulting in 20db of extra noise (When you compensate with 5db extra at the amp). The resulting frequency response also revealed a much more aggressive high pass filter, I was actually getting another -3db@30hz compared to the x-fi confirming where the lack of "punchiness" was coming from. And then the cherry on the top was that all the extra channeles (surrdound/sub/center) had an even more aggressive highpass filter, they cheapened out on the cheapening out, probably assuming you are not gonna use more than stereo.
Obviously this is just my anecdote, but I suspect this is very widespread.
EDIT: Oh and I haven't even talked about the line-ins! It's pretty much unusable in ALL motherboard audio I've cared to try. There is some insane noise gating and AGC going on to try and mask the fact that they use some really low bit depth ADCs with terrible dynamic range. Meanwhile I can capture pristine audio from my n64 into the x-fi no problem.
Most of your noise floor is not going to be coming from the DAC, and your frequency response difference is probably caused by a difference in impedance, which is a fun topic because it's not like there's a “correct” impedance and you may just be more fond of the effect a particular impedance pairing gets you.
AFAIK impedance mismatch should only matter in relation to speakers and amps or headphones and dacs/pre-amps. It shouldn't matter when doing line level output to an amp or even a line level loopback (dac to adc). The fact it has such behavior in a consistent manner leads me to believe it is just out of spec or badly implemented, even if it is impedance matching after all.
Regarding noise floor, the "DAC" (really, the audio source as a whole) did matter in this case. The volume is being set at the amp to as loud as I need because the volume is being controlled at the source. In the xfi setup I couldn't hear any hiss, noise or EMI from the pc itself, while on the onboard audio it bothered me pretty much instantly with a constant hiss and EMI buzzing even from moving the mouse. I do want to note again that it's likely the manufacturer implementation at fault rather than purely the DAC fault, regardless, the user is the one being harmed with a subpar product.
I do my setup this way because I have a pile of DSPs running in that PC, including an equal loudness contour compensated volume "dial" (bass/treble gets boosted as volume goes down essentially), so controlling the volume at the source is a must.
You're right. In serious audio world these numbers are kind of like saying "64-bit CPU". Other stuff like power is much more important. Someone could make big bucks advertising that if there was a catchy way to do it
THD+N is irrelevant for the issue the author is describing, through. You need to spec PSRR (power supply rejection ratio). Many individual ICs do not spec this, and pretty much every system does not spec this.
The source is electrical noise, but the solution of isolating the audio chain from the computer's USB means that in the future you might not notice when you've introduced another GPU memory bandwidth hog into your rendering loop.
I've been using optical connections for audio on my gaming PCs for decades now, exactly for this reason. Though wireless headphones will work just as well these days. Too many game developers mess this up (e.g. by having no frame limiter in the game menu) and many of them never fix these kinds of issues. Thanks for caring and fixing this in your game!
I hit a similar issue on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I watched YouTube or streamed Spotify while playing a game, the audio broke into little "clipping chirps" and static.
For me the culprit was Game Mode. I still don't really know what it does, but disabling it fixed everything. None of my games come close to stressing the CPU, yet Game Mode was throttling anything that wasn't the game. It was also on by default, which felt like a design miss.
For MacOS, a better approach would be to check what's happening on the second monitor or at least avoid throttling apps that aren't being displayed. Assuming the game deserves all system resources and that the user doesn't want to watch or listen to anything else is a bad bet.
Anyway, the good news is the fix on a Mac is simple once you know where to look. (=
What’s with the animosity towards Schiit? They seem to make decent products. Noise from using USB power delivery for audio devices is common.. that’s why you can (and should) use the dedicated power input to you DAC/amp
The above review specifically goes into the problem from OP.
There's also their amplifier with a rather non-standard architecture that tries to solve a non-problem (injecting feedback in a NFB loop - I might remember wrong, if so, forgive me) which leads to it measuring double digit (!) THD if you feed it a sine wave. I'm not an experienced engineer but it is IMO a non-starter to have an amplifier try to decide what is and isn't a musical signal as part of its protection circuitry, short of detecting DC offsets or shorts (pun not intended). I'm not in the market for a 1800$ amplifier that goes bzzzt if you feed it music it disagrees with [1]
>Noise from using USB power delivery for audio devices is common.. that’s why you can (and should) use the dedicated power input to you DAC/amp
I don't disagree with your point. However, a company designing products like these should be able to design a filter for this usecase unless you're trying to use your DAC as a a measuring device, or there is something seriously wrong with your motherboard. I honestly haven't heard of any other brand product with this problem unless it's ~20 years old and in need of repair. It doesn't cost much in the BOM, however it does cost in engineering hours/competence and QA and this is something that should have been caught by the latter.
Edit: I just want to add that I don't want to hate on Schiit. Honestly I'd like new audio companies to succeed and I applaud them for rejecting MQA back in the day and for not going all-in on the audiofool bullshit one sees too much of. But seeing such poor engineering and QA leaves a sour taste in my (electronics engineering) mouth. Maybe they have improved lately, I wouldn't know. I'm not really in their market anyways.
> No doubt you have noticed my frequent use of terms "nice" and "excellent" and that sums up the performance of Modi+. At this price point, we don't expect objective perfection but competent engineering and that is what we have. Physically, the unit is solidly built and of course supported by an English speaking US company. For people with such preference, the Modi+ provides an excellent option. That they can stay competitive with far east audio companies is definitely a feather in their cap.
> I am going to recommend the Schiit Modi+ DAC. Great to see Schiit continue the (new) tradition of optimizing objective performance as they cater to their traditional audience.
Look, if it works for you and you're happy with it - keep it. More power to you.
I just know that if I handed over something with such shoddy soldering to a customer, I'd lose my job or at the very least lose soldering privileges. But I am working with things that cost slightly more than 99$ that you can't find on store shelves :)
Schiit Audio makes great stuff, I've been using it for years and have other gear as well to compare to. I think it's good for what it is, although their pricing has gone a bit out of control lately. The problem here is not the maker of the DAC, it's that it's bus powered over USB, which is a problem regardless of who makes it.
Great write-up. This is basically spam but I want to specifically thank the author for pointing out their solution, because it's directly applicable to one of my own projects and I'm going to do it tonight!
> There’s no need to download the whole texture each frame, just the part of the picking texture that’s under the mouse. So I implemented that and it worked and buzzing is gone. As a bonus, now it’s also not visible at all on the GPU trace.
I have a similar issue with Genshin on PS5 when using the headphone jack in the controller with IEMs (didn't happen with a headset). It starts buzzing in my left ear when I open the game menu or open the map. On the map it only buzzes when I move the cursor, interestingly enough. I later noticed that the PSU coil whine coincided with the same events. Still no idea why it's like that
> On the map it only buzzes when I move the cursor, interestingly enough
Sounds like the game is doing more when the cursor moves around, they're probably checking for where the cursor is, and something is making the CPU/GPU do a bunch of extra work, which finally triggers the coil whine when the PSU is more heavily used.
I've basically had the same issue with Nvidia cards since the 2080ti started doing coil whine as soon as I opened Unreal Engine. Some programs trigger different sounds, depending on how much/well they use the GPU, and I've had the literal same experience with "hovering with my mouse over element X triggers coil whine" multiple times before.
Which is why I consistently have told people to ensure that they pick a DAC which is powered independently if they intend to connect it via USB. Schitt Audio makes great stuff (it's what I have sitting on my desk right now) which is designed in that way, but there's no magic formula to beat physics when you physically power an audio device over a connection that is vulnerable to induced noise.
If you're trying to eliminate noise in your audio setup, the first and most important thing is having audio converted from digital to analog outside of the computer chassis itself (e.g. instead of a soundcard get a DAC). The second thing is to disconnect the power flows between the two systems (e.g. get a DAC which is separately powered). The third thing is to connect the DAC via a non-electrical connection so that the signal path is not vulnerable to noise in the environment between the two systems (e.g. use Toslink/optical and not USB/copper). The fourth thing is to condition the power input to DAC to remove transients (use an audio power conditioned, which does not need to be some grandiose thing, it's a bunch of capacitors).
Beyond that, there's not much you can do, after all there's EMI/RFI all of the time in the environment. If the DAC chassis is metallic and properly grounded, it should reject most, and the same should be true for the computer chassis, but there is always going to be /some/ incidental noise. As long as the noise floor is low enough that it's well below even quiet listening with amplification, you'll never hear it. But the default state of audio on most computer systems is pretty shit and people don't realize it, because they are mostly listening to Bluetooth earbuds (which at least provide no physical path for induced noise).
That's a common problem. It's electrical noise in your signal. The only way I know how to completely eliminate it is using external DA/AD converters and connecting them to the PC using optical wires. We used MADI cards back in the studio back in the day.
you can do a lot with just good power filtering and maybe a ferrule on the USB cable to cut the high frequency stuff before it even gets to device. I'd imagine powered USB hub might help too.
I wonder if there is a market for motherboard targetting musicians that just have extra power filtering on USB power.
I have a Modi DAC I've used for years with several different gaming and development rigs and I've never had a problem like this. Sounds like a failing component, maybe a capacitor or regulator—the article author should contact Schiit.
Moving my cursor makes an audible sound over my (builtin) audio card. I always blamed inductors somewhere (noisy power). This has never not been the case with any desktop with built-in audio I have owned over the past 25+ years
Since switching to the $10ish Apple USB-C to headphone adapter vs. just plugging in my 3.5mm headset into the computer, the buzzing when gaming completely stopped for me. Cheap solution.
I had this problem on my Oculus Rift box (remember those? it still runs beat saber just fine) and the solution was to solder some beefy capacitors on the end of unused power cables coming out of the power supply. If I recall correctly it was the 12V line that did it, which I didn't expect.
The buzz isn't completely gone but now I can't hear it unless I'm paying attention to it, which if I am playing beat saber, I'm not.
Still a very common problem today and (aside from the need for more output channels or the need for professional mic preamps) the main reason people get USB audio interfaces.
As for USB audio interfaces I really love what RME is doing with their TotalMix, but if you want bang for the buck Behringers UMC series is the place to be.
Reading through your post, it's likely the noise sourced from the network cable is coupling into your headset cable. Check how close those cables are to each other If you're using a USB port at the back for your DAC, try switching it to the front. The noise can also come from the power supply which couples into the motherboard's ground plane and shows up on all USB ports.
Majority of sound cards up to late nineties used dual layer PCBs with terrible grounding strategies so even the ones bothering to condition power for analog section still audibly picked up interrupts, DMA transfers and CPU load.
I am a bit confused. Based on the earlier paragraphs, it hinted that the solution would be related to the frequency of the job, not necessarily its load (since other games do not have this issue), but then the fix was not changing the frequency but the load of the job.
There's a certain cinematic quality to this story... perhaps so much so that if it were to be included in an actual movie it would be seen as "too over the top" (i.e. CSI-like)
anyone else get big audio buzz relief using the extra, three prong cable on their normally two prong apple laptop charger? it felt as good as having my wisdom teeth out after i switched
I have this weird thing whenever I have headphones and open the Dota2 settings on my Mac, then I not only get buzzing but the overall sound quality plummets!
> I had a fairly decent CPU, a 3090RTX card, 32GB RAM
The answer might be more simple, OP when have you updated your chipset/mobo drivers?
This was a known issue (which I was also effected by) for amd chips that would fuck with the USB driver when the PCIE lane pulled was in pcie 4 (my memory is a bit rough in this)
I run into a similar problem. I have a power-hungry GPU (3080) and CPU (9800X3D).
All my audio equipment was on the same UPS (and therefore outlet) as my gaming PC.
The result is that any time a particularly stressful game would be open, I'd get buzzing in the speakers. (Especially if the framerate was at 360) If you ask audiophiles online they will swear up and down that a cheater plug, balanced cables, or optical isolation will fix it - that will not fix it. It's not a ground problem. It's not coming from the connection from the PC to the DAC - it's a power issue.
It seemed almost inconceivable to them that the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment.
I temporarily got a double-conversion UPS (converts AC to DC to AC again) and housed the audio equipment on that instead (separate from PC) Lo-and-behold the noise was completely gone.
However, those UPS are extremely expensive, and far worse they're very loud because the fans run constantly.
So, I went with a simpler alternative. Just get a power strip and plug all the audio equipment into that on a different outlet. That reduces it massively. You can also get some strips that are designed to reduce EMI, but I haven't felt the need as of yet.
If you're a bit handy, you can assemble a line filter using a part like this https://enerdoor.com/products/fin27/ for a heck of a lot cheaper than you can buy a filtered power strip.
You may also be able to solve the problem with a simple common mode choke, either the clip-on type, or a toroid that you wrap the cable through a couple-few times. https://palomar-engineers.com/rfi-kits/acdc-power-line-choke...
A filter like that will have very little attenuation in the audio spectrum.
I agree however that indiscriminately throwing ferrites at problems can be a good solution!
Even if there's very little audio-frequency attenuation, it's possible for higher frequencies to produce audio-frequency intermodulation distortion, and filtering could reduce this. This is one reason "high definition" (ultrasound sampling rate) audio is a bad idea as a listening format.
In 2013 I bought out 2 Radio Shacks worth of ferrite beads when I was hunting down signal noise in my senior design project (CNC mill rebuild and update.) All else fails, add more beads.
Also, I learned that you can make your own shielded flat cables with aluminum duct tape.
Who knew that they had a really good reason for using 48V signaling in the original machine controls from 1986?
This reminds me of my favorite "Downfall" meme video.
[Youtube] "Hitler fails radiated emissions" - Orin Laney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeo8ZZTfwZQ
Ferrites - almost never doing any harm, sometimes doing good. :-)
Maybe you’re right. My experience is with radios, where it’s possible that high frequency noise is conducted into the RF section rather than into the audio amplifier. I know that in one case, both my transmitted signal and received audio output were absolute garbage (edit: because it was picking up noise from the vehicle ignition) until I added a choke to the power input wiring.
Well the OP’s electrical noise almost certainly is coming through the USB connection as their DAC has no external power supply. Extremely common.
Your problem of an AC power supply not sufficiently filtering out high-frequency noise from mains is exceptionally rare to the point that yes, I also don’t believe that was the correct diagnosis of your issue.
Pure sine wave UPSs are not that expensive anymore man. I think the biggest "desktop" pure sine wave cyberpower sells (1500VA/1000W, CP1500PFCLCD) is <$300 now. I have a couple of them, they are great.
It's not about pure sine wave - it's double conversion. Only double-conversion would actually isolate the equipment from EMI on the line. Without that pure sine wave won't do squat for EMI.
And one of those, even the cheapest ones, run for about ~$900. And they are LOUD.
Are they loud because they're double-conversion or are they loud because they're designed for server racks? When I search for double-conversion online I can practically only find rack-mount solutions.
They're loud because silence is not a priority in their design and their fans run non-stop.
They're loud because unlike a regular UPS they need to run continually to convert the power back and forth. That generates a lot of waste heat, which fans must remove.
I have several that are not rackmount (SU1000XLCD/SU1500XLCD), and they're all loud because they run fans constantly.
I wonder if modern motor and power control tech could be adapted to make a desk-side motor-generator set that is efficient enough to rival an always-active, dual conversion AC-DC-AC UPS.
How efficient could a small AC->motor->generator->AC chain be with a modest flywheel mass to provide cycle-to-cycle stability?
Could it ever make sense to put one of these after a standby UPS so the output is always filtered by the motor-generator but the UPS only has to kick in for outages?
One advantage of a motor-generator set is that it's relatively easy to get high-voltage isolation using an insulating shaft. It might be possible to build something that could survive nearby lightning strikes to the incoming AC line. I don't think any standard UPS can do this.
The portable lithium battery "powerstations" double as great double-conversion UPS in addition to their intended outdoors (camping, beach, etc) activities, and depending on capacity go for less than 900 USD. It's only noisy when fast charging or providing high currents.
Definitely had various computer equipment plugged in to ours and it was great (I didn't specically test for EMI).
In my testing combining this UPS with a cheap power conditioner, the noise floor is more than sufficient.
Sure, it isn't the -80db noise floor of a P-2400, but I'm not running a broadcast studio
> If you ask audiophiles online they will swear up and down that a cheater plug, balanced cables, or optical isolation will fix it - that will not fix it.
Lifting the ground on my studio monitors absolutely fixed my noise problems. I run them off a MiniDSP 2x4HD, so other sources like EMI aren't really a factor.
The problem I have with a double conversion UPS is that it isn't an ideal sinusoidal source. It implies it is on the tin, but when you've got protected loads with PWM power delivery slamming around 1+ kilowatts, there's no way to guarantee a smooth waveform with a typical ~2500VA unit. Directly passing through to the grid could provide cleaner power under the most transient conditions.
Reminds me of my friend who has bought a shit load of 1.5v AA lithium batteries. The buck converters in those little bastards wreak havoc with every speaker around. His TV remote disconnects my Bluetooth headphones every time.
Weird. Wonder if they chose 2.4ghz as their time division for the switching, because it’s a cheap and common frequency to source for.
They won't be switching at that frequency, but they're probably putting off harmonics up to very high frequencies due to very sharp switching.
isolation transformers are way cheaper than double conversion and should work as well?
well they used to be cheaper, not sure what is going with prices these day, I remember this being around $100 a decade ago
https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/146730/Tripp-Lite-500...
https://www.officedepot.com/a/products/493958/Tripp-Lite-100...
It's not about isolation though - it's about line noise. An isolation transformer will let that pass straight through (minus the usual filtering due to any transformer being an inductor), whereas the AC->DC->AC conversion gets rid of all of it by effectively acting as a perfect low-pass filter.
A 1.5kva isolation transformer is about $600, that fits with today’s pricing.
No need for UPS, a good external usb soundcard with power supply will solve that problem.
I have all connected to the the same power circuit and with a Elektron Digitakt as audio device and have zero noise.
With audio devices powered by USB there is a lot of noise.
Sigh, it's almost like I had this conversation before.
My audio equipment is not connected by USB. It's connected by optical (TOSLINK) to an external DAC. TOSLINK is not great, but it shows that it is not a USB noise problem.
If you had that conversation before and you still having noise, maybe you are not doing the right thing... Sigh...
I got rid of the noise via the method I described in the original comment? Moving my audio equipment to separate power strip on a separate outlet. It didn't totally remove it, but made it quiet enough to deal with.
Don't mind them. I've had a similar thing happen, but with power line Ethernet. In your case however, I'd be at least a little concerned about the building wiring.
I ran into a similar problem! I briefly used CAT6, which is required to be shielded.
That shielding was carrying noise from my PC, through the network switch, to my raspberry pi that I used for music streaming. Absolutely nuts.
I swapped to unshielded ethernet cables and it went away.
As for building wiring, this issue has persisted in multiple buildings.
In many analog pro audio applications, it's actually recommended that a shield be connected at one side only, for this reason. By convention but not necessarily necessity, the bond is typically kept at the receiving end, as that's almost always a device with a grounded power cord (such as a mixer). Many DI boxes feature a ground lift switch as a convenient way to achieve this. But you wouldn't want to disconnect it at both ends, as then the shield has no effect at all.
Anyway, if you had problems with your unshielded cables that would be solved by a shield, but your shielded cables caused a different problem due to the bond at both ends, this technique of using shielded cables but severing the shield at one end of them would get you the best of both worlds.
Huh, I had no idea that cables would have their shield grounded at both ends... Single point ground is such a standard in electrical design that the guidance is generally "do otherwise only if you have the ability to make many prototypes to nail RFI issues".
It's a high-speed vs low-speed thing.
If you're building an audio cable your signal will peak out at a few kHz, so the cable acting as an antenna and picking up a signal in the MHz range isn't an issue. Similarly, you're not transmitting anything significant either. But a ground loop can easily ruin your day.
If you're building a cable for multi-gbps data transmission, that ground loop noise might as well not exist - it's basically DC. But ground your shielding at only one end, and suddenly you're ruining everyone's wifi!
Building a device which needs high-speed data on one side, and analog audio on the other side? Good luck...
Ruled out the monitor(s)? There's been cases where they've backfed power, and they certainly backfeed EMI as well. And, it could also be tied to FPS- assuming gsync/free sync.
If you have a multimeter its probably worth double checking if the case is low resistance grounded to the end of the cord. I'm assuming you have checked already, but as a shock hazard it bares repeating.
I also have a splitter which lets you power an USB device from a separate power supply (i.e. D+/D- lines are connected to a host and +5V comes from a separate plug, ground is shared though). And optical TOSLINK is a nice option where available.
I got a lot of noise when plugging speakers to my display :(
When I upgraded my PC to the same CPU, I had the same problem of crackling/buzzing speakers on my USB DAC (externally powered, but from the same strip/outlet) when the system was under load.
I had a hunch it was power related because my PSU was nearly 10 years old and probably with just barely enough wattage. I bought a new one and all the buzzing went away.
IIRC when I was researching possible causes, beefy Ryzen CPUs were the most commonly mentioned in various forums and reddit threads.
You could also chuck a bunch of ferrites on your PC power cord
It depends some setups generate noise when you move a cabled mouse with a high resolution. I never measured it, but I would assume it is because of the high frequency signals of the mouse generates if it is actively used.
In that case more isolated cables and connections would probably help.
>the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment
Do you have a PC case with a huge window? They (used to?) have grounded metal housings with only tiny openings for a reason.
So in your situation, noise from your PC was showing up in other equipment on the same circuit.
Did you try replacing the PSU?
> double-conversion UPS (converts AC to DC to AC again)
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2651
[dead]
[dead]
I remember 15+ years ago reading about certain laptops (Dell?) that you could 'hear' scrolling on websites, somehow the video chip was interfering with the sound chips. I had one at the time it was pretty weird.
Pretty common problem on builtin sound cards, even now. It's just very close to the noise source.
Shouldn't really happen on USB DAC, it should have enough filtering to get any interference injected by power, and enough shielding (and just being far away enough from machine) for other EMI
Yeah this is the main reason to use a USB DAC. I guess you get marginally better sound quality (more noticeable on expensive studio headphones that need more power to drive them) but better isolation/removal from the noise source is the main reason I use them. Especially relevant because in my travel I'm often in countries that don't have ground plugs in their power sources.
Quite a flashback. I switched to optical TOSLINK maybe about 20 years ago, which solved all those issues obviously. It's a bit weird how rare optical outs are on motherboards even today -- clearly less than half have them -- when it is such a useful interface.
Just ordered a hat for my Raspberry Pi with optical out, with a plan to make that my main music streamer. Excited to see if that works out!
I wish Mini-TOSLINK[1] had been more successful. It's allows you to put an optical and electrical audio output on the same 3.5mm connector (i.e. headphone port), which is helpful for saving space on crowded panels.
The trick is that your 3.5mm connector only needs to connect on the sides, so the end of the jack can be open for light to be transmitted.
This was seen pretty frequently on laptops for a while, but I think two things doomed it. One, most people just don't use optical. Two, there's nothing to advertise its existence. If you do have one of these ports, you probably don't even know you could plug an optical connector in there.
---
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK#Mini-TOSLINK
I remember when all MacBooks had it. "What is this red light for?" used to be a common post on forums.
Ditto. It’s is hard to find non-wifi motherboards with toslink.
All the cheap boards have neither. Most of the high end boards have both
I updated my computer this year, and didn't find anything without wifi either. So it seems it's a small tax you just have to pay now.
I've at least found that the wifi+Bluetooth chips seem to be significantly more robust than the standalone bt ones.
I don't foresee any Bluetooth need either for my desktop setup. But yeah I do see that many buyers would want that for headphones if nothing else, so it makes sense to include the chip.
I hear my second hand dell XPS laptop running fedora when I scroll through dropdown lists.
It sounds exactly like the reads on a physical hdd, which is silly because it has an SSD. Haven’t figured out what it is yet.
My XPS does something similar. Faint 50Hz chirping (coil whine?) when I move objects in Blender. Never encountered audio interference though.
Maybe I have sensitive hearing, but I encounter this frequently on machines from all manufacturers. It is very much still a problem today.
Yep, my 2019ish Dell XPS 13 makes hissy static noises on its speakers, even when system audio is muted.
I remember the BBC Micro doing the same thing when I was a little kid during certain operations, it always sounded to me like it was "thinking". :)
I can hear when my Dell laptop uses the flash drive heavily. It sounds kind of like a hard drive, so I actually had to verify that I have a flash chip. Apparently it's a known issue; I've assumed that something in it vibrates due to EMF.
Noise is caused by changes in current. Any pulse of current will ultimately create EMF.
If power lines run anywhere near the sound lines, you are just asking to pick up interference whenever the computer does basically anything. It doesn't take too much of a pulse to be picked up. For a 3.5 jack, the voltage is anywhere from 0.002 to 0.5V. Even a pretty small induced voltage will be audible.
Happens to my Lenovo X390, specially with disks writes...
I get this on my MacBook M1, I "hear" some websites "static"
I get fairly audiable coil whine when scrolling websites.
> A picking texture is a very simple idea. As the name says, it’s used to handle picking in the game, when you click somewhere on the screen (e.g. to select an unit), I use this texture to know what you clicked on. Instead of colors, every object instance writes their EntityID to this texture. Then, when you click the mouse, you check what id is in the pixel under the mouse position.
Unrelated, but why? Querying a point in a basic quad tree takes microseconds, is there any benefit to overengineering a solved problem this way? What do you gain from this?
Well, it's significantly easier to implement than a octree. Game is actually 3D under the hood, projected at a careful angle to look isometric 2D.
The reason the game is 3D has to do with partially visible things being way easier than with isometric textures layered in the right order.
Also, now that i just grab a pixel back from the GPU, it's no overhead at all (to construct or get the data for it).
I assume for the picking system you're rendering each entity/block as a different color (internally) and getting the pixel color under the mouse cursor?
"Color" is pretty much just "integer" to the GPU. It doesn't care if the 32-bit value a shader is writing to its output buffer is representing RGBA or a memory pointer.
It aligns with what appears on the screen accurately and without needing any extra work to make sure there's a representation in a tree that's pixel-accurate. It's also pretty low overhead with the way modern GPU rendering works.
What if you have a collision system where collision filters can exclude collisions based on some condition in such a way that their bounding boxes can overlap? For instance an arrow that pierces through a target to fly through it and onto another target? How do you accurately store the Entity ID information for multiple entities with a limited number of bits per pixel?
Entities that can't be picked, don't write to the texture, entities that can be picked, write to the texture their id. Whatever is closer to the camera will be the id that stays there (same as a color pixel, but instead of the object color you can think object id). So you are limited at one ID per pixel, but for me that works.
Right, it's the same z-buffer problem of deciding what pixel color is visible, with a non-blending buffer update mode.
To be totally coherent, you have to draw the entity ID in the same order you would draw the visible color, in cases where entities could "tie" at the same depth.
A point in screen space is a line in world space after inverse camera projection, so this way you get the line-to-closest-geometry test in O(1), after the overhead of needing to render the lookup texture first.
It's funny that apparently "high performance" DAC doesn't handle the common issue every single USB audio device have to worry about - noisy power. From the vendor page (on MODI 5, no idea which one author has).
> SPECS THAT MATTER
> Distortion: inaudible; 100-1000x lower than any transducer (speaker or headphone) you're using > Noise: inaudible; far below a typical headphone or speaker amp
The fact audiophiles talk about “DAC”s is really telling. Transparent digital-to-analogue conversion is a solved problem. Any computer or smartphone worth a damn has a DAC whose output is indistinguishable to the human ear from anything “better”.
The truth is that DAC is not the problem… everything else in the analogue audio chain is. Amplifiers are messy analogue devices. Speakers and headphones are incredibly messy analogue devices. Power supplies and power conditioners are messy analogue devices. And noise is not down to any one component, but is a whole-system design problem. A particularly cool thing about power supplies is that they often create noise that will be picked up by other devices on the same circuit.
Of course, when people are buying a “DAC” they are really buying a box of some kind that also includes an amplifier, but this naming choice surely contributes to people paying attention to the wrong specs.
I agree that you can have cheap and great DACs nowadays that far exceeds what a consumer needs but some manufacturers still insists in putting less than ideal ones, or fumbling their implementation, in all sorts of device. I've got a computer with a fairly recent motherboard that I'm using for an htpc and the audio output is much noisier and produced a less punchy bass than the now 20 year old (!) X-fi sound card I've been using for... 20 years. Too bad, I wanted to give it a respite but I guess It's gonna keep trucking for at least another decade.
I then proceeded to investigate that by using REW to produce measurements of each output and the findings confirmed my hearing, the motherboard audio was outputting 5db less, plus a noise floor 15 db higher than the x-fi, resulting in 20db of extra noise (When you compensate with 5db extra at the amp). The resulting frequency response also revealed a much more aggressive high pass filter, I was actually getting another -3db@30hz compared to the x-fi confirming where the lack of "punchiness" was coming from. And then the cherry on the top was that all the extra channeles (surrdound/sub/center) had an even more aggressive highpass filter, they cheapened out on the cheapening out, probably assuming you are not gonna use more than stereo.
Here is the graph, red is x-fi outs and green is motherboard outs: https://i.imgur.com/dxoLXJO.png
Obviously this is just my anecdote, but I suspect this is very widespread.
EDIT: Oh and I haven't even talked about the line-ins! It's pretty much unusable in ALL motherboard audio I've cared to try. There is some insane noise gating and AGC going on to try and mask the fact that they use some really low bit depth ADCs with terrible dynamic range. Meanwhile I can capture pristine audio from my n64 into the x-fi no problem.
Most of your noise floor is not going to be coming from the DAC, and your frequency response difference is probably caused by a difference in impedance, which is a fun topic because it's not like there's a “correct” impedance and you may just be more fond of the effect a particular impedance pairing gets you.
AFAIK impedance mismatch should only matter in relation to speakers and amps or headphones and dacs/pre-amps. It shouldn't matter when doing line level output to an amp or even a line level loopback (dac to adc). The fact it has such behavior in a consistent manner leads me to believe it is just out of spec or badly implemented, even if it is impedance matching after all.
Regarding noise floor, the "DAC" (really, the audio source as a whole) did matter in this case. The volume is being set at the amp to as loud as I need because the volume is being controlled at the source. In the xfi setup I couldn't hear any hiss, noise or EMI from the pc itself, while on the onboard audio it bothered me pretty much instantly with a constant hiss and EMI buzzing even from moving the mouse. I do want to note again that it's likely the manufacturer implementation at fault rather than purely the DAC fault, regardless, the user is the one being harmed with a subpar product.
I do my setup this way because I have a pile of DSPs running in that PC, including an equal loudness contour compensated volume "dial" (bass/treble gets boosted as volume goes down essentially), so controlling the volume at the source is a must.
this is because nobody who talks of DACS means just the DAC circuit, it means the whole unit.
like where you talk about your phone you actually mean pocket computer, but it's too long to say.
True, but plenty chase specs like sample rate (beyond 96 kHz) and bit depth (beyond 24) that have no practical benefit beyond the DAC circuit.
You're right. In serious audio world these numbers are kind of like saying "64-bit CPU". Other stuff like power is much more important. Someone could make big bucks advertising that if there was a catchy way to do it
> 100-1000x lower than any transducer
This seems like a lot but it's only 20-30db lower than whatever reference they're using.
This is the spec that really matters: THD+N: 0.0003% which is roughly -110 dB. It's very good and completely inaudible but not exceptional these days.
THD+N is irrelevant for the issue the author is describing, through. You need to spec PSRR (power supply rejection ratio). Many individual ICs do not spec this, and pretty much every system does not spec this.
Indeed. I was only commenting on the 100-1000x claim.
The source is electrical noise, but the solution of isolating the audio chain from the computer's USB means that in the future you might not notice when you've introduced another GPU memory bandwidth hog into your rendering loop.
Good story, though.
Just attach a scope to your power lines, boom, live feedback on what your renderer is doing.
I wonder if that will be next fad in PC building, just putting live power line graph on the screen inside
replace the scope with a dimmable light and we might have a better solution than low-decibel audio hum
or perhaps live wire into the seat, tied into a transistor on this signal, so if performance drops enough you're sure to be alerted to it
Honestly, would be a sick mod for the upcoming configurable Steam Machine front face.
That might be the strongest spacebar heating workflow situation I've actually run into so far
https://xkcd.com/1172
First thing that came to my mind when I read it!
I've been using optical connections for audio on my gaming PCs for decades now, exactly for this reason. Though wireless headphones will work just as well these days. Too many game developers mess this up (e.g. by having no frame limiter in the game menu) and many of them never fix these kinds of issues. Thanks for caring and fixing this in your game!
I hit a similar issue on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I watched YouTube or streamed Spotify while playing a game, the audio broke into little "clipping chirps" and static.
For me the culprit was Game Mode. I still don't really know what it does, but disabling it fixed everything. None of my games come close to stressing the CPU, yet Game Mode was throttling anything that wasn't the game. It was also on by default, which felt like a design miss.
For MacOS, a better approach would be to check what's happening on the second monitor or at least avoid throttling apps that aren't being displayed. Assuming the game deserves all system resources and that the user doesn't want to watch or listen to anything else is a bad bet.
Anyway, the good news is the fix on a Mac is simple once you know where to look. (=
25 years ago my 3.5mm jack headphones would buzz whenever I moved the mouse... Bzzzzzzzzz,tk, tk, tk ,tk, bzzzzzzz, tk, tk, tk, tk, tk....
Not at all surprised to see that it's a Schiit DAC causing this problem
That's funny it's actually named Schiit I thought that was a joke
What’s with the animosity towards Schiit? They seem to make decent products. Noise from using USB power delivery for audio devices is common.. that’s why you can (and should) use the dedicated power input to you DAC/amp
>They seem to make decent products
I don't agree with that sentiment. Their designs are subpar and the quality of the soldering is (maybe was) unacceptable:
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/h...
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...
The above review specifically goes into the problem from OP.
There's also their amplifier with a rather non-standard architecture that tries to solve a non-problem (injecting feedback in a NFB loop - I might remember wrong, if so, forgive me) which leads to it measuring double digit (!) THD if you feed it a sine wave. I'm not an experienced engineer but it is IMO a non-starter to have an amplifier try to decide what is and isn't a musical signal as part of its protection circuitry, short of detecting DC offsets or shorts (pun not intended). I'm not in the market for a 1800$ amplifier that goes bzzzt if you feed it music it disagrees with [1]
https://www.stereophile.com/content/schiit-audio-ragnarok-in...
>Noise from using USB power delivery for audio devices is common.. that’s why you can (and should) use the dedicated power input to you DAC/amp
I don't disagree with your point. However, a company designing products like these should be able to design a filter for this usecase unless you're trying to use your DAC as a a measuring device, or there is something seriously wrong with your motherboard. I honestly haven't heard of any other brand product with this problem unless it's ~20 years old and in need of repair. It doesn't cost much in the BOM, however it does cost in engineering hours/competence and QA and this is something that should have been caught by the latter.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzMbY4sZvIw
Edit: I just want to add that I don't want to hate on Schiit. Honestly I'd like new audio companies to succeed and I applaud them for rejecting MQA back in the day and for not going all-in on the audiofool bullshit one sees too much of. But seeing such poor engineering and QA leaves a sour taste in my (electronics engineering) mouth. Maybe they have improved lately, I wouldn't know. I'm not really in their market anyways.
Schitt did step up their engineering and quality in the last few years, in response to Amir/ASR reviews.
E.g. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/s...
> No doubt you have noticed my frequent use of terms "nice" and "excellent" and that sums up the performance of Modi+. At this price point, we don't expect objective perfection but competent engineering and that is what we have. Physically, the unit is solidly built and of course supported by an English speaking US company. For people with such preference, the Modi+ provides an excellent option. That they can stay competitive with far east audio companies is definitely a feather in their cap.
> I am going to recommend the Schiit Modi+ DAC. Great to see Schiit continue the (new) tradition of optimizing objective performance as they cater to their traditional audience.
Wow, that's exactly what I have, a MODI 2. Time for a change I guess
Look, if it works for you and you're happy with it - keep it. More power to you.
I just know that if I handed over something with such shoddy soldering to a customer, I'd lose my job or at the very least lose soldering privileges. But I am working with things that cost slightly more than 99$ that you can't find on store shelves :)
Topping DX3 Pro+[0] is a well-reviewed alternative.
0. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...
Schiit Audio makes great stuff, I've been using it for years and have other gear as well to compare to. I think it's good for what it is, although their pricing has gone a bit out of control lately. The problem here is not the maker of the DAC, it's that it's bus powered over USB, which is a problem regardless of who makes it.
I'm not sure if you are joking around the sound of the brand name, or complaining about the actual brand
why do you say that? I used a Schiit Bifrost for many years without issue
Why is that? I’ve generally only seen positive feedback on their stuff
Great write-up. This is basically spam but I want to specifically thank the author for pointing out their solution, because it's directly applicable to one of my own projects and I'm going to do it tonight!
> There’s no need to download the whole texture each frame, just the part of the picking texture that’s under the mouse. So I implemented that and it worked and buzzing is gone. As a bonus, now it’s also not visible at all on the GPU trace.
I have a similar issue with Genshin on PS5 when using the headphone jack in the controller with IEMs (didn't happen with a headset). It starts buzzing in my left ear when I open the game menu or open the map. On the map it only buzzes when I move the cursor, interestingly enough. I later noticed that the PSU coil whine coincided with the same events. Still no idea why it's like that
Thankfully doesn't happen with an external DAC.
> On the map it only buzzes when I move the cursor, interestingly enough
Sounds like the game is doing more when the cursor moves around, they're probably checking for where the cursor is, and something is making the CPU/GPU do a bunch of extra work, which finally triggers the coil whine when the PSU is more heavily used.
I've basically had the same issue with Nvidia cards since the 2080ti started doing coil whine as soon as I opened Unreal Engine. Some programs trigger different sounds, depending on how much/well they use the GPU, and I've had the literal same experience with "hovering with my mouse over element X triggers coil whine" multiple times before.
They connected the headphones to a wireless controller. The wireless controller doesn't have a GPU.
yeah but the noise coincides with when coil whine happens so i think that's still a solid guess
Which is why I consistently have told people to ensure that they pick a DAC which is powered independently if they intend to connect it via USB. Schitt Audio makes great stuff (it's what I have sitting on my desk right now) which is designed in that way, but there's no magic formula to beat physics when you physically power an audio device over a connection that is vulnerable to induced noise.
If you're trying to eliminate noise in your audio setup, the first and most important thing is having audio converted from digital to analog outside of the computer chassis itself (e.g. instead of a soundcard get a DAC). The second thing is to disconnect the power flows between the two systems (e.g. get a DAC which is separately powered). The third thing is to connect the DAC via a non-electrical connection so that the signal path is not vulnerable to noise in the environment between the two systems (e.g. use Toslink/optical and not USB/copper). The fourth thing is to condition the power input to DAC to remove transients (use an audio power conditioned, which does not need to be some grandiose thing, it's a bunch of capacitors).
Beyond that, there's not much you can do, after all there's EMI/RFI all of the time in the environment. If the DAC chassis is metallic and properly grounded, it should reject most, and the same should be true for the computer chassis, but there is always going to be /some/ incidental noise. As long as the noise floor is low enough that it's well below even quiet listening with amplification, you'll never hear it. But the default state of audio on most computer systems is pretty shit and people don't realize it, because they are mostly listening to Bluetooth earbuds (which at least provide no physical path for induced noise).
Schiit Modi 2 is notorious to struggle with cleaning up USB power
Example https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...
That's a common problem. It's electrical noise in your signal. The only way I know how to completely eliminate it is using external DA/AD converters and connecting them to the PC using optical wires. We used MADI cards back in the studio back in the day.
you can do a lot with just good power filtering and maybe a ferrule on the USB cable to cut the high frequency stuff before it even gets to device. I'd imagine powered USB hub might help too.
I wonder if there is a market for motherboard targetting musicians that just have extra power filtering on USB power.
There are also just USB devices that have just plugs + some LC filter that might help, for example https://oshwlab.com/wagiminator/usb-power-filter
I have a Modi DAC I've used for years with several different gaming and development rigs and I've never had a problem like this. Sounds like a failing component, maybe a capacitor or regulator—the article author should contact Schiit.
Moving my cursor makes an audible sound over my (builtin) audio card. I always blamed inductors somewhere (noisy power). This has never not been the case with any desktop with built-in audio I have owned over the past 25+ years
For your next desktop, get a motherboard with an optical audio output. Or add a soundcard with that for your current computer, those are still made.
Optical is a great suggestion! Never used it after 1998~ on my minidisc.
Not sure if it's related-- but anyone else get a buzz or pop in their headphone/spear when loading certain web pages?
I've been curious if this is some form of browser fingerprinting or just crappy speakers.
Since switching to the $10ish Apple USB-C to headphone adapter vs. just plugging in my 3.5mm headset into the computer, the buzzing when gaming completely stopped for me. Cheap solution.
I had this problem on my Oculus Rift box (remember those? it still runs beat saber just fine) and the solution was to solder some beefy capacitors on the end of unused power cables coming out of the power supply. If I recall correctly it was the 12V line that did it, which I didn't expect.
The buzz isn't completely gone but now I can't hear it unless I'm paying attention to it, which if I am playing beat saber, I'm not.
Still a very common problem today and (aside from the need for more output channels or the need for professional mic preamps) the main reason people get USB audio interfaces.
As for USB audio interfaces I really love what RME is doing with their TotalMix, but if you want bang for the buck Behringers UMC series is the place to be.
Reading through your post, it's likely the noise sourced from the network cable is coupling into your headset cable. Check how close those cables are to each other If you're using a USB port at the back for your DAC, try switching it to the front. The noise can also come from the power supply which couples into the motherboard's ground plane and shows up on all USB ports.
> I am working on an isometric game inspired from Gnomoria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, etc.
That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate further?
Oddly I can't access the site. The URL is 301-redirecting to itself in an infinite loop (which the browser finally stops and shows an error page).
These effects used to be much worse in the nineties, often even if you had a fancy sound card. Electrical noise is significantly reduced now.
Majority of sound cards up to late nineties used dual layer PCBs with terrible grounding strategies so even the ones bothering to condition power for analog section still audibly picked up interrupts, DMA transfers and CPU load.
I am a bit confused. Based on the earlier paragraphs, it hinted that the solution would be related to the frequency of the job, not necessarily its load (since other games do not have this issue), but then the fix was not changing the frequency but the load of the job.
What am I missing?
I had a laptop in the mid 00s which made a strange buzzing sound when scrolling a document in Adobe Reader, and in no other context.
There's a certain cinematic quality to this story... perhaps so much so that if it were to be included in an actual movie it would be seen as "too over the top" (i.e. CSI-like)
anyone else get big audio buzz relief using the extra, three prong cable on their normally two prong apple laptop charger? it felt as good as having my wisdom teeth out after i switched
Two prong apple charger is mind boggling to me. I can feel 50Hz static when gently touching the laptop. Problem goes away when grounded properly.
Also surprised there are barely any three prong hot plug adapters for the original charger.
And the internet if full of complaints on this matter: https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1lfu1by/tinglin...
> I can feel 50Hz static when gently touching the laptop. Problem goes away when grounded properly.
Happy to hear I'm not the only one with this problem!
I have this weird thing whenever I have headphones and open the Dota2 settings on my Mac, then I not only get buzzing but the overall sound quality plummets!
Bluetooth headphones? the settings menu could be using the microphone somehow and switching to mono audio because bluetooth is low bandwidth
Oh yeah, Bluetooth headphones, I think this might actually explain it.
I have an usb "audio card" for other reasons (since my hackintoshing days).
It works fine in some ports, it has a lot of background noise in others.
Your game looks super interesting! Very looking forward to playing :D
I was going to say get a DAC, but they already had one in their setup.
The DAC is what is causing this issue for me sometimes - unplugging and pluggin it back in solves it though.
#yolo unground that thing
> I had a fairly decent CPU, a 3090RTX card, 32GB RAM
The answer might be more simple, OP when have you updated your chipset/mobo drivers?
This was a known issue (which I was also effected by) for amd chips that would fuck with the USB driver when the PCIE lane pulled was in pcie 4 (my memory is a bit rough in this)
https://au.pcmag.com/motherboards/85999/amd-offers-tips-to-m...
Here's an article about it at the time but tldr update your chipset+motherboard drivers.
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