Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
alexene.dev
alexene.dev
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.
And one of those, even the cheapest ones, run for about ~$900. And they are LOUD.
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?
Definitely had various computer equipment plugged in to ours and it was great (I didn't specically test for EMI).
Sure, it isn't the -80db noise floor of a P-2400, but I'm not running a broadcast studio
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...
I agree however that indiscriminately throwing ferrites at problems can be a good solution!
[Youtube] "Hitler fails radiated emissions" - Orin Laney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeo8ZZTfwZQ
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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...
Do you have a PC case with a huge window? They (used to?) have grounded metal housings with only tiny openings for a reason.
I very much doubt that because audiophiles worries about a lot about both RFI, EMI and unwanted vibrations (I had one where I could hear a very faint metallic noise and it took me weeks to find the cause: a loose screw in the system ceiling a times vibrating a bit, depending on the song / passage in the song / frequencies and slightly touching a metal stud: horrible to diagnose but eventually I found it). For a start.
If you go on audiophile gear shops, you'll find power supply that, supposedly, prevent EMI.
Are RFI issues much more common? Sure. I had one in a previous place where I lived where simply lifting the speakers cable of the wooden floor would remove unwanted sounds: some kind of radio or TV program my cables would pick up. Then suddenly I stopped making fun of people lifting their speakers cable of the ground (but I'll still make fun of those paying $100 per little piece to lift their cables then buying 50 of these).
That said your comment is very interesting. But it also shows that, suddenly, power strips (or others) that try to deal with EMI, balanced cables (between various piece of audio gear), lifting $20 speakers cables off the ground, etc. don't look as idiotic as many make sound (ah ah). EMI, RFI and unwanted vibrations are a thing and they do ruin the listening experience.
Did you try replacing the PSU?
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.
relevant xkcd https://xkcd.com/2651
In that case more isolated cables and connections would probably help.
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
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!
All the cheap boards have neither. Most of the high end boards have both
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.
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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.
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.
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". :)
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?
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.
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).
> 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
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.
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 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.
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.
like where you talk about your phone you actually mean pocket computer, but it's too long to say.
Good story, though.
I wonder if that will be next fad in PC building, just putting live power line graph on the screen inside
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
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. (=
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.
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 :)
0. https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/t...
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.
> 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.
Thankfully doesn't happen with an external DAC.
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.
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).
Example https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...
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've been curious if this is some form of browser fingerprinting or just crappy speakers.
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.
That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate further?
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.
What am I missing?
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...
Happy to hear I'm not the only one with this problem!
It works fine in some ports, it has a lot of background noise in others.
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.