Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
alexene.dev84 points by pacificat0r 4 hours ago
84 points by pacificat0r 4 hours ago
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!
This reminds me of my favorite "Downfall" meme video.
[Youtube] "Hitler fails radiated emissions" - Orin Laney: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeo8ZZTfwZQ
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.
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.
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?
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.
They're loud because silence is not a priority in their design and their fans run non-stop.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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
Maybe I have sensitive hearing, but I encounter this frequently on machines from all manufacturers. It is very much still a problem today.
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.
> 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.
> 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?
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.
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).
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.
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
That might be the strongest spacebar heating workflow situation I've actually run into so far
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 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.
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.
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.
Not at all surprised to see that it's a Schiit DAC causing this problem
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 :)
I'm not sure if you are joking around the sound of the brand name, or complaining about the actual brand
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 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
Your game looks super interesting! Very looking forward to playing :D
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)
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.
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 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.
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
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).
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