5 ms·
When I'm playing music on my stereo from my PC through USB, turning off the lights on my bathroom on the other side of the wall will momentarily kill my USB dri
by Izmaki 8y ago
When I'm playing music on my stereo from my PC through USB, turning off the lights on my bathroom on the other side of the wall will momentarily kill my USB driver and as a result Spotify stops working.
Electromagnetic interference is no joke.
- ryacko 8y agoDid you hit the Amazon counterfeit stock bingo or something?
- winrid 8y agoGround loop through stereo?
- robocat 8y agoMost likely a crappy PSU with failing output caps. Mains noise/spike/brownout coming through onto 12V/5V/3.3V lines. Relevant to the article too!
- gerdesj 8y agoHire an electrician. While you are at it, get them to do a quick inspection of the rest of the 'leccy stuff at your home. Throw away any power bricks/wall warts/devices whose name you cannot pronounce easily or can't even read. Clear the fluff out from behind your fridge. Fire is no joke and given the EMI in your place I suggest you take it seriously. I'm not suggesting that fire hazards are exacerbated by EMI but that the sort of environment that has one may be more prone to the other. For the sake of what ... USD100(?) in time plus some materials you could fix and head off some potentially seriously life shortening problems. If nothing else, you'd keep Spotify working. If it dies say five times a day and costs you a few mins, then that is say 20 mins per day. Cost your personal time at say $20 per hour. Now tell me you can't afford to get it fixed. ... or you could whine about it on HN 8)
- Izmaki 8y agoI live in an apartment with little or no connected ground. We had weird laws once that allowed electricians to cut corners which they did. If its serious, I could try to convince the landlord... Hmm...
- gerdesj 8y agoThat does not sound too good. I doubt that the weird laws allowed outright dangerous practice but you never know. I don't know your landlord (obvs!) but you are probably keener on your own well being than they are. Please get some advice: blow a few quid (bucks, whatever) on a sparky. If you have a friend who knows what they are on about then bribe them to come over and cast an eye over things. Just to re-iterate the point: it is not normal for your bathroom light to cause a USB (bus) to crash in another room.
- marcosdumay 8y agoYour first comment sounds like something very serious. The kind of stuff that kills people.
- eigenvector 8y agoI had an old Dell laptop where I could "hear" an external USB hard drive spinning up in my headphones, but only if it was connected to a USB port on the same side of the laptop as the audio jack.
- aidenn0 8y agoDell is terrible about this; On my last 2 workstations I could hear my mouse moving if I plugged my mouse into the USB port next to the headphone jack.
- lucas_membrane 8y agoDid you buy it from the guy who took his battery powered Dell with him as he sailed from California to Hawaii? 1000 miles from land, he could still hear the 60 Hz. hum.
- MisterTea 8y agoUGh. Reminds me of the terrible USB powered speaker bar for an HP LCD I have at work. The audio comes from the 3.5 mm jack and power from USB. All you hear is the damn switching noise from the motherboard. Any time there is significant CPU use you get this noise in the background and it's quite audible at even moderate volumes. Not sure if it's the crap speaker bar; power and audio coming from the same chassis using two different cables or the motherboard. Could be a ground loop? Now That I think of it, I'll try to power the USB from a lab supply or beefy USB charger.
- robertAngst 8y agoWait- your USB on your computer stops working? Is this true for every component you plug in? I imagine this is your stereo power supply. I oddly would love to hear more.
- ansible 8y agoCould be lots of things. The first thing to check out is the neutral and ground connections on all related circuits.
- wtracy 8y agoI'm also curious if it affects all USB ports on the computer, or only some. (Some PC's have "always on" outlets that supply power even when the PC is turned off, and I imagine that those take a slightly different route through the power supply.) Anyway, my guess is that there's some line noise that isn't enough to mess up the PC, and the PC is passing it along to some component in the speaker that doesn't like it.
- pizza 8y agoTurning on my ceiling fan kills my USB audio device as well. Audio applications on Windows do have a tendency to more or less self-immolate when the audio driver fails.
- Spooky23 8y agoThat’s bad ground. There’s some sort of shoddy electrical work in the wall. In my home, a previous owner cut a cable too short and connected the line to ground via a paper clip. Could have killed us.
- archagon 8y agoI had a similar problem with an aluminum Silverstone case. Turned out there was a grounding washer connected by wire to the front panel that had to be attached to a screw on the motherboard (I think). Fixed USB disconnecting issues right up. (See: https://superuser.com/questions/64098/static-when-metal-usb-plug-touches-my-case-and-other-electrical-problems https://superuser.com/questions/64098/static-when-metal-usb-...)
- white-flame 8y agoThat is absolutely NOT "electromagnetic interference", in terms of radiative electromagnetic noise. It's a wiring fault.
- dbuder 8y agoIt absolutely is EMI and the only way to construe it as a wiring fault is to count the pcb as wiring, because that is usually what you would need to fix. Long headphone cables don't help either.