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Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
- vanschelven 10mo agoThere'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)
- Popeyes 10mo agoI was going to say get a DAC, but they already had one in their setup.
- FinnKuhn 10mo agoThe DAC is what is causing this issue for me sometimes - unplugging and pluggin it back in solves it though.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- andrewmcwatters 10mo ago[dead]
- kevindamm 10mo agoThe 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.
- jraph 10mo agoThat might be the strongest spacebar heating workflow situation I've actually run into so far https://xkcd.com/1172 https://xkcd.com/1172
- ivanjermakov 10mo agoFirst thing that came to my mind when I read it!
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoJust 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
- kevindamm 10mo agoreplace 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
- ZeWaka 10mo agoHonestly, would be a sick mod for the upcoming configurable Steam Machine front face.
- LM358 10mo agoNot at all surprised to see that it's a Schiit DAC causing this problem
- fbd_0100 10mo agowhy do you say that? I used a Schiit Bifrost for many years without issue
- ShipEveryWeek 10mo agoWhat’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
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- LM358 10mo ago>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/hardware-teardown-of-schiit-modi-2-usb-dac.2082/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/h... https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/budget-dac-review-schiit-modi-2-99.1649/ 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-integrated-amplifier-measurements 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 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.
- vardump 10mo agoThese effects used to be much worse in the nineties, often even if you had a fancy sound card. Electrical noise is significantly reduced now.
- rasz 10mo agoMajority 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.
- Garvi 10mo agoThat'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.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoyou 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 https://oshwlab.com/wagiminator/usb-power-filter
- diath 10mo ago> 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?
- rcxdude 10mo agoIt 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.
- diath 10mo agoWhat 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?
- pacificat0r 10mo agoEntities 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.
- saltcured 10mo agoRight, 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.
- asimovDev 10mo agoI 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- embedding-shape 10mo ago> 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.
- bluedino 10mo agoI 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.
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoPretty 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
- icelancer 10mo agoYeah 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.
- azraellzanella 10mo agoI get this on my MacBook M1, I "hear" some websites "static"
- tecleandor 10mo agoHappens to my Lenovo X390, specially with disks writes...
- bogwog 10mo agoMaybe I have sensitive hearing, but I encounter this frequently on machines from all manufacturers. It is very much still a problem today.
- distances 10mo agoQuite 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!
- PunchyHamster 10mo agoIt'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
- pier25 10mo ago> 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- TazeTSchnitzel 10mo agoThe 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.
- klamann 10mo agoI'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!
- thenthenthen 10mo agoMoving 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
- distances 10mo agoFor 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.
- thenthenthen 10mo agoOptical is a great suggestion! Never used it after 1998~ on my minidisc.
- tristor 10mo agoWhich 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).
- ericbarrett 10mo agoI 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.
- nottorp 10mo agoI 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.
- Night_Thastus 10mo agoI 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.
- monster_truck 10mo agoPure 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.
- Night_Thastus 10mo agoIt'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.
- LoganDark 10mo agoAre 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.
- bitbasher 10mo agoNot 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.
- LUmBULtERA 10mo agoSince 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.
- hlynurd 10mo agoI 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!
- DefineOutside 10mo agoBluetooth headphones? the settings menu could be using the microphone somehow and switching to mono audio because bluetooth is low bandwidth
- hlynurd 10mo agoOh yeah, Bluetooth headphones, I think this might actually explain it.
- digitalsushi 10mo agoanyone 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
- ivanjermakov 10mo agoTwo 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/tingling_sensation_vibration_inside_when_charging/ https://www.reddit.com/r/macbookpro/comments/1lfu1by/tinglin...
- nozzlegear 10mo ago> 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!
- phaser 10mo agoYour game looks super interesting! Very looking forward to playing :D
- spiritplumber 10mo agoI 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.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- SpaceManNabs 10mo agoI 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?
- glitchc 10mo agoReading 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.
- dbg31415 10mo agoI 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. (=
- kg 10mo agoGreat 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.
- mistyvales 10mo agoSchiit Modi 2 is notorious to struggle with cleaning up USB power Example https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/budget-dac-review-schiit-modi-2-99.1649/ https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...
- lnx01 10mo ago25 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....
- pfcd 10mo ago> I am working on an isometric game inspired from Gnomoria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, etc. That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate further?
- jofzar 10mo ago> 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-mitigate-usb-disconnect-problems-on-b550-x570-motherboards 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.
- s5300 10mo ago[dead]
- atoav 10mo agoStill 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.
- ptrl600 10mo agoI 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.
- Lapsa 10mo ago#yolo unground that thing
- amatecha 10mo agoOddly 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).