USB Nervosa Thread Decrapifiers, pro interfaces, and bears oh my

Discussion in 'Digital: DACs, USB converters, decrapifiers' started by zerodeefex, Sep 28, 2015.

  1. uncola

    uncola Friend

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    Maybe try one with galvanic isolation.. sounds like you have power related noise
     
  2. kixx

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    I don't know man, the galvanic one is 'round 500$ here (nano igalvanic 3), so i ain't forking that out with the ipurifier flop. Been eyeing a m-stage hpa-3 balanced amp, which is exactly 500$ ... might pounce on that as it does seem rather nice and dandy. For that price i might also find a motherboard with spdif out. What am i talking? The processor is the first generation i5 (2500K), a mb for that socket is 50$ =}}

    Writing this, just struck me: i have some pins on the motherboard so i can connect 2 more usb ports in the back of the pc, with an usb pci backplate. Think imma find one of those first, since it's dirt cheap. Maybe it's a different hub so no more noise. Might even cannibalize a usb cable and make a direct connection ... short some things out! :D
     
  3. haywood

    haywood Friend

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    I thought conventional wisdom here is if you need usb to get a dedicated card rather than use motherboard options which are notoriously crap, or ideally to not use usb at all like with an Eitr.

    I’d also suggest looking into the raspberry pi related threads here with an eye towards retiring your old pc, the Pi itself is less than $40 and you can get a nice spdif hat for $100ish (Pi2Design 502dac or Allo Digione). Always on, silent, sips energy, vibrant (and free, though donations appreciated, etc.) software scene.
     
  4. neogeosnk

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    I had the same problem that you described. Ended up being the lights on my keyboard. After I turned them off, all my troubles went away.
     
  5. kixx

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    I have thought of getting a usb dedicated card, but conventional wisdom is not my thing. I kinda got sucked into the mesmerizing stellar reviews and haven't given enough research about that ipurifier bugger. Guess i'm gonna have give eitr a look ... i think schiit has a european dealer.

    That raspberry thing kinda intimidates me. I'd rather not touch stuff i don't fully comprehend ... yet. The pc, for me, is sort of a retarded old friend, who likes to pull schiit pranks every now and then ... giving me a headache (i.e. stupid noise over usb).

    I know, i tried man ... LED lights pulled some pranks on me with some failed radio transmissions a few years back. A powerfull cree led flashlight was left turned on a weak and barely working radio receiver (more like pocket walkie talkie) and jammed it, so i always suspect them. It's like friggin aliens. I did bust out my old chicony keyboard hat's not illuminated and mechanical, and a balled mouse ... but it didn't do squat.

     
  6. bixby

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    @kixx Couple of things, what player are you using, do you use usb storage?

    A few things to try. Try free demo of fidelizer, it helped a friend kill some mouse noise, not sure why.

    Get some music playing and pull every usb device except mouse and see if noises go away. A dedicated computer with only the usb dac connected to one usb port is usually the quietest and best sounding. Oh, and kill the wifi by disabling in control panel see if that helps. And a cheap $20 or less usb card can be a very subtle improvement but not massive. I use one but only in main speaker setup, HP system not much difference.
     
  7. neogeosnk

    neogeosnk Friend

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    If you're just running spotify, try the raspberry Pi with a hat as suggested by @haywood . Super easy to setup using Volumio. You can even just test it out with just the Raspberry Pi without the hat to see if it will work for u for about $35 pounds. It's what I use at work because I work on top of a factory and with a lot of machines that generate noise. I'm also next to an industrial electrical run the size of tree trunk and I don't hear any noise.
     
  8. Armaegis

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    This isn't a "noise" issue necessarily. It's more likely related to the usb implementation or hardware drivers. Chasing the decrapifiers is just a band-aid when you should be trying to sniff out the source of the interference in the first place*. (I think it may even be possible that the "noise" is injecting itself into the digital data due to how usb audio streams from the computer, but please don't quote me on that because that specific level of computer buggery is beyond me).

    Unfortunately, I don't have a solid answer for you here other than the usual computer hardware witchery: update all device drivers (especially usb controller, motherboard, mouse, keyboard, graphics card) and firmware if available. Check for a bios update. Physically move your card peripherals to another slot, and/or try a separate usb expansion card.

    *Seriously people, all the additional filter thingamabobs should be for chasing the last 5% of your audio chain. If there's actual clickety clackety stuff coming from your transducer, that last 5% is meaningless.
     
  9. kixx

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    Thanks for the solutions and the help, but i have fixed the issue. I found and installed the usb backplate directly on the motherboard (it looks like usb 3.0 to boot), and the noise is gone. Cranking the amp to the max with no music playing and ... silence! Finally!

    [​IMG]
     
  10. Dzerh

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    A you sure you are receiving noise through USB and not through AC power/ground line?

    EDIT: lol, too slow
     
  11. Dzerh

    Dzerh Friend

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    sorry, quoting you here :)
    To the best of my knowledge this is quite impossible with "USB Audio" - as soon as data presented to USB driver packets can be delayed or lost, but not altered. So you may hear that the stream is some how modulated by the computer load but it will be different from the noise described by @kixx.
     
  12. Armaegis

    Armaegis Friend

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    Yeah, again, my memory on this is sketchy at best, but I recall reading somewhere that it had something to do with data buffering, and the conflicting signals generated from a moving mouse wound up injecting repeating clicks into the audio stream. Maybe I was just reading some other guy's theory, I dunno, but I've had similar issues in the past.
     
  13. Gruss Gott

    Gruss Gott Almost "Made"

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    all of this - whenever I use my pc for audio I shut down all other apps, disconnect everything but the eitr, etc.

    When I first got my Jot/Modi Multibit I had all kinds of noise issues from the DAC, amp, etc (same with my mojo), most of which are likely because I live in a major downtown, in a giant condo building, where I can pick up 25 wi-fi signals and 100 BT devices on any given day. (not to mention in the center of silicon valley so who the feck knows what kind of EMI shiz is going on around here)

    I had to take some steps to eliminate a ground loop, used a different wall circuit, etc. that fixed my ground loop and most of my amp hum (like when i touched the volume knob). Then I replaced the amp power cord and got some audioquest golden gate rcas which eliminated the rest of the amp-side hum. Then started some USB hygiene, got an eitr, and then a good USB cable. That brought me down to silencio.

    No vendor can design for every environment and config a customer is going to try, and no piece of electronics is going to work every time, equally, everywhere.

    Anybody remember rabbit ear antennas? For some reason, as a kid, if I hung the curtains over the curtain rod (really pissed off my mom), we'd get primo reception, but that probably wouldn't have worked at your house ... back in them thar days we didn't j'accuse snake oil, we just shrugged and enjoyed the show.

    No better engineering school than growing up poor!
     
    Last edited: Oct 8, 2018
  14. Armaegis

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    Latency is another common gremlin that people don't think to check on. The two most common tools for diagnosing that are DPC Latency Check and Resplendence Latencymon.
     
  15. Baten

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    Is latency really that important just for music consumption though?
     
  16. kixx

    kixx Acquaintance

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    For music playback not really (no more that 20ms is ok-ish), but for movies or games you wouldn't want the sound lagging behind the picture. Even 0.3 seconds can be nasty in a movie. It's like english dub on a japanese movie.
     
  17. Baten

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    I've honestly never experienced this latency unless the sync was botched in the source video :)
     
  18. Taverius

    Taverius Smells like sausages

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    I bought a startech USB card and the Yggdrasil has that as a dedicated output.

    Not as good as an AES out, possibly, but an order of magnitude cheaper.
     
  19. Thad E Ginathom

    Thad E Ginathom Friend

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    All you did was shift your USB to a different place on the bus. Trying different USB sockets is the first way of doing this. Adding sockets just give you more to try. It will be USB 3 if what it is plugged into on the mother board is, otherwise not.

    My theory: It's not so much the mouse, as the graphics of the mouse pointer moving across the screen. It's a matter of priorities: computer/OS designers think that the display should be high, or even top, of that list.

    Over the top unless you have a mal-adjusted PC! But hey, if it works for you, enjoy.

    That particularly applies to DPC latency. I'm glad to say that I don't remember the details, but been there and sufferred that. This will produce major clicks and dropouts. No subtle differences, but an unusable machine/

    That kind of latency isn't, no. It doesn't matter a jot unless you literally have to wait after pushing the play or pause button!

    The kind of latency that doesn't matter. Unless one belongs to the Church of Computer Audiophile, where they probably think that a few milliseconds inside the computer is poisoning their music!

    The kind of latency that matters is the kind where one process in your machine has to stop and wait for another process. This goes on all the time: the PC is absolutely not designed as a real-time machine, whereas music is obviously a real-time thing.

    I am absolutely not a PC internals buff, but I was forced to get into this sort of stuff around a decade ago. I can't go further into the mechanics, but the words to google are interupts and latency. Get into that stuff if you enjoy, but better to find a USB port that works without problem. They are certainly not made equal! The fight with DPC latency, if you are that unlucky, might even end up with buying a new machine.

    My "solution:"

    I really don't know what the state of Windows is these days. Think back in history: it used to be necessary to tweak it to play music fluently and reliably. Computer Audiophile began with the practicalities of those days before it turned to religion and madness. Playing audio on a supercomputer is not much stress; it is not difficult, for man or machine. Even our phones are supercomputers compared to the PCs of twenty years ago. The will multi-task without sweat. But, occasionally, a tweak is needed to stop one task interfering with another.

    Today, I'd say (unless Windows actually did get really really good!) move to a different operating system, and use of a version of it that has been optimised for audio. For me, that became, way back then, Linux and KXStudio. Whilst KXStudio is made for music makers and comes with (the option of) a heap of music-making software, there are distros for just-listeners. Somebody else will have done the the work of sorting out the stuff so that you can move or mouse across the screen whilst listening to un-crackled sound.
     
  20. kixx

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    I did indeed solve the problem on a different usb port, but the funny part is that i ran out of usb ports to try to fix the issue. I had to find a usb backplate add-on to fix the issue, and i've been lucky i had that lying about from an older pc.

    And yes, windows still needs a bit of tweaking for the best playback. There are options you need to configure, and you also need to stop windows shutting down usb hubs to save energy. I found my dacs popping and clicking after a 15 minutes pause ... turned out to be an energy saving option that is by default set to "on". Gah!
     

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