Why do my headphones buzz when I run my game?

Good story, though.

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?

Thankfully doesn't happen with an external DAC.

> 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

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.

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.

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).

That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate further?

What am I missing?

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. (=

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.

Example https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/b...

> 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.

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.

It works fine in some ports, it has a lot of background noise in others.

I've been curious if this is some form of browser fingerprinting or just crappy speakers.