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Comment by mmastrac | Hacker News Reader

USB killed it. Keep your signal digital until you hit the speakers (or a short audio cable). No interference, 44.1kHz from end-to-end (or more).

If you don't like the DAC in the headphones, you can also find a high-quality USB DAC and use the audio cable from there.

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> you can also find a high-quality USB DAC

For anyone curious, check out Schiit Audio. I have the Magnius/Modius paired with Sennheiser HD660s headphones and I couldn't be happier. JDS Labs Atom is also a good choice.

> No interference

This has not been my experience at all. For my 5" powered studio monitors, the _only_ way to get a interference-free signal from my desktop computer was with an optical cable to an external DAC.

That's probably a grounding problem, and was probably just coincidentally broken since optical cables don't carry electrical signals, and hence can't be a part of ground loops.

Can't go wrong with optical cables for this reason - they're foolproof against interference. That's why I'll always use them when possible.

You're giving me flashbacks to the stupid amount of time it took for me to identify a coil whine issue on my motherboard that gets worse when the CPU is in power saving mode.

I 'worked around' the issue for the longest time by leaving covid based processing going on folding@home, which would force my CPU into turbo mode.

Eventually I found out that if I disabled cstates, it mostly went away.

Hot glue on the coil should shut it up

You may have a ground loop and that needs to be fixed

Can you please tell me what optical cable you used? Struggled with this issue for years and if an optical cable somewhere in the chain can fix my problem i'd love to buy one.

there's basically only one kind of optical cable used in consumer audio (S/PDIF+TOSLINK, or however you want to refer to it). the trick is to arranging for both ends to use it.

GP probably has a sound card with optical output and speakers with optical input. This is usually called Toslink or SP/DIF (the latter may refer to a coax link - wired so won't help with ground loops).

The fiber is standard and you don't need any fancy Monster fiber costing $100 a foot.

As others replied, you may have grounding problems, that is, either the lack of grounding or too much of it (ground loop). An effective way to solve the problem is to isolate the signal by putting an audio transformer in between the outputs and the amplifier (or amplified speakers), one for each output. I've done this for desktops and laptops and it brought the noises to zero. Just make sure the transformers are of decent quality and suitable for audio.

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