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Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

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Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#101

Post by Night_Thastus »

butvacuum wrote: post #85
Night_Thastus wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got rid of the noise via the method I described in the original comment? Moving my audio equipment to separate power strip on a separate outlet. It didn't totally remove it, but made it quiet enough to deal with.

Don't mind them. I've had a similar thing happen, but with power line Ethernet. In your case however, I'd be at least a little concerned about the building wiring.

I ran into a similar problem! I briefly used CAT6, which is required to be shielded.

That shielding was carrying noise from my PC, through the network switch, to my raspberry pi that I used for music streaming. Absolutely nuts.

I swapped to unshielded ethernet cables and it went away.

As for building wiring, this issue has persisted in multiple buildings.

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#102

Post by adrianmonk »

distances wrote: post #76
bluedino wrote: post #23

I 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.

Quite 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!

I wish Mini-TOSLINK[1] had been more successful. It's allows you to put an optical and electrical audio output on the same 3.5mm connector (i.e. headphone port), which is helpful for saving space on crowded panels.

The trick is that your 3.5mm connector only needs to connect on the sides, so the end of the jack can be open for light to be transmitted.

This was seen pretty frequently on laptops for a while, but I think two things doomed it. One, most people just don't use optical. Two, there's nothing to advertise its existence. If you do have one of these ports, you probably don't even know you could plug an optical connector in there.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK#Mini-TOSLINK

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#104

Post by jofzar »

> 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-m...

Here's an article about it at the time but tldr update your chipset+motherboard drivers.

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#105

Post by 0xc0ff338 »

bluedino wrote: post #23

I 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.

I get fairly audiable coil whine when scrolling websites.

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#106

Post by TacticalCoder »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #42

I 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 i…

> It seemed almost inconceivable to them that the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment.

I very much doubt that because audiophiles worries about a lot about both RFI, EMI and unwanted vibrations (I had one where I could hear a very faint metallic noise and it took me weeks to find the cause: a loose screw in the system ceiling a times vibrating a bit, depending on the song / passage in the song / frequencies and slightly touching a metal stud: horrible to diagnose but eventually I found it). For a start.

If you go on audiophile gear shops, you'll find power supply that, supposedly, prevent EMI.

Are RFI issues much more common? Sure. I had one in a previous place where I lived where simply lifting the speakers cable of the wooden floor would remove unwanted sounds: some kind of radio or TV program my cables would pick up. Then suddenly I stopped making fun of people lifting their speakers cable of the ground (but I'll still make fun of those paying $100 per little piece to lift their cables then buying 50 of these).

That said your comment is very interesting. But it also shows that, suddenly, power strips (or others) that try to deal with EMI, balanced cables (between various piece of audio gear), lifting $20 speakers cables off the ground, etc. don't look as idiotic as many make sound (ah ah). EMI, RFI and unwanted vibrations are a thing and they do ruin the listening experience.

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#107

Post by terribleperson »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #42

I 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 i…

So in your situation, noise from your PC was showing up in other equipment on the same circuit.

Did you try replacing the PSU?

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#108

Post by ZeWaka »

PunchyHamster wrote: post #27
kevindamm wrote: post #6

The 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.

Just 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

Honestly, would be a sick mod for the upcoming configurable Steam Machine front face.

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#109

Post by ZeWaka »

pacificat0r wrote: post #18
diath wrote: post #10

> 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 po…

Well, it's significantly easier to implement than a octree. Game is actually 3D under the hood, projected at a careful angle to look isometric 2D. The reason the game is 3D has to do with partially visible things being way easier than with isometric textures layered in the right order. Also, now that i just grab a pixel back from the GPU, it's no overhead at all (to construct or get the data for it).

I assume for the picking system you're rendering each entity/block as a different color (internally) and getting the pixel color under the mouse cursor?

Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

#110

Post by actionfromafar »

LM358 wrote: post #54
Gracana wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're a bit handy, you can assemble a line filter using a part like this https://enerdoor.com/products/fin27/ for a heck of a lot cheaper than you can buy a filtered power strip. You may also be able to solve the problem with a simple common mode choke, either the clip-on type, or a toroid that you wrap the cable through a couple-few times. https://palomar-engineers.com/rfi-kits/acdc-power-line-choke...

A filter like that will have very little attenuation in the audio spectrum. I agree however that indiscriminately throwing ferrites at problems can be a good solution!

Ferrites - almost never doing any harm, sometimes doing good. :-)
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