111–120 of 153 posts
These effects used to be much worse in the nineties, often even if you had a fancy sound card. Electrical noise is significantly reduced now.
It'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
The 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…
I then proceeded to investigate that by using REW to produce measurements of each output and the findings confirmed my hearing, the motherboard audio was outputting 5db less, plus a noise floor 15 db higher than the x-fi, resulting in 20db of extra noise (When you compensate with 5db extra at the amp). The resulting frequency response also revealed a much more aggressive high pass filter, I was actually getting another -3db@30hz compared to the x-fi confirming where the lack of "punchiness" was coming from. And then the cherry on the top was that all the extra channeles (surrdound/sub/center) had an even more aggressive highpass filter, they cheapened out on the cheapening out, probably assuming you are not gonna use more than stereo.
Here is the graph, red is x-fi outs and green is motherboard outs: https://i.imgur.com/dxoLXJO.png
Obviously this is just my anecdote, but I suspect this is very widespread.
EDIT: Oh and I haven't even talked about the line-ins! It's pretty much unusable in ALL motherboard audio I've cared to try. There is some insane noise gating and AGC going on to try and mask the fact that they use some really low bit depth ADCs with terrible dynamic range. Meanwhile I can capture pristine audio from my n64 into the x-fi no problem.
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 can hear when my Dell laptop uses the flash drive heavily. It sounds kind of like a hard drive, so I actually had to verify that I have a flash chip. Apparently it's a known issue; I've assumed that something in it vibrates due to EMF.
If power lines run anywhere near the sound lines, you are just asking to pick up interference whenever the computer does basically anything. It doesn't take too much of a pulse to be picked up. For a 3.5 jack, the voltage is anywhere from 0.002 to 0.5V. Even a pretty small induced voltage will be audible.
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 hear my second hand dell XPS laptop running fedora when I scroll through dropdown lists. It sounds exactly like the reads on a physical hdd, which is silly because it has an SSD. Haven’t figured out what it is yet.
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.
That might be the strongest spacebar heating workflow situation I've actually run into so far https://xkcd.com/1172
anyone 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
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/tinglin...
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What 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?
Entities 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.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 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…
I agree that you can have cheap and great DACs nowadays that far exceeds what a consumer needs but some manufacturers still insists in putting less than ideal ones, or fumbling their implementation, in all sorts of device. I've got a computer with a fairly recent motherboard that I'm using for an htpc and the audio output is much noisier and produced a less punchy bass than the now 20 year old (!) X-fi sound card I'v…
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Pure 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.
It'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.
Definitely had various computer equipment plugged in to ours and it was great (I didn't specically test for EMI).
