Not at all surprised to see that it's a Schiit DAC causing this problem
That's funny it's actually named Schiit I thought that was a joke
Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
21–30 of 153 posts
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#22I have a similar issue with Genshin on PS5 when using the headphone jack in the controller with IEMs (didn't happen with a headset). It starts buzzing in my left ear when I open the game menu or open the map. On the map it only buzzes when I move the cursor, interestingly enough. I later noticed that the PSU coil whine coincided with the same events. Still no idea why it's like that Thankfully doesn't happen with an…
> On the map it only buzzes when I move the cursor, interestingly enough
Sounds like the game is doing more when the cursor moves around, they're probably checking for where the cursor is, and something is making the CPU/GPU do a bunch of extra work, which finally triggers the coil whine when the PSU is more heavily used.
I've basically had the same issue with Nvidia cards since the 2080ti started doing coil whine as soon as I opened Unreal Engine. Some programs trigger different sounds, depending on how much/well they use the GPU, and I've had the literal same experience with "hovering with my mouse over element X triggers coil whine" multiple times before.
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#23I 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.
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#24Not at all surprised to see that it's a Schiit DAC causing this problem
What’s with the animosity towards Schiit? They seem to make decent products. Noise from using USB power delivery for audio devices is common.. that’s why you can (and should) use the dedicated power input to you DAC/amp
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Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#25It'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
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#26I 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.
Pretty common problem on builtin sound cards, even now. It's just very close to the noise source.
Shouldn't really happen on USB DAC, it should have enough filtering to get any interference injected by power, and enough shielding (and just being far away enough from machine) for other EMI
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#27The 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
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#28> 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…
It aligns with what appears on the screen accurately and without needing any extra work to make sure there's a representation in a tree that's pixel-accurate. It's also pretty low overhead with the way modern GPU rendering works.
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?
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#29That's a common problem. It's electrical noise in your signal. The only way I know how to completely eliminate it is using external DA/AD converters and connecting them to the PC using optical wires. We used MADI cards back in the studio back in the day.
you can do a lot with just good power filtering and maybe a ferrule on the USB cable to cut the high frequency stuff before it even gets to device. I'd imagine powered USB hub might help too.
I wonder if there is a market for motherboard targetting musicians that just have extra power filtering on USB power.
There are also just USB devices that have just plugs + some LC filter that might help, for example https://oshwlab.com/wagiminator/usb-power-filter
Re: Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?
#30I've been using optical connections for audio on my gaming PCs for decades now, exactly for this reason. Though wireless headphones will work just as well these days. Too many game developers mess this up (e.g. by having no frame limiter in the game menu) and many of them never fix these kinds of issues. Thanks for caring and fixing this in your game!