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Why are my headphones buzzing whenever I run my game?

226 points| pacificat0r | 3 months ago |alexene.dev

142 comments

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Night_Thastus|2 months ago

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 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.

brigade|2 months ago

Well the OP’s electrical noise almost certainly is coming through the USB connection as their DAC has no external power supply. Extremely common.

Your problem of an AC power supply not sufficiently filtering out high-frequency noise from mains is exceptionally rare to the point that yes, I also don’t believe that was the correct diagnosis of your issue.

monster_truck|2 months ago

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.

bob1029|2 months ago

> 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.

Lifting the ground on my studio monitors absolutely fixed my noise problems. I run them off a MiniDSP 2x4HD, so other sources like EMI aren't really a factor.

The problem I have with a double conversion UPS is that it isn't an ideal sinusoidal source. It implies it is on the tin, but when you've got protected loads with PWM power delivery slamming around 1+ kilowatts, there's no way to guarantee a smooth waveform with a typical ~2500VA unit. Directly passing through to the grid could provide cleaner power under the most transient conditions.

bjoli|2 months ago

Reminds me of my friend who has bought a shit load of 1.5v AA lithium batteries. The buck converters in those little bastards wreak havoc with every speaker around. His TV remote disconnects my Bluetooth headphones every time.

Yeask|2 months ago

No need for UPS, a good external usb soundcard with power supply will solve that problem.

I have all connected to the the same power circuit and with a Elektron Digitakt as audio device and have zero noise.

With audio devices powered by USB there is a lot of noise.

mainde|2 months ago

When I upgraded my PC to the same CPU, I had the same problem of crackling/buzzing speakers on my USB DAC (externally powered, but from the same strip/outlet) when the system was under load.

I had a hunch it was power related because my PSU was nearly 10 years old and probably with just barely enough wattage. I bought a new one and all the buzzing went away.

IIRC when I was researching possible causes, beefy Ryzen CPUs were the most commonly mentioned in various forums and reddit threads.

voldacar|2 months ago

You could also chuck a bunch of ferrites on your PC power cord

raxxorraxor|2 months ago

It depends some setups generate noise when you move a cabled mouse with a high resolution. I never measured it, but I would assume it is because of the high frequency signals of the mouse generates if it is actively used.

In that case more isolated cables and connections would probably help.

ThePowerOfFuet|2 months ago

>the problem was EMI from the computer making it into the equipment

Do you have a PC case with a huge window? They (used to?) have grounded metal housings with only tiny openings for a reason.

terribleperson|2 months ago

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

Did you try replacing the PSU?

TacticalCoder|2 months ago

> 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.

bluedino|2 months ago

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.

PunchyHamster|2 months ago

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

distances|2 months ago

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!

kace91|2 months ago

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.

bogwog|2 months ago

Maybe I have sensitive hearing, but I encounter this frequently on machines from all manufacturers. It is very much still a problem today.

taneq|2 months ago

Yep, my 2019ish Dell XPS 13 makes hissy static noises on its speakers, even when system audio is muted.

I remember the BBC Micro doing the same thing when I was a little kid during certain operations, it always sounded to me like it was "thinking". :)

gwbas1c|2 months ago

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.

tecleandor|2 months ago

Happens to my Lenovo X390, specially with disks writes...

azraellzanella|2 months ago

I get this on my MacBook M1, I "hear" some websites "static"

0xc0ff338|2 months ago

I get fairly audiable coil whine when scrolling websites.

diath|2 months ago

> 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 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?

pacificat0r|2 months ago

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).

rcxdude|2 months ago

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.

matja|2 months ago

A point in screen space is a line in world space after inverse camera projection, so this way you get the line-to-closest-geometry test in O(1), after the overhead of needing to render the lookup texture first.

PunchyHamster|2 months ago

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

TazeTSchnitzel|2 months ago

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 analogue devices. Power supplies and power conditioners are messy analogue devices. And noise is not down to any one component, but is a whole-system design problem. A particularly cool thing about power supplies is that they often create noise that will be picked up by other devices on the same circuit.

Of course, when people are buying a “DAC” they are really buying a box of some kind that also includes an amplifier, but this naming choice surely contributes to people paying attention to the wrong specs.

pier25|2 months ago

> 100-1000x lower than any transducer

This seems like a lot but it's only 20-30db lower than whatever reference they're using.

This is the spec that really matters: THD+N: 0.0003% which is roughly -110 dB. It's very good and completely inaudible but not exceptional these days.

kevindamm|2 months ago

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.

PunchyHamster|2 months ago

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

jraph|2 months ago

That might be the strongest spacebar heating workflow situation I've actually run into so far

https://xkcd.com/1172

klamann|2 months ago

I'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!

dbg31415|2 months ago

I hit a similar issue on my MacBook Pro. Whenever I watched YouTube or streamed Spotify while playing a game, the audio broke into little "clipping chirps" and static.

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. (=

lnx01|2 months ago

25 years ago my 3.5mm jack headphones would buzz whenever I moved the mouse... Bzzzzzzzzz,tk, tk, tk ,tk, bzzzzzzz, tk, tk, tk, tk, tk....

LM358|2 months ago

Not at all surprised to see that it's a Schiit DAC causing this problem

ge96|2 months ago

That's funny it's actually named Schiit I thought that was a joke

ShipEveryWeek|2 months ago

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

tristor|2 months ago

Schiit Audio makes great stuff, I've been using it for years and have other gear as well to compare to. I think it's good for what it is, although their pricing has gone a bit out of control lately. The problem here is not the maker of the DAC, it's that it's bus powered over USB, which is a problem regardless of who makes it.

Fire-Dragon-DoL|2 months ago

I'm not sure if you are joking around the sound of the brand name, or complaining about the actual brand

fbd_0100|2 months ago

why do you say that? I used a Schiit Bifrost for many years without issue

nickdichev|2 months ago

Why is that? I’ve generally only seen positive feedback on their stuff

kg|2 months ago

Great write-up. This is basically spam but I want to specifically thank the author for pointing out their solution, because it's directly applicable to one of my own projects and I'm going to do it tonight!

> 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.

asimovDev|2 months ago

I 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 external DAC.

embedding-shape|2 months ago

> 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.

tristor|2 months ago

Which is why I consistently have told people to ensure that they pick a DAC which is powered independently if they intend to connect it via USB. Schitt Audio makes great stuff (it's what I have sitting on my desk right now) which is designed in that way, but there's no magic formula to beat physics when you physically power an audio device over a connection that is vulnerable to induced noise.

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).

Garvi|2 months ago

That'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.

PunchyHamster|2 months ago

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

ericbarrett|2 months ago

I have a Modi DAC I've used for years with several different gaming and development rigs and I've never had a problem like this. Sounds like a failing component, maybe a capacitor or regulator—the article author should contact Schiit.

thenthenthen|2 months ago

Moving my cursor makes an audible sound over my (builtin) audio card. I always blamed inductors somewhere (noisy power). This has never not been the case with any desktop with built-in audio I have owned over the past 25+ years

distances|2 months ago

For your next desktop, get a motherboard with an optical audio output. Or add a soundcard with that for your current computer, those are still made.

bitbasher|2 months ago

Not sure if it's related-- but anyone else get a buzz or pop in their headphone/spear when loading certain web pages?

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

LUmBULtERA|2 months ago

Since switching to the $10ish Apple USB-C to headphone adapter vs. just plugging in my 3.5mm headset into the computer, the buzzing when gaming completely stopped for me. Cheap solution.

spiritplumber|2 months ago

I had this problem on my Oculus Rift box (remember those? it still runs beat saber just fine) and the solution was to solder some beefy capacitors on the end of unused power cables coming out of the power supply. If I recall correctly it was the 12V line that did it, which I didn't expect.

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.

glitchc|2 months ago

Reading through your post, it's likely the noise sourced from the network cable is coupling into your headset cable. Check how close those cables are to each other If you're using a USB port at the back for your DAC, try switching it to the front. The noise can also come from the power supply which couples into the motherboard's ground plane and shows up on all USB ports.

vardump|2 months ago

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.

rasz|2 months ago

Majority of sound cards up to late nineties used dual layer PCBs with terrible grounding strategies so even the ones bothering to condition power for analog section still audibly picked up interrupts, DMA transfers and CPU load.

pfcd|2 months ago

> I am working on an isometric game inspired from Gnomoria, RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, etc.

That sounds interesting. Could you elaborate further?

atoav|2 months ago

Still a very common problem today and (aside from the need for more output channels or the need for professional mic preamps) the main reason people get USB audio interfaces.

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.

SpaceManNabs|2 months ago

I am a bit confused. Based on the earlier paragraphs, it hinted that the solution would be related to the frequency of the job, not necessarily its load (since other games do not have this issue), but then the fix was not changing the frequency but the load of the job.

What am I missing?

vanschelven|2 months ago

There's a certain cinematic quality to this story... perhaps so much so that if it were to be included in an actual movie it would be seen as "too over the top" (i.e. CSI-like)

digitalsushi|2 months ago

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

ivanjermakov|2 months ago

Two prong apple charger is mind boggling to me. I can feel 50Hz static when gently touching the laptop. Problem goes away when grounded properly.

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...

amatecha|2 months ago

Oddly I can't access the site. The URL is 301-redirecting to itself in an infinite loop (which the browser finally stops and shows an error page).

hlynurd|2 months ago

I have this weird thing whenever I have headphones and open the Dota2 settings on my Mac, then I not only get buzzing but the overall sound quality plummets!

DefineOutside|2 months ago

Bluetooth headphones? the settings menu could be using the microphone somehow and switching to mono audio because bluetooth is low bandwidth

ptrl600|2 months ago

I had a laptop in the mid 00s which made a strange buzzing sound when scrolling a document in Adobe Reader, and in no other context.

nottorp|2 months ago

I have an usb "audio card" for other reasons (since my hackintoshing days).

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

Popeyes|2 months ago

I was going to say get a DAC, but they already had one in their setup.

FinnKuhn|2 months ago

The DAC is what is causing this issue for me sometimes - unplugging and pluggin it back in solves it though.

phaser|2 months ago

Your game looks super interesting! Very looking forward to playing :D

Lapsa|2 months ago

#yolo unground that thing

jofzar|2 months ago

> 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.

s5300|2 months ago

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