I had to put a new psu in a machine over the Christmas, and now notice the
bog standard Soundblaster live card seems to be outputting a kind of
gurgling whine which varies and kind of sounds likt e sort of low level
interference you get on some weaker fm stations.
I guess the crud removal in the psu is crap, but the thing is,does anyone
do a kind of gadget you can plug the motherboard power plug into, and get
cleaner power out for the board. after all nothing else has changed, so it
has to be on the power line to the analogue bits of the card.

Brian

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"Brian Gaff" wrote in message
om...

but the thing is,does anyone do a kind of gadget you can plug the
motherboard power plug into, and get cleaner power out for the board.
after all nothing else has changed, so it has to be on the power line to
the analogue bits of the card.


I've never heard of such a thing, and very much doubt that that such a thing
is made.

David.

In article , Brian Gaff
wrote:
I had to put a new psu in a machine over the Christmas, and now notice
the bog standard Soundblaster live card seems to be outputting a kind of
gurgling whine which varies and kind of sounds likt e sort of low level
interference you get on some weaker fm stations. I guess the crud
removal in the psu is crap, but the thing is,does anyone do a kind of
gadget you can plug the motherboard power plug into, and get cleaner
power out for the board. after all nothing else has changed, so it has
to be on the power line to the analogue bits of the card.

Why not simply change to an outboard DAC like the DACMagic? That works very
well in my experience.

BTW It does not *have* to just conducted by the power line. Could be
radiated or EM coupled.

FWIW Personally I avoid using any analogue stages inside a computer as they
generally aren't designed to provide a suitable environment. Instead I
either take out optical SPDIF or USB (as for the DACMagic). Of these
optical is probably best if you have a serious interference problem, but
USB works nicely in the cases I've tried with the DACMagic.

Slainte,

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

Hmm, that is an idea. Also of course one could leave the screenreader on the
internal card, and only have the audio you want through the drivers to the
new external card.

Hmmm
Brian

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graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
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"Jim Lesurf" wrote in message
...
In article , Brian Gaff
wrote:
I had to put a new psu in a machine over the Christmas, and now notice
the bog standard Soundblaster live card seems to be outputting a kind of
gurgling whine which varies and kind of sounds likt e sort of low level
interference you get on some weaker fm stations. I guess the crud
removal in the psu is crap, but the thing is,does anyone do a kind of
gadget you can plug the motherboard power plug into, and get cleaner
power out for the board. after all nothing else has changed, so it has
to be on the power line to the analogue bits of the card.

Why not simply change to an outboard DAC like the DACMagic? That works
very
well in my experience.

BTW It does not *have* to just conducted by the power line. Could be
radiated or EM coupled.

FWIW Personally I avoid using any analogue stages inside a computer as
they
generally aren't designed to provide a suitable environment. Instead I
either take out optical SPDIF or USB (as for the DACMagic). Of these
optical is probably best if you have a serious interference problem, but
USB works nicely in the cases I've tried with the DACMagic.

Slainte,

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics
http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

Le 11/01/2010 10:55, Jim Lesurf a écrit :


Why not simply change to an outboard DAC like the DACMagic? That works very
well in my experience.

BTW It does not *have* to just conducted by the power line. Could be
radiated or EM coupled.

FWIW Personally I avoid using any analogue stages inside a computer as they
generally aren't designed to provide a suitable environment. Instead I
either take out optical SPDIF or USB (as for the DACMagic). Of these
optical is probably best if you have a serious interference problem, but
USB works nicely in the cases I've tried with the DACMagic.

Slainte,

Jim


I tried plugging my Acer Aspire One 751H nettop into a dacmagic via the
usb connection using foobar & asio4all.
The sound was absolutely vile!
It sounded like a gurgling 78rpm played on a distant AM radio.
Am I doing something wrong I ask myself?

:-)

--
Froggy


"Les cons ça ose tout, c'est même à ça qu'on les reconnaît."

Michel Audiard, "Les Tontons Flingueurs" (1963)

In article , froggy
wrote:
Le 11/01/2010 10:55, Jim Lesurf a écrit :


Why not simply change to an outboard DAC like the DACMagic? That works
very well in my experience.


I tried plugging my Acer Aspire One 751H nettop into a dacmagic via the
usb connection using foobar & asio4all. The sound was absolutely vile!
It sounded like a gurgling 78rpm played on a distant AM radio. Am I
doing something wrong I ask myself?

Maybe you were listening to a net radio station of someone playing a 78.
:-) Can't tell as you don't say what source material you were using.

However you may need to check that the data is being sent reliably via USB.

With my ancient laptop I had to tweak some of the ALSA and Pulse settings
to avoid occasional breaks. But not had to do that with my new laptop.
However if you are using Windows I can't comment on any software tweaks.

FWIW It works well here from a Shuttle using Ubuntu. Details on the
audiomisc website.

I don't use the DACmagic via usb with my fairly new Acer 5738Z as that
works nicely via its optical spdif output using Xubuntu.

BTW For both the above I have a 60GB SSD fitted as the HD.

Slainte,

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

Le 12/01/2010 10:52, Jim Lesurf a écrit :
In article , froggy
wrote:
Le 11/01/2010 10:55, Jim Lesurf a écrit :


Why not simply change to an outboard DAC like the DACMagic? That works
very well in my experience.


I tried plugging my Acer Aspire One 751H nettop into a dacmagic via the
usb connection using foobar & asio4all. The sound was absolutely vile!
It sounded like a gurgling 78rpm played on a distant AM radio. Am I
doing something wrong I ask myself?

Maybe you were listening to a net radio station of someone playing a 78.
:-) Can't tell as you don't say what source material you were using.

However you may need to check that the data is being sent reliably via USB.

With my ancient laptop I had to tweak some of the ALSA and Pulse settings
to avoid occasional breaks. But not had to do that with my new laptop.
However if you are using Windows I can't comment on any software tweaks.

FWIW It works well here from a Shuttle using Ubuntu. Details on the
audiomisc website.

I don't use the DACmagic via usb with my fairly new Acer 5738Z as that
works nicely via its optical spdif output using Xubuntu.

BTW For both the above I have a 60GB SSD fitted as the HD.

Slainte,

Jim


Thanks for your insight Jim.

I was listening to both flac and wav files ripped from CDs.
OS is Win XP3.
I wondered if Windows was corrupting the sound in anyway so I installed
Mandriva 2010 on a sdhc card, plugged it into the card reader and
restarted the computer on the card.
The problem persisted even under Linux (using Amarok and Rhythmbox)
I'm wondering if it isn't a hardware related problem.
Unfortunately there is no spdif output on the Aspire One 751H to fall
back on.....

Cheers.

--
Froggy


"Les cons ça ose tout, c'est même à ça qu'on les reconnaît."

Michel Audiard, "Les Tontons Flingueurs" (1963)

In article , froggy
wrote:
Le 12/01/2010 10:52, Jim Lesurf a écrit :
In article , froggy
[snips]

FWIW It works well here from a Shuttle using Ubuntu. Details on the
audiomisc website.

Thanks for your insight Jim.

I was listening to both flac and wav files ripped from CDs. OS is Win
XP3. I wondered if Windows was corrupting the sound in anyway so I
installed Mandriva 2010 on a sdhc card, plugged it into the card reader
and restarted the computer on the card. The problem persisted even under
Linux (using Amarok and Rhythmbox) I'm wondering if it isn't a hardware
related problem. Unfortunately there is no spdif output on the Aspire
One 751H to fall back on.....

One of the main things I insisted on when buying a new laptop was that it
had an optical output. Cost more to do so, but it does now work nicely and
gives bit perfect results at 44k.

Can't comment on Madriva 2010 as I've not tried it. Problem here is how
ALSA and/or Pulse are supplied by default and the details of any kernel
modules, etc.

However experiments with Ubuntu/Xubuntu make me think the critical thing
here is the specific settings for ALSA and/or Pulse.

There are some config settings for ALSA IIRC that set things like the size
of batches of data to send to the sound stream sink. Similarly, for Pulse.
This may matter for USB. At one point I did get occasional glitches and I
think I changed the batch details. But I can't now recall the details.

Unfortunately, soundcards can be a PITA because the producers often seem to
just do something that they think works 'OK' with the current Windows, even
if the result is rubbish in audio terms. So you may have a card where
no-one in the Linux community has been able to guess or reverse engineer
how to get it to co-operate.

Also you may find you are stuck with 'the wrong sample rate' with the
internal card as they just presumed that the OS would do a crude conversion
for you.

I think it likely that if you used Ubuntu 9.04 and setup Pulse as mentioned
on one of my webpages you would be able to get the DACMagic to work. But
I'm afraid I can't be 100 percent certain of that! And it can take some
furtling about as I know from experience! :-/

Should also mention that I think the situation has changed with Ubuntu
9.10, and I've not bothered to change to that as yet, so can't comment. May
be easier, may be harder. However Pulse should 'see' the USB DAC and let
you set it as the sound sink, then be able to 'see' any source you play and
direct that to the sink.

if you haven't already seen them, have a look at

http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Linux/Sou...Computing.html

http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Linux/Sou...stenAgain.html

The second one also has a link at the bottom to one of the useful pages for
settings up Ubuntu 9.04 so that it used Pulse nicely to feed the DACMagic.
There may be some other problem with your hardware, but that worked for me
OK.

Slainte,

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 08:49:12 GMT, "Brian Gaff"
wrote:

I had to put a new psu in a machine over the Christmas, and now notice the
bog standard Soundblaster live card seems to be outputting a kind of
gurgling whine which varies and kind of sounds likt e sort of low level
interference you get on some weaker fm stations.
I guess the crud removal in the psu is crap, but the thing is,does anyone
do a kind of gadget you can plug the motherboard power plug into, and get
cleaner power out for the board. after all nothing else has changed, so it
has to be on the power line to the analogue bits of the card.

Try a different power supply. They're cheap enough, or you could
borrow one from another computer. If it sounds better, try to get a
refund on the noisy unit.

But before you do that, check the ground connection on the mains power
cable.

Already done the ground thing, indeed, I have too good an earth and had to
be very careful with cable length to stop earth loop problems with
connected gear.

Well, the psu is not actually new, spare would have been a better term..
However it seems robust enough, but the fact the previous dead supply did
not have this does point to some of the switching artifacts getting into the
computer.

Brian

--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________


"Laurence Payne" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 11 Jan 2010 08:49:12 GMT, "Brian Gaff"
wrote:

I had to put a new psu in a machine over the Christmas, and now notice the
bog standard Soundblaster live card seems to be outputting a kind of
gurgling whine which varies and kind of sounds likt e sort of low level
interference you get on some weaker fm stations.
I guess the crud removal in the psu is crap, but the thing is,does anyone
do a kind of gadget you can plug the motherboard power plug into, and get
cleaner power out for the board. after all nothing else has changed, so
it
has to be on the power line to the analogue bits of the card.

Try a different power supply. They're cheap enough, or you could
borrow one from another computer. If it sounds better, try to get a
refund on the noisy unit.

But before you do that, check the ground connection on the mains power
cable.