the damned 'high-pitch' sound..

E

EugeneS

New member
hello all,

I know there are a lot of talkings about this 'high-pitch sound' from speakers, but this is kinda more personal.

so, I have a new pair of Yamaha H80 with a M-Audio Mobile Pre MKII soundcard, these plugged into a new powerful desktop PC.
About the noise.. it's a subtle and static 'beep' sound everytime I enter my DAW, or I open (AIMP3) for listening to music. The sound continues utill I quit the DAW or AIMP. Also, when browsing the folders of the HDD (e.g. Music(D:)/Experimental/ etc. etc) for each new folder a short BEEP sound.



card drivers: I've tried different versions of my soundcard drivers; even tried with asio4all and the same problem. So, it's not the drivers.
Tried again to plug the card into my laptop with the speakers in the same place, and everything is fine! NO BEEP SOUNDS OCCUR!

USB ports: unplugged everything; tried on different ports - no success.
card setup is the same for desktop and laptop, but with laptop it works fine.
Latency Checker shows green.
another thing: I have headphones out of my soundcard (Beyerdynamic DT 770) and they sound fine.
Ground loop? as far as I know my house is ground-looped.

I actually had this issue a month ago, and I found on the web a similar problem, which was fixed by using balanced cables, rather than unbalanced. At that time I had unbalanced cables and I thought by just buying new cables I will solve the issue, but today I tried with new balanced cables and the BEEP is still there.


have you guys any ideas? I'm so damn tired of these gear issues..

 
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if your house is ground looped then you have a problem as you have multiple pathways to ground (this is the meaning of a ground loop)

as for the rest:

soundcard on it's own power or drawing from the pc? usb buss power is spec'd at 5V@2A for each port but most implementations only allow 500mA per port...
can you get a power supply for the soundcard if you don't already have one?

if you use your laptop with a power supply do you get teh same problems (i.e. is it a case of battery power vs wall power causing the problem to appear or disappear?)
 
emm, as far as I know every building should be ground looped (only one pathway); in case there's some electricity problems it will go to the earth. Am I right? silly understanding, but bear with me please ))

soundcard is drawing from the PC; but there should've been problems with the laptop also, right?

and for the last one, if I understood you correctly.. I checked with the laptop plugged and unplugged (from the same power supply as PC) and there are no problems in both cases.


PS in the past I had a pair of KRKs and after using them for half a year (same laptop, same soundcard and even with unbalanced cables), there started to appear some noises (but not beeps). In the end I found that one of the two were broken, so I bought Yamahas. Don't know if it will clarify something, but it's a fact that the soundcard worked with no power supply and in the same building.

and is the ground loops still valid even if the beep sound appears only when I'm in a DAW or a media player?
 
EugeneS said:
emm, as far as I know every building should be ground looped (only one pathway); in case there's some electricity problems it will go to the earth. Am I right? silly understanding, but bear with me please ))
Click to expand...

a ground loop is two or more alternate paths to ground - as I said last time: that is the definition of a loop. In modern buildings there is only one pathway to ground so no loop.

Electricity is a strange beast that is always seeking the easiest pathway to ground or 0v - if you offer it two alternative paths it will try to go along the path of least resistance, but along the way due to the nature of audio, it may "decide" that the resistance of the selected pathway changes and so it will try the other pathway - this leads to a surging along the two ground paths.

However, your problem sounds more like a problem with the drivers or some other active program on your machine

can you get us an audio example of the problem - record it with your laptop and then upload so that we can hear what you are hearing
 
beep2.wav

the beep starts at 0:04 (it's just an AIMP3 playing) and at 0:18 I closed the AIMP (the same is with Ableton).
and then I just browse some folders and you can hear the short beep.

sorry for the white noise, it's my 'quality' phone :D however, I have a subtle white noise from the speakers, but this doesn't bother me at all :)
 
I'll be honest even after boosting this so that I did not have to listen at excruciatingly high volume levels I could not hear a beep of any sort - I could hear your mouse wheel being rotated and I could hear the general noise background but nothing else

which makes me suspect that you may have your internal speaker turned on in your desktop pc - check your audio settings - and that is what is beeping
 
well, that's a pitty you don't hear anything, at 0:04 after the double-click it's pretty hearable.. I checked on zippy with another laptop (and different headphones). It's a little quieter, but still I can hear it clearly.

well, as for the internal speaker (about which I knew nothing till now :D).. I googled a little and found about the 'beep' under Device Manager. I disabled it, same beep sound. Then I uninstalled it, the beep is still there.

however, I tend to believe that it's something with the PC, motherboard maybe.. any other ideas? something else to check?

bandcoach, you're my last hope :)
 
go to sound control panel
go to sounds tab
turn off all sounds to begin with
apply
test
now go back and turn on important audio cues like rubbish, startup, shutdown and others that you want to hear - as you reinstate a sound test again to make sure that you have not accidentally reinstated the beep

But I am serious: when I downloaded your file I normalised it to -3db (loudest sound was -3db in 0dbfs) and heard absolutely nothing but clicks and mouse wheel rotations
 
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hmm, weird))

here's another recording with the mic as close as possible :)

VOICE140210_003.MP3 at Share Send


I disabled all the sounds and at first I was dissapointed, cause the noise was still there.. but one thing changed, the beep while browsing the folders dissapeared completely, which is cool :) now what would you sau about the static beep?

hope you'll be able to hear the noise from my recording.
 
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see I wouldn't call that a beep but a tock - very wooden sounding, almost a woodblock or part of a tick-tock set

will do some thinking and get back to you tomorrow evening my time - big day ahead and out for most of it
 
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