[geeks] audio issue with PC case

[Shannon]

On 22-Feb-2014 10:00, Rjtoegel wrote:
> Only problem with Al foil is that Al oxidizes in air which gives it a
> nonconductive oxide coating with makes for lousy contacts.  That's why it's
> hit or miss.  Best would be a piece of copper braid from a piece of coax
> cable.  Unfortunately it's a bitch to remove from the cable and thread the
> audio wires through it.  Another alternative is to wrap the audio cables with
> insulated wire with a fairly tight wrap and ground at one end.  That will act
> as a shield.  I've used that to cure ignition noise in my HF mobile ham radio
> setup.

Aluminum did not help.

I suspect the motherboard traces, which run to a connector right under
the graphics card, are picking up the noise.

Too bad, the front panel would be convenient.

I partially solved the issue by putting a Sound Blaster Z in the
machine. The front panel is still noisy, but it has a headset connector
on the back so I can have a headset and still route sound through my KVM.

The KVM adds a lot of noise so I only use it if I have to.

Sometimes with PC audio you just can't completely win. They are so noisy
inside and unlike Apple, most do not do anything to shield the analog
signals in the case.

They also don't watch things like placement of connectors (i.e. keeep
them away from big noise sources), and so on.

If this were purely audio, like professional stuff, then I'd be using
optical connects to some external audio hardware.

But for games, the SBZ sounds much better and has a hell of a lot less
latency and CPU usage.

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