Arcygenical
Fully [H]
- Joined
- Jun 10, 2005
- Messages
- 25,066
I'm looking for an affordable balanced DAC. The entirety of my rack is all balanced, so why shouldn't the audio source be balanced... But, I'm not a huge fan of spending 200-300$ for a USB Balanced DAC, which may run into the same issues, see:
I'm getting a LOT of noise across the PA system (2x generic 750wrms Behringer PA's, and a decent 2 way crossover, along with the old Monoprice 31 band Parametric EQ), whenever power usage changes on my Gen 1 Ryzen PC - aka during games, cutscenes/vs menus, encoding video, watching video, hell, even moving the mouse causes a slight whistle around the 3000hz mark (Can you imagine how annoying this is - I've seen almost a 60w fluctuation as well, which is 10db or so over background usage of 6w @ low volume). Clearly, the 3.5mm solution on board is absolutely terrible. I've tried lifting the PA grounds, tying them to earth directly (via copper water piping to earth) and I've even gone as far as ungrounding the PC... Alas, there's still noticeable whine with ANY power usage change. And yes, I've tried around 3 PSU's now.
I do have an EQ that can take unbalanced inputs and "convert" them to balanced - but obviously we're losing the other half of the signal by doing so, simply pseudo-balancing - Other audio sources, say, a phone, or a macbook pro, sound absolutely wonderful, even with unbalanced input. It's just the damn PC.
I do *not* have a ground loop, as that's impossible with my power delivery scheme.
So... Balanced DAC? USB (ugh). Sound card that does TRS balanced? Anything affordable? I only need stereo output, as I run a 2.2 stereo setup. I don't mind building it myself, either. The last few TOSLINK and USB dac's that I've built ftrom Aliexpress have been incredible, at around 30$, albeit, not balanced. I don't care about TRS or XLR.
Thanks :/
I'm getting a LOT of noise across the PA system (2x generic 750wrms Behringer PA's, and a decent 2 way crossover, along with the old Monoprice 31 band Parametric EQ), whenever power usage changes on my Gen 1 Ryzen PC - aka during games, cutscenes/vs menus, encoding video, watching video, hell, even moving the mouse causes a slight whistle around the 3000hz mark (Can you imagine how annoying this is - I've seen almost a 60w fluctuation as well, which is 10db or so over background usage of 6w @ low volume). Clearly, the 3.5mm solution on board is absolutely terrible. I've tried lifting the PA grounds, tying them to earth directly (via copper water piping to earth) and I've even gone as far as ungrounding the PC... Alas, there's still noticeable whine with ANY power usage change. And yes, I've tried around 3 PSU's now.
I do have an EQ that can take unbalanced inputs and "convert" them to balanced - but obviously we're losing the other half of the signal by doing so, simply pseudo-balancing - Other audio sources, say, a phone, or a macbook pro, sound absolutely wonderful, even with unbalanced input. It's just the damn PC.
I do *not* have a ground loop, as that's impossible with my power delivery scheme.
So... Balanced DAC? USB (ugh). Sound card that does TRS balanced? Anything affordable? I only need stereo output, as I run a 2.2 stereo setup. I don't mind building it myself, either. The last few TOSLINK and USB dac's that I've built ftrom Aliexpress have been incredible, at around 30$, albeit, not balanced. I don't care about TRS or XLR.
Thanks :/