The most common workaround that I've seen people use for the PS5 is something like HDMI to the TV, and then using the TVs optical output into the DAC. But it's not exactly an elegant solution. Thanks, Sony.

Not to my knowledge. UAC1 is largely a dead standard these days, aside from the Playstation.

Ah yes, of course. So because you've never experienced the issue yourself, it couldn't possibly exist. Got it. Good talk.

"No, that’s the whole point of digital audio in the first place. If your assertion were true the internet wouldn’t work, and neither would USB in many circumstances." It has nothing whatsoever to do with the digital signal. No idea where you even got that from. Noise can absolutely be...

You're underestimating the complexity of the issue. You can take one DAC that passes through GPU noise and hook it up to another system, and get no noise at all. Every part along the chain can have an influence. Swap to a different GPU, noise might go away. Use a different motherboard...

"a consumer DAC used appropriately is essentially defective if it allows noise/distortion to leak from the 5v power or ground into the analogue output signal to the extent of being audible (at any reasonable consumer listening level)." I see people saying this an awful lot, but there's no...

I do use a pre-amp, but I don't know that it's strictly speaking necessary for everybody to do so, especially not with the prevalence of DAC/HPA combo units that have a pre-amp function. However, my own system is also a weird blend of modern and vintage, so... Yeah. My own system chain is PC >...

Price drop.

Bump!

Replace the cable! They're cheap enough even for a decent quality cable.

I have for sale an SMSL M500 MkIII DAC and headphone amp. This is the most recent version from SMSL. I was just sent this as a new replacement for my original one, directly from SMSL and it has only been taken out of the box to verify functionality. This is not a refurb, however. It comes with...

I was thinking the same. But there seems to be some confusion about what exact kind of noise is being discussed. Ground loop issues are typically *not* subtle and are very obvious. It's not just a faint background hiss that may or may not be audible, as some in this thread seem to have implied.

Dolby Atmos won't do anything with music that isn't encoded with Dolby Atmos. It just gets passed through as stereo. It works pretty alright for headphones with Atmos-encoded movies and games (depends on the game and its implementation too), but it's never going to be as good as a full on Atmos...

Welp, now I know what I'm getting next time I go to Total Wine!

I didn't realize you guys did gin as well... Hmmmm... Is that something that will be hitting Total Wine shelves? Also, also... Am I the only one that noticed that Schiit named the Mjolnir 3 gain stage after an anabolic steroid?

My SMSL M500 MkIII is utterly quiet even with IEMs. I have a surge protector on it, that's it. When I swapped my pre-amplifier and power-amp from Rotel RC-970BX/RB-850 to Acurus L10/A100 I did run into GPU noise, but it was fixed with a USB isolator that just shuts off the power delivery and...

I was referring strictly to the DAC-UP 2 version. And yeah, MSI had it as well, but I forget what they called it. I skipped a handful of chipset generations from both Intel and AMD, so never had a board with the feature from anybody.

That appears to be a deprecated feature. None of their current boards have it anymore. Looks like it was really only present on the X370 AM4 and Intel Z370-399 boards in the latest iteration of DAC-UP 2. Same for MSI. And my Asus ROG Strix X570-F doesn't have anything like that either. *shrug*

Do they? Can't say I've ever run into that. Which ones offer that as a feature?

Not really, no. They're largely all using the same USB controllers and I'm not aware of any of them doing anything special to isolate USB power. Jitter also isn't an issue when it comes to modern USB DACs as they're basically all asynchronous or should be. USB noise may or may not be an issue...

Sure. But you're also using a laptop burdened and hamstrung by a number of applications and restrictions installed by your employer. If you buy a laptop or computer of your own, you would not be hampered by such things and would have substantially more overhead. I myself have a 2014 Dell laptop...

Any modern computer should basically be able to handle playing and ripping music, especially if you're using a USB DAC. Running a Linux partition isn't necessarily going to make things better and will usually require more work to set up for bit-perfect audio reproduction. I suspect you're...

You can use the remote or the knob on the front. The remote is faster. It's pretty easy either way, although not having a dedicated button on the front for swapping between headphones and line output would be just about my only complaint.

The X7 was pretty high-end for PC audio back when it was released, but... That was a while. I would fully expect both the headphone amplifier and DAC section of the M500 MkIII to substantially outclass the X7. And yeah, I'm quite happy with my M500. It has plenty of power to drive 300 ohm and...

The Zen Dac v2 does though. https://ifi-audio.com/products/zen-dac-v2/