Quick Audio Questions Megathread: Start here

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Quick Audio Questions Megathread: Start here

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Salt Fish posted:

Any ideas?

Your audio interface's inputs will behave differently depending on whether you plug a TS or a TRS jack into it. The difference being whether it thinks it should take the connection as being unbalanced or balanced. Your tv headphone output or an hdmi audio extractor will produce an unbalanced signal. Your test with a single 1/8" TRS to a 1/4" TRS cable will have the interface subtract one channel from the other, resulting in an almost imperceptible signal level. Your ideal cable isn't a 1/8" TRS split into two 1/4" TRS ends for that reason. The TV end uses the TRS connection for two unbalanced signals, so the interface end should have two TS 1/4" jacks, which your interface will happily take.

There are many ways to approach this with adapters, my personal favorite is 1/4" TS to RCA plugs for the interface, combined with whatever common home stereo audio lead you need after that.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2024 12:45

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# ¿ Nov 19, 2025 02:20

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Good! You can get the weirdest and wrongest wired up adapter cables on like Amazon, so if it's explicit about what is doing and what you should use it for and what all competitors are doing wrong, that improves your chances vastly.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2024 16:39

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

The user guide for the microphone says to set the input level in the windows settings to 50%-70% to start with. I recommend trying something like Audacity to see if you actually get clipping and if lowering that level helps.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2024 19:31

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

LurchinTard posted:

vintage/old audio equipment so let me know if there's a better thread but I have a JVC XL-V1K1 that i havent used in a pretty long time. I'm trying to set it up again and i put in a cd in and it sounds really far away, muffled, reverbed, the voices in particular sound far away but the rest of the sound (Guitars, etc) are semi-normal, if a bit off tone if that makes sense.
anyone know why this could be and if its a easy fix? CD units aren't the most expensive thing i nteh world right now but if I can fix it I'd prefer too.

I can't find an exact match for that device, but does it have a headphone output and does the sound do the same thing there?

# ¿ Oct 20, 2024 07:10

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

You are using the headphone output with a trs to xlr cable to plug into a mixer? If so, the cable is your problem. TRS jacks can be used either for unbalanced stereo or balanced mono. Not interoperable. The thing on the xlr end is expecting the latter, while the cd player is outputting the former. A solution is going to depend on what the mixer offers wrt connecting unbalanced sources.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2024 07:55

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Mixer was me guessing what you could mean by 'deck' as a thing that takes xlr. So never mind that.

# ¿ Oct 20, 2024 19:13

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

This is a stereo receiver, not one that could accidentally be set to some sort of surround or fake surround mode, right?

# ¿ Oct 22, 2024 16:19

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Android app thread

# ¿ Nov 27, 2024 17:51

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

It works very differently under the hood. Where PCM audio has a fixed grid in time and bit depth, DSD clocks at an immensly high sample rate but modulates the density of the data points in time and instead of absolute depth values, it's more like "up a bit here, down a bit there". At the time it was conceived, there would have been some concern that making regular high quality DACs couldn't be done cheaply and that DSD offered a different set of tradeoffs for manufacturers, where you could lowpass less steep and from a higher frequency. By the time it came to market though, it was unabashedly aimed at audiophiles only, because economies of scale had come through for DACs and no one but Sony was interested in doing a whole top down tech refresh throughout the whole industry for mostly literally imperceptible advances.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2025 13:23

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Fruits of the sea posted:

So it treats the data as relative values?

As an explanation, I think that's an approximation I only saw in a graphic years ago. Mathematically, it's only one bit deep, so the nudge values can only be one and zero. So it's more like it inserts a sample point wherever the waveform has moved one bit's worth up or down? I definitely don't actually understand the maths involved.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2025 14:34

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Shitloads of bluetooth devices that you can make calls through do have their lovely own built-in pinhole microphone. Even if that doesn't turn out to be the case, calls made through speakers that can be picked up by the microphone involve echo cancelling, which can be terrible. A solution involving headphones on his end would work better in that regard.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2025 22:31

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Looks like that soundbar has two hdmi inputs and one hdmi output. Since you don't need the tv to produce sound and only have two sources, can't you just plug them into the soundbar and connect up your tv to its output without needing earc?

# ¿ Aug 13, 2025 17:53

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Replaygain attempts to keep a consistent volume level between different files by calculating a (sort of) average level for each file and setting a single offset parameter for the whole file, so the average of all the different files ends up playing back as roughly the same. It will not change relative volume levels within a file. To do that, you need a dynamic compressor. There is one built into VLC for example.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2025 17:39

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

The only difference will be the content between 22kHz-24kHz, which in normal audio is close to nothing and at inaudible levels. You can null a file with the resampled version and there will be a faint whimper on the meters, but it'll all be below audible levels by several orders of magnitude. A human, not an average one, but any human, will not be able to discern the difference.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2025 22:13

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

I've heard two jbl bluetooth speakers and in both cases I was kinda impressed with what came out of it, even the two packs of cigarettes sized ones. In general they're also pretty good with spare parts availability, although I don't know about batteries specifically.

# ¿ Nov 6, 2025 21:42

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

Lily Catts posted:

So I've been using 3 audio devices with my laptop:

1. Steelseries Arctis Nova 1 (I don't use the built-in mic)
2. Maono AU-PM360TR (this is the mic I use)
3. Edifier G2000 (speakers)

The headset and mic are connected to the laptop through a 3.5mm jack (I use a 2 female-1 male splitter), while the speakers are connected via Bluetooth. The Bluetooth connection is pretty stable but the audio goes noticeably out of sync when I try to play video. Any ideas? I've been thinking of connecting the speakers to a USB splitter (since I'm short on ports), would that solve my issue?

I used to plug in a previous pair of speakers (also Edifier) via USB but I was getting some frequent Windows 11 crashing issues so I switched to Bluetooth instead. I feel like it's a Win11 thing as I used to have a similar configuration that worked fine with my previous laptop, which was on Win10. (Sorry if this is confusing!)

Sometimes the bluetooth driver is aware and can report back what the latency is and the software playing video can adjust by holding back the video the same amount of time. This will not work for video games at all, but for actual video, sometimes maybe, depending. Bluetooth is a horrifying house of cards, and there's not a sane thing you can do to fix it when it doesn't work right as far as I'm aware.

Generally plugging the speakers into a usb port should not have that problem. Plugging them into a usb hub should also be fine, as long as it's a hub and not some oddball split cable that came with another poorly designed device. I'm assuming the speakers get their power from somewhere else, so that shouldn't be a problem either. I don't know what was up with the crashing, that's obviously not acceptable, let's hope that was specific to the other hardware.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2025 18:12

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# ¿ Nov 19, 2025 02:20

Flipperwaldt: Nov 11, 2011; Won't somebody think of the starving hamsters in China?

qirex posted:

A usb audio interface is probably what you�re looking for, something like a Focusrite Scarlett or MOTU M2 would take care of all that, headphones, mic and line out for the speakers

Those speakers have a usb audio interface built in for output. It's not a bad suggestion if that doesn't work out though.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2025 20:17

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Inspect Your Gadgets > Quick Audio Questions Megathread: Start here