Pretty common problem on builtin sound cards, even now. It's just very close to the noise source.

Shouldn't really happen on USB DAC, it should have enough filtering to get any interference injected by power, and enough shielding (and just being far away enough from machine) for other EMI

Yeah this is the main reason to use a USB DAC. I guess you get marginally better sound quality (more noticeable on expensive studio headphones that need more power to drive them) but better isolation/removal from the noise source is the main reason I use them. Especially relevant because in my travel I'm often in countries that don't have ground plugs in their power sources.

Quite a flashback. I switched to optical TOSLINK maybe about 20 years ago, which solved all those issues obviously. It's a bit weird how rare optical outs are on motherboards even today -- clearly less than half have them -- when it is such a useful interface.

Just ordered a hat for my Raspberry Pi with optical out, with a plan to make that my main music streamer. Excited to see if that works out!

I wish Mini-TOSLINK[1] had been more successful. It's allows you to put an optical and electrical audio output on the same 3.5mm connector (i.e. headphone port), which is helpful for saving space on crowded panels.

The trick is that your 3.5mm connector only needs to connect on the sides, so the end of the jack can be open for light to be transmitted.

This was seen pretty frequently on laptops for a while, but I think two things doomed it. One, most people just don't use optical. Two, there's nothing to advertise its existence. If you do have one of these ports, you probably don't even know you could plug an optical connector in there.

---

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOSLINK#Mini-TOSLINK

I remember when all MacBooks had it. "What is this red light for?" used to be a common post on forums.

Ditto. It’s is hard to find non-wifi motherboards with toslink.

All the cheap boards have neither. Most of the high end boards have both

I updated my computer this year, and didn't find anything without wifi either. So it seems it's a small tax you just have to pay now.

I've at least found that the wifi+Bluetooth chips seem to be significantly more robust than the standalone bt ones.

I don't foresee any Bluetooth need either for my desktop setup. But yeah I do see that many buyers would want that for headphones if nothing else, so it makes sense to include the chip.

I hear my second hand dell XPS laptop running fedora when I scroll through dropdown lists.

It sounds exactly like the reads on a physical hdd, which is silly because it has an SSD. Haven’t figured out what it is yet.

My XPS does something similar. Faint 50Hz chirping (coil whine?) when I move objects in Blender. Never encountered audio interference though.

Maybe I have sensitive hearing, but I encounter this frequently on machines from all manufacturers. It is very much still a problem today.

Yep, my 2019ish Dell XPS 13 makes hissy static noises on its speakers, even when system audio is muted.

I remember the BBC Micro doing the same thing when I was a little kid during certain operations, it always sounded to me like it was "thinking". :)

I can hear when my Dell laptop uses the flash drive heavily. It sounds kind of like a hard drive, so I actually had to verify that I have a flash chip. Apparently it's a known issue; I've assumed that something in it vibrates due to EMF.

Noise is caused by changes in current. Any pulse of current will ultimately create EMF.

If power lines run anywhere near the sound lines, you are just asking to pick up interference whenever the computer does basically anything. It doesn't take too much of a pulse to be picked up. For a 3.5 jack, the voltage is anywhere from 0.002 to 0.5V. Even a pretty small induced voltage will be audible.

Happens to my Lenovo X390, specially with disks writes...

I get this on my MacBook M1, I "hear" some websites "static"

I get fairly audiable coil whine when scrolling websites.