Hello,
I am new here, but have often found Tom's Hardware to be a valuable source of troubleshooting advice in the past. But the issues I'm having now are weirder than ones I'm used to dealing with, so I figured it was high time I brought my own question here this time.
I recently built a new system, the parts of which can be viewed here (note: right now it only has 32gb ram, one of the sticks I got was dead/is pending replacement). Overall it's been a reasonably solid build... however, it has its quirks. One of them is that my audio and recording equipment is behaving strangely compared to my previous build. The USB microphone (AT2005USB) that had been working fine on my old computer now has a faint static sound in the background, and today, when I started rendering out a video, I noticed a static sound in my headphones that persisted as long as the render was running. It's never been audible before but I often play music, and it was very clearly tied to the render-- it stopped when the render stopped.
A common result while researching my microphone issues has been improper grounding, and it was a listed cause of mysterious static sounds, too. Those could also be caused by an improperly shielded video/audio card, which is something I'm still investigating, but the common result between these problems of improper grounding makes me think that may well be the culprit (along with the fact that the mic is usb and not plugged into the audio card). The problem is, I don't know anything about troubleshooting a grounding issue-- what I'm even looking for, what I need to check. The whole system runs through a UPS-- it's a desktop build so I don't want to leave it vulnerable to power flickers. I've heard that can also cause issues, but this UPS worked fine with my older PC. That said, I did just move cross country with it, and so I don't know if something could've jostled loose on the way.
How would I even go about troubleshooting something like this-- where do I even start? And am I even right to think these issues could be connected to the grounding, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Thank you so much, and have a great day,
Jay
I am new here, but have often found Tom's Hardware to be a valuable source of troubleshooting advice in the past. But the issues I'm having now are weirder than ones I'm used to dealing with, so I figured it was high time I brought my own question here this time.
I recently built a new system, the parts of which can be viewed here (note: right now it only has 32gb ram, one of the sticks I got was dead/is pending replacement). Overall it's been a reasonably solid build... however, it has its quirks. One of them is that my audio and recording equipment is behaving strangely compared to my previous build. The USB microphone (AT2005USB) that had been working fine on my old computer now has a faint static sound in the background, and today, when I started rendering out a video, I noticed a static sound in my headphones that persisted as long as the render was running. It's never been audible before but I often play music, and it was very clearly tied to the render-- it stopped when the render stopped.
A common result while researching my microphone issues has been improper grounding, and it was a listed cause of mysterious static sounds, too. Those could also be caused by an improperly shielded video/audio card, which is something I'm still investigating, but the common result between these problems of improper grounding makes me think that may well be the culprit (along with the fact that the mic is usb and not plugged into the audio card). The problem is, I don't know anything about troubleshooting a grounding issue-- what I'm even looking for, what I need to check. The whole system runs through a UPS-- it's a desktop build so I don't want to leave it vulnerable to power flickers. I've heard that can also cause issues, but this UPS worked fine with my older PC. That said, I did just move cross country with it, and so I don't know if something could've jostled loose on the way.
How would I even go about troubleshooting something like this-- where do I even start? And am I even right to think these issues could be connected to the grounding, or am I barking up the wrong tree?
Thank you so much, and have a great day,
Jay