Powerline noise

[mcandmar]

I needed to chop up a cable for my isolator build and picked up a couple of Belkin USB 2.0's.  Internally i found the +/- power were a larger gauge than the data lines, each set was twisted separately, wrapped in a foil shield, then the entire lot had a braided shield over it.  Seems pretty overkill to me, and that was just an off the shelf cable from a regular manufacturer.   From what i have found if its USB 2.0 compliant it will have all that which is more than enough basically.

Though apparently $200 solid silver cables sprinkled with fairy dust can give you a larger sound stage and more resolving micro dynamics

[feralcoder]

Sorry to revive very old post, but it's a timeless topic: "hearing PC power noise via DAC".  All solutions so far have presumed this noise is present and needs to be removed: at source (PC power conditioning, expensive PS, etc), in transmission (toslink works if DAC not powered by PC), or even from the post-DAC signal. 

These are all much more technically difficult and expensive than fixing the root of the problem: decouple the DAC entirely from the PC's power.  This can be done with a USB hub.  The PC's USB connection to hub may be noisy, but who cares, it's digital, then repeated - a USB hub is very similar to a network switch.  The hub is independently powered from a cleaner source, maybe 20 feet from PC, so the USB signal to DAC has a clean power baseline, no PC noise to remove.

I'll point out that the PC noise problem is many problems: PS noise, component noise, fans, wall line noise...   All irrelevant, just decouple all of that from the analog chain with a USB hub.

[Paul Birkeland]

A self powered USB hub could indeed work.