Sennheiser PC37X randomly goes bad after disconnecting the cable ?
Greetings, Yesterday I was using my headset like normal with my macbook, just listening to music and on a call with people like usual, and the headset was perfectly fine. The stock wire that came with the headset is extremely long and yesterday it annoyed me very much that it kept getting tangled with itself, so I decided to see if the cable is replaceable. I pulled out the cable from the headset and saw the adapter, and looked online for a replacement. Upon plugging it back in, the audio sounded extremely muffled and washed out. Im not sure what I did wrong to make it mess up like that as I've always taken good care of it, ive had it for about 2 years and its always just been chilling on my desk, but anywho I thought the cable just went bad and ordered a replacement. The replacement came, and the issue is still persistant, so I am not sure what the issue is I've tried multiple different headsets and the issue is not with the port, and I also tried it with my windows laptop and...
Apr 23, 2024
A simple example of this is the Bluetooth input on newer car stereos. If you minimize the volume on your phone and try to "recover" the volume with the amp in the car radio, that usually sounds bad -- too much noise. Instead, always max out the volume on the phone, and use the volume knob on the radio to control the playback volume. That way you will have lowest noise and highest quality.
Sorry if this was too long ;)
1) Is there a noise floor? and 2) How to minimize it?
Theoretically, there is always a noise floor present, no matter what equipment you talk about -- ours, or someone else's. In practice, whether you hear this noise floor or not depends on a lot of things, such as your headphones (balanced armatures are most sensitive, overheads are not as bad), the amount of background noise (a quiet room will be most revealing, a moving train, the least) and any background noise in the recording itself. Some recordings have a surprising amount of background noise heard during quiet passages. When you hit "pause", the noise from the recording disappears and at that point you may or may not hear the noise generated in your equipment.
While we go to great lengths to minimize the residual noise in our products, it's up to the people to say whether they hear it or not. As you noticed, I'm not influencing that argument. But correct gain structure is always important, no matter whose gear you use. This equally applies to our competitors. Sadly, based on the amount of calls and emails we take on the subject, correct gain structure is not obvious to everyone and as evidenced by Papieur's comment, my explanation was useful to him. Yes, unfortunately, we see people mess up gain structures, unknowingly, quite often. And then they complain about too much noise and when we explain the procedure, they thank us.
And to your point -- even though I myself know the "correct procedure" I actually use the PC volume fader sometimes when I can't reach for the DACport's volume control knob (it's somewhat out of reach on my desk). I know it's not ideal, but sometimes its just more convenient, because the mouse is already in my hand and I just need to bring the volume down because the phone rang, or something. The important thing is to know what's correct in theory, then you decide for yourself what you do in practice, based on the circumstances.
Now that the theory is out of the way, you can share if you heard the background noise, what headphones you used, other conditions, etc. I'm sure it will be useful to people.