Crackling noise when playing audio

[_charizard]

Recently i've noticed that sometimes when sound is playing over the headphones (MM-100), there is some crackling noise, not the planar crackle, like bad signal crackling but very faintly. It's not unusable but it is distracting and irritating, most importantly it happens intermittently. I'm running headphones through fiio k5 pro ess and using the oratory preset for EqApo. When i tried to switch the usb port, the buzzing was insane and definitely unusable, there are like 2 usb ports out of 8 that do not constantly buzz, including the front IO. The usb 3.1 in particular produces the most buzz. I had dac/amps before this one but its only on this one that this happens and its weird, the two that do not buzz work 99.9 except the mentioned intermittent crackling. Switching to the onboard motherboard dac (Prime X370 Pro) the buzzing still continues unchanged, like on the 2 that ''work''. Now, when trying over the phone with the basic usb c to 3.5mm adapter, there is no crackling or buzzing at all, although i don't use any eq over phone. I can't isolate the issue specifically because its weird, it seems that headphones are fine but why would it have issues over on the pc side? Every other dac works as it should. Is there something on the dac's side that is faulty or on the pc's side? I also tried to uninstall and reinstall drivers for the k5, it didn't help.

 

[Caveman Carl]

If it doesn't crackle with the phone but does both on the amp and PC, then it's definitely not the cans that are faulty. Are your PC and amp connected to the same surge protector? If not, they should be, to avoid a ground loop. To me, your description of a buzzing when you switch ports sounds like mains noise. I used the K5 some years ago, and it was subject to mains noise. A cheap ground loop isolator solved the problem.

 

[_charizard]

If it doesn't crackle with the phone but does both on the amp and PC, then it's definitely not the cans that are faulty. Are your PC and amp connected to the same surge protector? If not, they should be, to avoid a ground loop. To me, your description of a buzzing when you switch ports sounds like mains noise. I used the K5 some years ago, and it was subject to mains noise. A cheap ground loop isolator solved the problem.

They are on the same power strip, i tried swapping pc to the main outlet and dac on the power strip, vice versa and no changes to the output, i cant get them both to be on the wall outlet at the same time, don't have enough outlets. So if i get a higher quality power strip it should solve the issue?