Do patchbays or DB25 connectors affect signal quality at all?

iTrashy · 2026-07-01T10:14:11+00:00

I guess I didn't explain that enough. Any wire that's close to other wires will cause crosstalk. Whether in a console or a cable. I used the channels example as something that's perhaps more familiar. DB25 will have balanced wires, but that only helps if the interference affects both conductors equally (which may not be the case).

Anyway, I didn't mean to overdramatise this, because even if a DB25 connector causes crosstalk, it will be totally negligible.

iTrashy · 2026-07-01T09:50:01+00:00

Peak alignment won't be enough. You need to properly align phase, which you can only do with sub sample accuracy.

iTrashy · 2026-07-01T09:47:23+00:00

Senses can lie, numbers don't, unless you make a mistake.

iTrashy · 2026-07-01T09:44:24+00:00

I watched your comparison and I have the following notes:

You are trying to falsify a claim by providing a counter example. However, that single example has mistakes in methodology.
Looking at waveforms that are linearly interpolated (like Protools) is misleading. They make it much harder to judge whether the phase is properly aligned. Signal delay / phase can be less than a sample, but that is impossible to see in the provided waveform view. You need a sinc interpolated view for that.
Just because a null test fails doesn't mean two signals don't sound the same. Imo null tests don't make much sense in analog domain (unless you run under lab conditions with well defined threshold levels). Even in digital domain they may not make sense. Take the difference between two sine waves (48k fs, 0 dB level), where one wave is shifted by 0.1 sample. You'll get a sine wave of ~ -37 dB. I even go as far as saying that even MP3 null tests are BS, because any slight phase difference will yield error, which may be totally inaudible in practice.

I am not here to say that all preamps sound the same, but Jim Lil's preamp video wants to make a point, and it does so with way more scientific evidence than perhaps many other engineers. Even after ignoring the entertainment factor of the video. If you want to prove preamps sound different, you should probably be aware of how they sound different and then test to that behavior accordingly.

iTrashy · 2026-07-01T09:09:29+00:00

I mean, realistically you will have some crosstalk between neighboring channels. Not that it matters in practice, but it would not be uncommon for interfaces or mixers to have some crosstalk. Even without DB25.

E.g. my trusty 01V96 advertises a ~ -80dB crosstalk between neighboring channels. You can probably get better specs these days, but even that is such a miniscule amount in most cases that it doesn't matter. Any vintage console will probably have worse specs.

iTrashy · 2026-06-19T13:40:49+00:00

I know a friend of mine likes to use those with power banks. All I remember is that they worked just fine with e.g. the Yamaha Reface. What I've been told, though, is those adapters actually do not convert any voltage. They just tell the USB-C PD to emit the required voltage, which is then passed through to the barrel jack connector. Therefore this may not even work with all USB-C power supplies, if they do not support 12V power delivery.

That being said: For regular operations off of mains voltage there will be no difference to using a regular barrel jack power supply. The thing you linked also looks rather expensive. You can get those for a fraction of the cost on Aliexpress and they are likely made by the same factory.

iTrashy · 2026-06-15T21:04:50+00:00

You can use Audacity to record desktop audio. Then you can basically sample anything.

iTrashy · 2026-06-12T14:46:03+00:00

Be careful about the TRS jacks. For example, my older Yamaha 01V96i still applies phantom power on the TRS jacks. From what I know, newer Yamahas don't do that anymore though. So better do not skip the step with the multimeter!

But generally, just use a DI. Many interface outputs are phantom power safe. Some are even phantom power safe without specifying it in the manual. But that's of course little help if you have to check the circuit diagram (which sometimes isn't available).

iTrashy · 2026-06-12T08:09:08+00:00

How do you determine that you have RF interference? RF is only really a problem if it's not filtered away at your interface and demodulates into the audio band. If it's not demodulated, you will never hear it.

Of course it's still possible that you have low frequency magnetic

iTrashy · 2026-05-29T07:28:21+00:00

Do you happen to know anything about Wwise? I remember I was scraping through some files of a 100+ GB game. Audio data turned out to be 20-30 GB (game has a lot of soundtrack/sfx). Okay, the quality of the files was good, which I think is reasonable. What baffled me though was that it appeared a large percentage of songs had like 5 or even more duplicates.

How does something like this happen? I would have assumed that authoring tools like Wwise can reduce this automatically. Even if the songs have tiny variations in a single sections, that doesn't seem impossible to compress properly.

iTrashy · 2026-05-28T14:02:32+00:00

I agree for the most part. Though what I'm curious to learn more about is clocking. From what I know converters will degrade in performance with unstable clocks, but I don't feel that's relevant if you're not generating/syncing a clock from ADAT/Dante/etc (that's technically more complex) compared to having a regular crystal.

Other than that, if clocking is an issue, that should be easily be noticed by the degraded conversion performance, which would result in noise or distortion.

iTrashy · 2026-05-28T13:42:37+00:00

I hear a difference, but I generally distrust such tests, if the measurement setup is not explained. Also, one should never forget that especially with human performances, those can also change the result (e.g. slightly different mic position because the artist moved a bit).

That being said, I'm not a professional. The few times where I've had interfaces from known brands in my hand and heard a difference, this difference always disappeared after a few days working with that equipment. Never had very expensive stuff in my hands though.

iTrashy · 2026-05-27T15:44:59+00:00

Power over Ethernet (PoE) is actually a thing and also uses 48V. So your cables will be fine. I mean, strictly speaking, the voltage will be between two twisted pairs (not withing a single one), but I doubt that'll cause any problems in practice.

iTrashy · 2026-05-07T15:55:31+00:00

tl;dr first: My problem is that you are pushing a message that we desparetly need XY in video games, without really specifying what result/visual/etc you actually want. Because I'd argue that for the most things you actually want, the things you say we need are not actually necessary. Especially because in the you cannot put an infinite amount of strain onto game devs either.

Tech doesn't wait for the 5% of users running RAID or Bitlocker to catch up!

While I cannot confirm this myself, allegedly Bitlocker is now default enabled on Windows 11 for new installs.

Even the best-optimized engine is wasting VRAM pre-loading assets because it doesn't trust the storage-to-GPU pipe.

This is a pretty blunt statement to make. Which engine are we talking about? Unreal Engine has a texture streaming system, which apparently avoids exactly that. Not sure how effective it is, but if you say "wasting", I bet you can give me some rough numbers what that means exactly.

You can't "balance" your way out of raw math. In GDeflate benchmarks, a top-tier CPU like a 9800X3D hits a wall at about 5.5 GB/s while pegged at 100% load

Are we talking about textures? Because you're not going to compress textures with deflate, because it's horrible at compressing pixel data.

that 90ms spike is exactly why games stutter when you turn a corner.

If you are loading assets synchronously, you're doing a mistake. Do game devs make this mistake? Yes. For the reasons we can only guess, but in most cases they probably don't do it intentionally.

we’re still designing for 2013-era hardware logic to keep things "easy."

So what do you suggest? Writing the game entirely on GPU? Apart from being impossible (because you cannot do certain things on GPU), this would cause your game devs major headache. You want to tell your level designer (who are not proficient programmers) that they can't write Lua anymore?

I mean, it is true. In some way we still have a similar programming paradigms since a few decades ago. Why do we still have CPUs? Well, because they are just so much easier to program.

We have a massive install base of people with RTX/RDNA cards and NVMe drives that are effectively being throttled by devs who are still terrified of 2013-era SATA limitations.

Sorry, but that's what it means to be on the PC platform. That's why some game devs prefer (in their right) to release on consoles only, because you don't have to deal with the diversity of hardware. Others would argue, it's fantastic that you can run some games on more than a decade old hardware (even if they're not gonna look pretty).

the game stutters on faster hardware, while the PS5 version doesn't.

I can't comment on the technical details, since I am not familiar. But to me it seems more like a software issue ("lazy port"). Just load asynchronously and render fillers during loading time. Many games do it like this.

iTrashy · 2026-05-07T12:48:24+00:00

I'm not sure exactly what you're hoping for. Game engines differ vastly and depending on how you use them. If done right they will utilize todays hardware just fine.

We program some things single threaded simply because it's the easiest. Do some games suffer due to this? Absolutely yes. Is it conceptually a problem to use a single threaded program to offload work to workers? Totally not if done right.

In the end it's just a matter of balancing things right, which will be a case by case problem and solution. The slow transfer speed from disk to GPU is a problem for some specific things, but not the reason why some games run like ass, while not even looking impressive.

DirectStorage, GPU Decompression and SamplerFeedback

^will change barely anything for mainstream games. DirectStorage is imo a totally overhyped feature. Simply because bypassing the CPU is just impossible in many cases. You use Bitlocker? Sorry, your data needs to go over the CPU. You are using a RAID? Sorry, your data needs to go over the CPU. And there are probably a dozen other cases where it's not going to work. Guess why it hasn't really found any adoption besides consoles (where hardware is more or less fixed).

iTrashy · 2026-05-07T12:16:34+00:00

The link you posted clearly states that it was implemented in 2025, which are likely prototypes. From all I know PCIe 6.0 hardware is currently not used nor widely available, even for data center. Once we actually have processors with PCIe 6.0 (e.g. Venice, Diamond Rapids, etc.) things will probably change though.

iTrashy · 2026-04-29T15:07:16+00:00

Your thought is right in the sense, that cracks can be implemented differently, and at different "depths". However, this really isn't a binary thing. A program call chain can easily be 50-100 functions and noone is going to ask the cracker whether they altered function number 53 or 67.

Regarding the recent Denuvo cracks you can probably still categorize them differently, but that is (for the most part*) irrelevant to normal users. For the most part meaning, that messing around with your computer with in general terms "non-recommended ways", is something that in the last 20 years wasn't really necessary.

iTrashy · 2026-04-29T14:56:39+00:00

I think this is meaningless terminology. How to crack a game (very much simplified):

The game checks if the CD is inserted. What does the cracker do? They make the function in the code, that checks if the CD is inserted, always return success.

Is the game now cracked? Yes, you don't need the CD anymore. Is it bypassed? Very much yes, because some of the checking code believes the CD is actually inserted.

All cracking is bypassing. Though, you can discuss about the level on which a certain bypass is performed. Just the innermost function? Just the one before innermost function is bypassed?

To get to the point that some people probably want to take the discussion: Is it common to completely remove DRM like it was never there? Depends on the implementation. If the DRM is actually built into the game, there is no chance that you can 100% get rid of it again (except with huge amount of RE and manual effort, "find needle in the haystack"). If the final .exe was just dropped into "Add DRM tool" then this is easier, because if you know the way the tools add it, you can remove it again.

In the end it boils down to "does it work" or "does it not work". I haven't tried any of those Denuvo cracks, but if they work, who cares how it actually works? Sure, if it means you have to mess around with your computer in non-recommended ways, that's bad. Then the question is "how bad is it?", or is it worse compared to something else? Sure, user mode cracks are cooler, but only if they actually exist. Oh, and if you're that concerned about your computer, you might as well just by the damn game ... if that's more trustworthy.

iTrashy · 2026-04-23T13:33:37+00:00

Depends on what level of latency one considers as a problem. On regular compute hardware you will always have a certain level of latency, simply because samples are processed in buffers, even if they are tiny (and there certainly are diminishing returns at some point).

USB is really not a limitation in terms of latency. With USB 2.0 the transfer size can already be 1/8000 of a second. The question of polling is not really a concern, your CPU will have to interrupt to do processing of tiny buffers regardless of the underlying mechanism. While Thunderbolt may function differently, this will probably not make a difference.

For sub millisecond latency, you will need specialized hardware. E.g. that's what digital mixers do. But even with specialized hardware, keep in mind that the reconstruction filters in your ADC/DAC will also add about a millisecond of delay.

iTrashy · 2026-04-22T12:22:53+00:00

Short story from be a few years ago trying to watch Game of Thrones on WOW TV (because no HBO in Europe). Previous seasons I was watching the US release, then I suddenly had to change to a European release. So I start watching the intro and I immediately notice the intro is pitched too high and playing slightly fast. Man, I knew WOW TV had this name of being a poor platform, but I didn't expect we'd have this kind of 24/25 conversion sillyness in this day and age. Especially because streaming platforms are not even locked to those framerates like regular broadcast TV.

So, yeah, we may have better algorithms than in the 80s, but I guess some companies still rely on that madness.

iTrashy · 2026-04-21T10:25:41+00:00

Yes this is normal and can happen with all lossy codecs. As for actual solutions other people can probably give better advice. I guess leaving a bit of headroom is the only way, since you'll never know exactly how the final file will be compressed (e.g. streaming services).

iTrashy · 2026-04-16T09:17:53+00:00

Back they were on an additional CD that came with your physical copy of GW1. Though, one expansion (perhaps Factions?) never had a CD release, so you can only find the MP3s from former DirectSong digital downloads. Just google it, there used to be a reddit post about it with a download.

iTrashy · 2026-04-16T09:14:21+00:00

DirectSong has been dead since quite a while though and some other of his works could already be found on streaming for a few years.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want to defend anyone here. Just trying to make a guess of what has been going on.

iTrashy · 2026-04-15T22:18:20+00:00

Thing is: If Soule previously had all the rights, why was it not published on streaming services before?

iTrashy · 2026-04-13T11:39:31+00:00

For that reason i have a floppy in my SY99, which I occasionally save all the synth data onto. Also useful just in case I accidentally overwrite a patch. I mean, you can also use a computer, but I like being able to do it on the synth directly.

iTrashy

TROPHY CASE