Consistent, quiet but high pitched beep when recording.

P

PowerupPikawho

New Member
Sometimes when I try to record on OBS, I get a very quiet, but high pitched beeping. It lasts the entire time I'm recording and ends when I stop recording. It doesn't show up on Audacity, which I used to record my voiceovers, and as far as I can tell OBS itself isn't picking up the noise.


This beeping is driving me absolutely crazy. Please help.
 
The automated Log Analyzer found some issues that may or may not be related:

Analyzer | OBS

OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open source software for video recording and live streaming. Stream to Twitch, YouTube and many other providers or record your own videos with high quality H264 / AAC encoding.
obsproject.com obsproject.com

For anything beyond that, a recording would be nice if you can get one that shows the problem. If OBS does not pick it up, you might need an external recorder.

One guess is that you're using the internal audio hardware, which sits in the same electrically noisy box as everything else. Because everything else is digital, it's practically immune to all that noise, but the "last mile" audio path to your speakers or headphones is analog, and therefore *not* immune. So you're actually listening to your GPU and whatever else is active, in the extreme low-frequency ("sub bass", if you will) range compared to what those things are actually doing. (mid-to-high MHz and low GHz, compared to audio's low kHz tops)

To fix that, if it really is the problem, get a (good!) USB sound card. Get the analog part outside of the noisy box by some distance (a standard USB cord is more than plenty), and into its own box that is actually designed specifically to do that one job well. Don't just sort by price and pick the cheapest plastic cube that has USB and 'phone connectors, as those tend to use the same lousy chip that is designed to match the noisy box that it was originally meant to live in. Get something good instead, with some real engineering behind it.
 
Last edited:
I have a LOT of gain available in my audio rig, and I think I hear it. A kind of pulsating sound, about 1.5 to 2x per second?

That might be the result of two things that are different by that much. Either one by itself would sound like that but constant - they're close enough that we can't distinguish them - but when they mix, they produce a "beat frequency" that we hear as the entire sound coming and going.
That's also what happens when you hit two adjacent notes on a keyboard instrument, and is done on purpose with truck and train horns so that they're especially obnoxious and noticeable, except that the two components are a bit more different in those cases and so the beat frequency is a bit higher.

At any rate, it's probably the inherent noise that's inside the computer, and the only real solution is to keep the analog signal out of that "noise bath", as I said before.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top