Hi all! First of all, it’s my first time posting a question here, so I apologize if this isn’t the correct place.
Anyways, when I ordered my Mic of off Amazon, it came with this annoying “buzzing” sound, that wouldn’t leave. I got around to fix it by lowering the sensitivity of the Mic in both the Mac system preferences and in on audacity. That kinda fixed it, until I realized last week that it was my phone that was causing this buzz. Taking it out of the way fixed it for a year.
Now, the problem is different. Before, the Mic was doing this sound:
Yes, lowering the sensitivity helps, but not completely. Besides, it’s not that convenient to have the Mic doing that, and it is a problem that it shouldn’t have, therefore I’d like to fix it. It’s a CAD U1 USB Dynamic Recording Microphone.
Are you going through a USB hub or did you decide to invest in one of the new USB3 hard drives?
Put Audacity in monitor mode (click once on the red recording sound meters) and play the microphone into your headphones while you wave the microphone around or move the cable around. Squeeze the cable, roll it around your hand like you’re putting it away. Does anything at all change?
Close Audacity, unplug an replug the microphone completely twice. Restart Audacity. Still noisy?
I am using the Microphone straight into one of the USB ports. It did change a little bit from changing from the right most port to the most to the left.
Curiously, squeezing the cables like you said will indeed improve it quite a lot. It’s not 100%, but it’s getting there.
Also, it seems that the farther away that I am from the computer the less the annoying sound exists. I’ll see if I can record something to get the comparison.
That’s excellent. Not that it’s going to immediately cure your problem, but now you have a way to figure out what’s wrong. When I do these tricks to find a problem, it does look like I should be locked up or something, but it’s actually a valid trouble-shooting measure.
Take note what happens to the noise level when you move the cable and microphone around your desk. The most electrically noisy thing on your desk is likely to be the large screen on the iMac. There’s a lot of high-power things going on inside the screen and there’s no metal shielding between you and the screen electronics. You need to be able to see the screen.
If you can gently coil the cable, hold it tightly in your hand and get a significant reduction in noise, then the cable or one of the two connections (either end) may be going or gone. Your hand and arm are becoming part of the protective shield that’s supposed to be inside the cable.
No, of course, it’s not supposed to do that. There’s no way to change the cable, is there?
There is one other thing you can easily try. You may have lost the good, firm connection in the power plug. Gracefully shut everything down and pull the power plugs out of the wall and put them back two or three times. If you’re using a power strip, “exercise” all those plugs as well. Do you have three-prong plugs in your walls? Turn everything back on.
Make sure you shut down your printer correctly before you do this. The computer will get very cross with you if you pull the power plug while it’s on, but you can damage the printer.