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[Frank Koenig]

I’ve been doing this long enough that I should have known better. But here we are. Over the several years that I’ve owned a Sound Devices USBPre 2 I’ve chronically fought a weird crackling noise on playback. It’s independent of signal level, source application, sampling rate, type of source file (mp3, wav, Smaart’s pink noise gen, etc.), and every other variable I could think of. It could often be made to go away by replugging the USB connection (clue). I never heard it going the other way using the USBPre as a source (recording mode). It got especially bad the last few days while I was doing a full system reacquaintance (how do you work this thing?) and checkout.

Well, the title says it. I swapped USB cables and problem gone. I rounded up all my USB cables and they all appear to work fine except this one. Silly me to assume that digital connections either work perfectly or not at all.

--Frank

[Robert Healey]

I used to have huge stacks of various USB cables, most that came with devices and got tossed in the pile. A couple years ago, after seemingly never-ending issues with both production and non-production equipment like printers, I threw them all away and bought a stock of new ones from C2G. I haven't had problems with any of the new ones yet, but I figure I will have to do it all again at the 5-year mark. It involved spending a bit of money, but it was worth it not to be banging my head against the wall every time I connected a USB device.

[Brian Jojade]

Yup, faulty USB cables have been a thing, well even since before USB came out.

The part that sucks about a crappy cable is it might still WORK.  Things like data transfers will have checks and re-send failed data.  Files still end up transferred, they just might take longer, and you get no warning that you've got a crap cable making life miserable.

For something real time like audio/video transfer, resending the data isn't really an option and the result is crackling and noise.  But still no warning on the screen that the data stream is getting corrupted.  THAT'S annoying!!

[ProSoundWeb Community]