Legion 7 soundcard vs Topping E30 II lite and Topping L30 II perception

[HarmonicTHD]

Another question, assuming the soundcard is totally transparent, is there any advantage connecting the E30 II lite to the amp instead of feeding the amp directly via soundcard headphone jack, other than being very handy to work as preamp to my Yamaha HS7 monitors when not using the headphones?

See also my response above in order to find out (loop test). One needs facts and can’t make assumptions as the decision might be incorrect.

 

[cluster]

I will try to find a 3.5 mm jack double ended cable.

 

[kemmler3D]

Probably a rogue APO at work. This is not uncommon in OEM systems. It may be a good idea to disable all factory APOs. In some cases offending software may even need to be explicitly uninstalled (e.g. Waves Maxxaudio). On my desktop Asus board I had to disable the DTS headphone misimprovements as well.

Maybe? But it didn't install anything on any other audio devices... using a little FiiO DAC cured all my problems with that setup. This was my work laptop while I was working in the audio biz, so I had lots of opportunity to notice weird audio behavior.

 

[cluster]

See also my response above in order to find out (loop test). One needs facts and can’t make assumptions as the decision might be incorrect.

Hello again.

So I connected the external mic input from my soundcard to the jack output with the cable and tried a sweep in REW, the only thing I changed was the input and outputs to match them and to use L and R channels.

Here are the results and settings:

Any conclusions? It seems to have slight more bass near 20 hz.

 

[cluster]

And another with more detail in the subbass:

Maybe the impedance of the cable connected to the jack and mic is not very high? and causes this elevated subbass response?

 

[AnalogSteph]

You seem to have about 90% of THD if I am not mistaken, so it seems safe to say that the mic input is more than just a tad unhappy, and I would not trust your results much under these conditions. In the olden days, mic inputs used to be able to handle near enough the full line-out level, but with more modern chips like the ALC897 I've encountered a limitation to maybe half a volt. Try reducing your output level by 6 dB or so. If push comes to shove, some external attenuation (passive or by way of a headphone amplifier) may prove useful.

 

[cluster]

You seem to have about 90% of THD if I am not mistaken, so it seems safe to say that the mic input is more than just a tad unhappy, and I would not trust your results much under these conditions. In the olden days, mic inputs used to be able to handle near enough the full line-out level, but with more modern chips like the ALC897 I've encountered a limitation to maybe half a volt. Try reducing your output level by 6 dB or so. If push comes to shove, some external attenuation (passive or by way of a headphone amplifier) may prove useful.

The best I was able to do, tweaking the gains etc was this:

But the db to noise ratio wasn't very high.
Not sure what to make of this

 

[AnalogSteph]

Still absolutely terrible. I would probably go back to trusty old RMAA in this case and see whether that yields anything better. And inspect the soundcard's input settings, maybe the preamp gain setting is up to max. This is the kind of thing that I'd want to physically be at the machine for.

BTW, since you are not calibrated anyway, switch vertical scale from SPL to dBFS. Also, it goes without saying that a vertical scale exceeding 400 dB is not particularly useful unless you need to have the noise made by molecules as well as a nearby nuclear explosion all in the same graph.

 

[cluster]

Hello again

These are my settings, mic//input:

Output/speakers:

Additional details:

Like I said the setup is sound card jack > to splitter cable (3.5mm male to input 3.5 mm female and output 3.5mm female). I then connected the input to the output using a 3.5mm male to 3.5mm male cable I had from my old hd215 headphones. I start to think maybe the cable is compromised because a ps5 controller does not recognize the hd215 with this cable, even though it works normally with a smartphone or my pc....

 

[AnalogSteph]

Why do you need a splitter cable? Wait, that's a headset jack, right? If so, you only get a mono mic input, so make sure the whole shebang isn't shorting one of your output channels to ground. I mean, it should work the way you're showing it (Lch out, Lch in), but you just never know.

If you have doubts about the 3.5 mm cable, they can be checked fairly easily with a multimeter.

You can right-click the level field in device properties and switch between % and dB. In my Realtek, 100% is +12 dB, 82% is +6 dB and 55% is 0 dB, and at least the positive side appears to be all digital.

Your recorded noise level appears... quite high.

 

[cluster]

Why do you need a splitter cable? Wait, that's a headset jack, right? If so, you only get a mono mic input, so make sure the whole shebang isn't shorting one of your output channels to ground. I mean, it should work the way you're showing it (Lch out, Lch in), but you just never know.

If you have doubts about the 3.5 mm cable, they can be checked fairly easily with a multimeter.

You can right-click the level field in device properties and switch between % and dB. In my Realtek, 100% is +12 dB, 82% is +6 dB and 55% is 0 dB, and at least the positive side appears to be all digital.

Your recorded noise level appears... quite high.

If I get a new cable I will update the results, thank your input.