I have a PCIe PowerMac where the onboard card is noisy.

I used to use RCA to 3.5mm and the RCA was very noisy, so I went to 3.5 to 3.5 plug and it is better but still annoying.

Has anyone had this same issue?

Can you use the optical out on the PowerMac? That might solve my problem as well.

I thought about get a noise removed for RCA and using my thick shielded cables but wasn't sure what others have experienced..

Perhaps USB Audio would be better?

[ Edited by matt3 26.07.2023 - 19:56 ]

try a card audio compatible
else the capacitor perhaps or alim

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No noise here afaict on analog but I added optical out support for the PowerMac7,x machines back then for the standard audio driver which in theory should also work with the PowerMac11,x machines - case solved ...

Great news thank you!

I purchased new computer speakers that have optical.

Plugged it in and so far it doesn't work.

I think I have some junk in prefs that might be causing issues.

Right now I have a bunch of VOID: entries in audio as well as Unit 0:, Filesave:, and Apple12S:

Should I clear out my system somehow and test it again because of the void entries?



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Check the basics first. You should be able to see the laser lit up from the fibre - no laser, no output. Then you've got to make sure the formats align - unlike analogue, optical has a format (AC3/PCM/DTS, compressed, 2.0 vs 5.1, etc etc etc) and a bitrate. If any of these don't match with what the speakers handle you'll get nothing.

Unfortunately TOSLINK is a very old standard now and has almost been abandoned by the world, so getting it to spit out anything can be a challenge, and anything but basic stereo no better than analogue a problem even for modern gaming PCs. Everyone's moved onto HDMI for digital sound.

You could also have gotten an optical to analogue converter instead of the speakers, which probably would have handled more formats. But these are also pretty expensive.

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Hu. Can't agree with that. Any serious audio gear have optical in/out. TOSLINK is just a mechanical port standard nowadays. Most devices spit S/PDIF digital stream over the fiber.

There is indeed a shift to HDMI in computer products probably related to cost saving (removing a port? less expensive to manufacture and also less cable mess for the user...).

There is even products that extract the audio signal from HDMI to optical SPDIF. Most TV have optical out too...

Even a cheap as 'f' (sub 30€ USB audio card) UCA222 from Behringer features a TOSLINK optical out port.

TOSLINK ain't dead at all! :)

Thanks for the guidance, never dealt with optical before.

There is no laser light coming from the powermac so perhaps it is a driver or corruption?

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It simply is unsupported for PowerMac11,2 (yet). I already mentioned that I added it for PowerMac7,2/PowerMac7,3 (AGP G5 Macs) but that doesn't mean that it automagically works for PMac11,2 (PCIe G5 Macs).

No worries and thanks for letting me know.

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It's a bandwidth issue. TOSLink just never had enough to go up to 7.1, and its bitrates are pretty limited as well.

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Edit: Hadn't read cyfm's response.

Whatever damaged the soundboard and caused static could also have affected the toslink, perhaps by disabling the laser. I've known it to happen before with toslink ports.

But it's probably the driver.

[ Edited by KennyR 29.07.2023 - 21:23 ]

You can try a USB to Toslink adapter (I have one but it worked pretty bad with MorphOS last time I tried).