I’ve been working on a project for the Patch, and I’m consistently getting a fair amount of noise from it. It’s audible in the audio outputs, but also can be heard in audio coming out of my case (Intellijel 7U performance) when the Patch is just plugged in.
The noise seems to be of two types. One is a high-pitched whine which is definitely related to the screen. The number of lighted pixels on the screen affects the pitch – all-black is almost inaudibly low, and all-white is high enough to be hard to hear (with my ears anyway). In-between there’s very distinct variation. Rewriting my code to reduce the text on the screen quiets it somewhat, but paging through my menu, which results in different text on the screen, causes audible changes in the noise that are very annoying.
I can reduce the amount of stuff on screen but I’ve reduced about as much as I’m willing to and there’s still plenty of whine. I’ve tried to reduce the frequency of screen updates but that doesn’t seem to matter. Is there anything else I can do to mitigate the display noise?
Second issue is more typical electrical noise, also audible from the case when the Patch is plugged in. I’ve tried simplifying my setup down to just the case and a mixer, plugged into the same power strip, but that has no effect.
I’ve looked at most of the threads here about noise, but they mostly seem to focus on hardware design for using the Seed. Some discussion of firmware and distributing processing over cycles. I haven’t tried that yet, but nothing I’ve done to reduce processing or reduce the block size seems to make a difference. Also, the Patch is moderately noisy even when just running Blink. Trying a different case (4ms Pod) didn’t seem to make much difference either.
Let me give an example. My application is a drum kit, and there are 16 drum voices. I use the encoder to select a voice. Up to 4 parameters of the selected voice can be changed with the knobs – I display the current value of each parameter and a label to tell me what the parameter is. Some voices only have 2 or 3 parameters.
As I scroll through the voices, the ones with 4 parameters are noisier than the ones with fewer. I think the noise is higher pitched (and gets higher as more information is on screen). For the ones with less info I’m not sure if the noise goes away or if it’s just too low pitched to hear (or is covered by other noise).
Here’s an audio recording. The different noises are as I scroll through the menu, with different amounts of text on screen. At the end, the screensaver comes on (screen almost blank) and the screen-noise is reduced.
Thank you for the screenshots and the audio recording. We think that there’s something wrong with your Daisy Patch.
We are sorry that you received a faulty unit. We will be happy to go through an RMA. Please email us through here and we’ll continue on from there. Thank you so much.
I’d be glad if it’s a fault in these particular units and not a design issue! But I’m hearing about the same noise on all three of my Patches. This is one I bought last year and two I bought recently, where I had to send the Daisies back to you for replacement.
I’ll do a more exact comparison of the three units and see if they all sound the same.
I’ve tried them in two different cases (Intellijel 7U and a 4ms Pod) and, I think, connected individually. But I’ll check it over more exhaustively, each Seed in each case alone.
All 3 have a similar sound at similar levels plugged solo into the same case, the 4ms pod. I wasn’t able to test the Intellijel case as it’s full of modules, but when I last compared them, it didn’t make a difference.
I’m sorry I forgot to reply to your previous post.
Thank you for letting me know the version numbers. After I saw that post, I shared this thread to the engineers and they’ll look into this issue when they get the chance.
