If you’ve heard the high-pitched whine or buzz from an electronic device when a current-carrying inductor is vibrating, you’ll know how unpleasant it can be. It’s common in all kinds of equipment, but it’s become a particular annoyance of late in hardware like PC power supplies, GPUs, and cooling pumps. There is plenty of hearsay on the web about which parts whine and which don’t, and [Lowell Wood] wants to get to the bottom of it.
To track the issue, [Lowell] has put together the Coil Whine Database. It accepts user reports on hardware, regarding the level at which coil whine is present. A score of 0 is given to a part that is inaudible in a quiet room, with higher scores representing higher sound levels. A part scored at 2 is audible working at a desk with the computer under load; a part scored at 4 is audible even when the machine or device is at idle.
For now, the database is largely empty—[Lowell] has just opened submissions, adding a report on their own ROG Astral RTX 5080 card for good measure. If you want to submit a report on a unit, either silent or noisy, that’s simple enough—just fill in the coil whine report form. Over time, submissions will hopefully grow, and it will be easier to get a good idea of what equipment whines and what is likely to operate silently out of the box.
The database aims to present a guide to what parts whine, and how much, noting that any given population of devices tends to vary. To that end, any given device won’t be reported on publicly until it receives at least 5 reports. To counter bias, reports of silent parts will be weighted higher, since it’s unlikely that people happy with their quiet hardware will be rushing to research this issue or report it to a database. Relevant files to the project are available on GitHub for the curious.
This database could be a great boon to the brigade of PC builders out there who like their machines to be as silent as possible. If that sort of thing appeals to you, it’s probably time you started researching passive cooling as well…
The parts causing vibration aren’t necessarily the parts causing noise. You want to stop the vibrations, and if you can’t, you want to dampen the noise.
The worst combinations are a vibration that hits a resonant frequency of something else, a flexing PCB for instance.
“To counter bias, reports of silent parts will be weighted higher, since it’s unlikely that people happy with their quiet hardware will be rushing to research this issue or report it to a database” – resellers will love this bias and use it to their advantage.
A big issue with this approach is that everyone stops hearing it once they get into their late 30’s, so how do you know a reportedly silent unit actually is silent, or just that the reporter no longer can hear that high?
The real solution is of course, wait a few years until your hearing goes :D
I still hear it in my mid 40s. Those teenager deterrents they have to stop them loitering still drive me mad and whine and high pitched buzzing drives me mad, especially CRTs. I can still tell if there’s one on in a house once I walk in.
I’ve had audio equipment with it and the seller thought that I was mad. I had to send an amp back 3 times before I got fed up and just fixed it myself. Spoiler, it was inductance in the transformer coil windings!
Not to mention those “ultrasonic” PIR devices that are supposed to keep cats away. Those things are usually really loud.
That’s exactly what I was just thinking about. There was one that was placed along my walk to work, and I looked at it once to see if I could find an off switch. Nothing stood out, and I had to get to work. Luckily I think it broke or its batteries died rather quickly and it hasn’t bothered me since. I’m mid 40s and was wearing ear buds while listening to music the first time its screech and clicks pierced my brain. That thing about not hearing high pitches later in life is perhaps just a myth, or at least it is highly dependent on the individual.
I’m in my mid-50s and I can still hear coil whine, and I know I’ve got high-frequency hearing loss.
Not everyone. Some people are smart enough to 1. not use headphones 2. use hearing protection even for trivial tasks such as DIY repairs or home improvement projects with power tools. Despite being 43 my hearing is still comparable to that of a teenager. Lady doing the test was quite shocked.
On the other hand, when stuck at traffic I sometimes pity those “tough” and stupid 20-25 years old guys doing roadworks with zero protection – stuff like cutting concrete with a 5 HP gasoline-powered saw. They will go deaf before they know it and they won’t be able to enjoy disco-polo anymore.
If you think your hearing is just as good as it was twenty years ago, you’re simply deluding yourself. Aging happens even if you avoid doing things to accelerate the process.
But hey, I’m sure you’ll live forever if you just avoid getting injured!
Surely no one has ever experienced life in a way different from you, right? I mean you’re the model of perfection, so anything anyone else says should just be brushed away as delusion.
Not sure how you get from “I’m old, and it’s coming for you too” to “I’m a model of perfection”. Maybe you should get your eyes tested too?
In countries where people drive on the the right side of the road (driver sits on the left side of the car), people tend to have hearing degrade faster in the left ear. Apparently just the buffeting from an open window is harmful.
citation needed
There is very high pitched coil whine, and there is lower frequencies coil whine, it all depends on the frequency the device is putting in the coil I suppose.
I bet there is coil whine no human can hear but dogs and cats can.
In short, with age you probably have less chance getting annoyed by it (because they tend to use high frequency switching more often) , but only less.
You could of course start a discussion on when the word ‘whine’ gets replaced by ‘hum’.
I’m over the senior discount age at many local establishments. Not 15 minutes ago I was noticing the sound that came from my 50″ TV/Monitor 4 feet away was changing as I displayed different documents.
Granted, it’s a cheap cheap cheap, old, whitebox, trash-picked and repaired dumb TV, so it may just be exceptionally loud. But I’m taking it as a win that I can still hear that. :-)
Ah, you forget, marriage is the leading cause of deafness in men!
Now, I agree, sometimes a part is quiet, but boards, harnesses, side panels, etc. can resonate. Thin self adhesive felt between parts can fix that.
I’ve recently assembled a PC with a PSU costing 300$+. Was surprised in how unpleasantly this 1650W whines.
Great initiative! I’ll contribute by adding the model of that PSU. And try to get a refund if I have time
Is this what is happening when I’m watching tv and something white comes on screen? It makes a terrible high pitched whine when the sound is off or low (probably masked when volume is set higher).
Probably. White requires a higher current and it’s likely the switching power supply. I’ve seen (or rather heard) that a few times with switching power supplies when theyre at their upper limits.
Indeed, and certain technologies are worse at it. If your TV is LCD with the fluorescent side lit backlights, they basically all whine as the ballast ages. LED is less likely to whine, but their switching power supplies can start to whine as the capacitors start to crack. Some less than optimal values on capacitors and resistors can cause ringing as well. That can also be due to aging of he passive components. If you ever open it up, check the electrolytic bulk capacitors first as they tend to dry out over time, then check the surface mount capacitors.
maybe would be cool add an reference app to submit a spectrum, and a record with a specific reference sound in aproximate distance (something like “recorded from 1m of the device with galaxy s9 playing california dreaming in volume 6)
It is not always necessarily just inductors; some capacitors can also be surprisingly “loud.”
This.
Monolithic ceramic SMD capacitors operating at the resonant frequency of the PCB. I couldn’t hear it, but customers wives and children were driven nuts.
There’s a reason they also offer them with the little folded metal legs.
Good point yeah, and now I wonder if there are other more obscure parts that whine.
Sometimes it’s hard to pinpoint which part is doing it, and I know about caps and coils but surely there are more parts.
I think old incadescent light bulbs sometimes make a noise, but seeing the wire in it is coiled I suppose you could call it coil whine :)
Our experiences of sound vary widely from person to person, especially at high frequencies. These personal submissions are far too subjective to be useful at all imo, even if the parts themselves put out identical noise between units.
Ideally you’d want everyone to use the same audio equipment and recording methodology, then give a score based on the volume level at say 20k-40k hz that the equipment recorded. Then I might be able to determine that if a part produces x decibels at y frequency it’ll bother me personally.
I’m sorry, but I can’t see much value in a database of randos saying a part whines or not. One guy can barely hear 15k and nothing whines, some superhuman can hear 60k clearly and everything drives her nuts so she submits it all. Unless you get some objective data I feel this is a waste of effort.
Yeah ok, just start your own db and tell people to buy a 2 grand certified device to measure it and include their proof of purchase.
For all we know your db might grow to 2 or 3 people!
The db of the article will obviously have some error rate, but the idea is to average it out, if 100 people say their brand X PSU whines we can get some confidence it’s an issue.
Although you do get that sometimes a brand gets popular to be suspicious/negative about, and then thousands will hear what is not there I admit.
I hear this stuff constantly and I’m above the age where it’s supposed to go away. Have examples of identical cards that exhibit it and ones that don’t – it’s all based on real but subtle interacting physical situations, from analog part value variation to soldering mechanics to board geometries. I have an LG BT speaker that emits weird modem like noise-core when charging, you can discern the battery charge state by the texture of the noise, (this is actually making it into the amplifier, so not exclusively acoustic).
Acoustic coil noise (and capacitor noise, particularly ceramic monolithics) varies even within given designs and parts. Boost-buck convertors are constantly ranging their operating frequencies. In audio equipment we often find supposedly “out-of-hearing range” oscillations mixing and down-converting into audible bands. Even more wonderfully this easily occurs across interactions of multiple pieces of equipment in a system, be that throughout a studio or within a rack or computer case – in some edge cases it may arise only with particulars combination of gear. Certainly the designers can be possibly be at fault for inadequate power-supply rejection – or it may be the interconnection layer that has insufficient ground bonding. “Sneak paths” are everywhere and the proliferation of power-efficient switching convertors in modern equipment makes the electro-magnetic environment very crowded with interacting fast signals.
Perfect use for smartphones mic and your “spectrum” app of choice to get a response curve, and if you place it in the same spot a change in amplitude.
Nothing like inductor whine to tell you its working. Better/bigger/more filter caps tend to smooth it out and quite it down.
Heck even little 10-100mA dc-dc converters you can hear with the right type of loads and in a super quite room (FCC testing chambers are a good example)
I use pwm daily, yet I cannot stand the whine and would love a practical solution. Whenever I start out on a project I know to just give it a deadstop loop where it gives more oomph to actually get things moving but that is a software fix notsomuch on the hardware side. I do find pwm highly useful in other applications but motors always make me wince lol. Interesting information though and a bit different than my own homespun theory into the whine :)
Sometimes, at extra cost, the inductor or transformer can be potted. When epoxy is holding the wires and laminations motionless, they can’t vibrate to cause noise.
Alternately, if the operating frequency can be raised above about 35 kHz, the sound will be inaudible to almost all people. (Pity the dogs.) However, being unable to hear the whine doesn’t mean it’s not doing damage.
I suppose this is something that should be tested to get UL certification.
LOL! In the mid 80s, I spent a goodly slug of money on a Sony Trinitron TV. The picture couldn’t be beat, but the flyback transformer emitted a godawful loud whining noise. I took it in for warranty service several times – lots of things were changed, but it didn’t get any better. The last time I picked it up, at a busy warranty serivce center, I insisted that it be plugged in before I took it home. It still made the same loud noise. I conducted a poll of the people waiting in line – they all could hear it. I then realized that the techs at this place were all over 50. Their hearing had rolled off to the point that they couldn’t hear it. I gave up at that point and gave it to a friend who had fried his high frequency hearing with rock and roll, and couldn’t hear it.
Its been our experience that switches work better if there is an inductor at the input, that isnt the same value as the switcher. This is to avoid resonance if some load waveform happens to walk through that frequency.
We also modified the famous LiteOn USB PSU to add one more cap and more potting. I couldn’t stand the noise either when I was 50.