RACK As a source thru headphones jack on Mac mini

Lounge
1

So I decided to clean up my old Mac mini and use it for rack as a sound source. I’ll connect via 3.55m headphones output to Audio Interface, (There is a decreasing in audio quality while doing this?)

There is any other utility tools in rack for that kind of use?

Thanks,have a good day:)

2

The noise floor on a 3.5mm jack is going to be extremely bad. There is a lot of hardware available that will give better sound quality than a 3.5mm unbalanced output!

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3

good to know. What hardware solution can you suggest ?

4

Depends on the setup / use / budget. What exactly are you trying to achieve beside sound quality. A second audio interface would be best, but just taking the audio stream from the display port would probably be a good solution depending on if the display port supports audio that is. Need more info…

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5

I’ve never tried it personally but check out AUnetsend

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6

I achieved my goal, Make it running without noticeable hum, Actually the audio is pretty clean.

Thanks for the help,:slight_smile:

7

Oh man i Never checked what that Plugin do, Maybe it will save me a Running Cable in the room. Thanks :pray:t4:

8

Aunetsend needs a AunetReceive and can be loaded only in Logic Pro x, but there is other ones doing this-amazing but nor for me- better using a cable than trust on internet connection :smile:

10

To clear up some things… it depends on the cable connected. If your cable is of low quality, which is not an unlikely scenario given the information received in the topic. In most cases when connecting from one output to an interface the cable used is probably going to be long and of low quality. When I say more info needed these are the things that need to be taking into account.

A headphone jack is not supposed to be used for line-out. When you take a headphone jack and bring it up to line level the signal is boosted to line-level and thus noise floor increased. The length of the cable also increases the noise floor. Cables on Headphones are short, are usually gold plated and usually have been optimised / tested for a headphone output which means you will not hear the noise in your headphones when they are of high quality even when they are low quality.

If a headphone output is connected to line in, then one of the first things to do is boost the source audio so the noise floor is negated when increased to line-level. If a cable needs to be long then use a gold plated high quality cable or shorten the distance or don’t use headphone output.

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