TOPIC: PWR-ICE125 white noise/hissing

Dear community,

I bought two miniDSP PWR-ICE125 and they both make a white noise/hissing on both channels. I tried everything :

- Checked if the ground is good ;
- Checked if this noise is caused by a input (AES-EBU, Ethernet,...) ;
- Tried to remove it by opening the jumper to reduce the sensitivity ;
- Checked if it's not my drivers ;

In fact, I checked everything I think of and there's still this white noise/hissing. Like it's oscillating...

My tweeter, connected to channel 2, has a sensitivity of 89 dB/2,83V/1m and my woofer 86 dB (channel 1).

I'm out of idea. Maybe those plate amps are that noisy?

Hi Bassaris, just to help double check....
I've found with two PWR-ICE 250, I have to make sure input settings in the plugin matches the input type connections and signal that I'm using into the amp (and making sure to use the center XLR input with digital) or indeed I get alot of white noise....and nothing works.
An analog input with a digital signal, gives white noise....a digital input with an analog signal gives funky noise...

Does your setup work, but is just noisy? Or does it not work and is noisy?

If it's the first case, I dunno. My system is quiet with a HF/VHF sensitivity of 118db....I would expect yours to be dead quiet...
If it's the second case, welcome to my club of always being able to somehow get settings wrong !

Hi captgnarly !

Thanks for the answer.

I'm in full digital and the input is correctly set to digital in the plugin.

My setup is working, but I got this strange noise, it's the 50 Hz from the power supply and its harmonics... Even with nothing connected but the power supply I got this noise and the master volume even at zero doesn't change a thing.

It's really strange, I received a third PWR-ICE 125 today and I got the exact same issue (even without any config loaded to it).

Is there any solution for it? I have also noising in two PWR-ICE125 amps, also withou t any configuration loaded there is a noise.

I can't speak to whether the noise I had on my PWR-ICE125 was identical or as significant as what you are experiencing. And for the record I did not find the noise to be in any way obtrusive when used with my lxmini speakers.

But for what its worth, I applied sheets of 3m AB5100S rfi/emr reduction sheets to my PWR-ICE125, and I found that the noise levels such as they were before, were reduced. I am very happy with the PWR-ICE125 devices itself in my application, and use the AES/EBU input, so was happy to spend on this.

Got mine from Mouser I think? more than a year ago, and even then it was no longer in production and the remaining stock was just being sold off. I don't know what the current equivalent is.

JayM wrote: can you give more detail on this? where did you apply exactly? any photos?

My apologies for the photo attached.



But essentially, most importantly I think, I have covered all 4 sides of the transformer.

I applied the material on top of the caps and chips wherever I could. There are photos of how others have applied the sheets to things like DACs or amplifiers, so if you google search, I am sure you will turn something up - that's all I did.

it is conductive on one side so I just made sure I was not touching any circuit board traces when I applied the material. That really is the only caveat to it.

I still recommend it, and I am definite in that I heard an improvement in low level info coming through that might have not before I applied the material.

Good luck!

Hi,

The issue is that the ICE amps want to have a very low input resistance.
The output resistance of the digital circuit is somewhat around 470ohm.

What you can do is to add an additional resistor in to the input stage about 100-200ohm.

These will increase the signal to noise ratio.
The bad side is you don´t get the maximum volume out...


Best regards