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5ibl1

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Mar 21, 2016
16
1
Hello,

recently I bought a used Mac pro '09 and I'm using my RME Fireface 400 with it. Everything is stable and working as it should except that every time I'm playing audio through the interface there's a high pitched tone ringing inside the computer. This ~8 kHz whistling is not loud but it's there all the time I'm playing something from the computer with or without the interface plugged to the speakers. I've tried changing the firewire cable and plugging the computer to another electrical socket and also unplugging everything else in case something was causing interference but nothing seems to affect this. There was also some unwanted noise (some kind of interference) coming from my speakers when using the interface bus-powered but with the power cable it's gone.

I've been using the interface for several years mostly with a macbook pro and never had this kind of issue before. Apparently this has been quite a common thing especially some years ago with OS X 10.6.3. With this hardware and El Capitan it's certainly back at least for me.

There seems to be discussion related to this but I don't know if a solution exists. Has anyone else had the same kind of problem recently and hopefully found a way to fix it?

I found a thread from last year about the same kind of problem where someone suggested to buy a firewire 400 PCIe card. Could this work for me? Now I'm using a firewire 6-pin to 9-pin cable.

Thanks in advance
 
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