#Usb 3.1 card for mac pro 5.1 upgrade#
#Usb 3.1 card for mac pro 5.1 series#
#Usb 3.1 card for mac pro 5.1 windows#

Why adapt when upgrading offers more? With the Sonnet Thunderbolt 3 upgrade installed you get: There it is, a 5.Connect computer to one port on your Thunderbolt 3 upgraded system and daisy chain up to 5 additional Thunderbolt devices (plus two 4K monitors or one 5K display, or one USB device) To identify which channel is which speaker, click on it and white noise will play through that channel only, click again to turn it off.Īfter this you are no longer able to use the keyboard buttons to control the volume, but the speakers probably have a volume control of their own. (Google for more info, or just test the different settings)Ĥ) Click 'configure speakers', select Multichannel and fill in your setup. You can also change the sampling rate, the relative volume, the master clock device and whether you want drift control to be activated. With this program it's possible to combine any number of connected sound devices into a single virtual one.ġ) Click the small '+' symbol at the bottomĢ) Choose one of both options (with aggregate device you can combine any number of inputs and outputs, with multiple output device it's only outputs)ģ) Select the aggregate device, and tick the boxes of the three sound cards. To do this you have to open an application called Audio MIDI setup, located under Utilities. The diameter of 5mm is just small enough for the cap to fit inside the sound card's casing, and the fc is below 1 Hz when used with an amplifier, which is more than low enough! For use with headphones, I suggest not going below 470uF. I went with a 47uF radial electrolytic capacitor. If you plan to plug a pair of headphones into the sound card, a very high capacitance will be needed, since the impedance can go as low as 16 Ohms. For use with an amplifier, typical input resistance is over 40 kOhms. The design tradeoff you have to take into account is the following: a higher capacitance means a lower fc, but also a bigger capacitor. However, if the cutoff frequency (fc) is too high, the lower audible frequencies are also attenuated and there will be no bass present in the signal. This means that a frequency of 0 Hz isn't passed through to the output of the filter. The frequency response is given in the picture above. You'll want the capacitance value to be sufficiently high, because we're in fact making a high pass RC filter where the resistance is the amplifier input impedance.

#Usb 3.1 card for mac pro 5.1 series#

In order to filter this DC-component out, and have only an AC audio signal going to the speakers, a capacitor needs to be placed in series with the output. Therefore the amplifier output has a DC voltage component of 2.5V. This is because the inbuilt opamp needs a symmetric power supply, so a virtual ground is placed at half the maximum voltage of 5V. If you don't add them, you will hear a very loud pop every time you plug a speaker or a pair of headphones into the sound card. The manufacturer has made a placeholder for them, but instead of soldering the capacitors onto the PCB they just shorted the connections. In order to save money in the production of the sound card, no output capacitors were added. In the next step I will be adding output capacitors to the USB sound cards, here I'll discuss why that is necessary: For now, this is a Mac-only instructable. If anyone succeeds in doing this, please let me know in the comments and I'll add it to the instructable.

#Usb 3.1 card for mac pro 5.1 windows#

I've done a quick google search to find out whether it's possible to combine sound devices on windows computers, but no helpful results turned up. Using an expensive sound card to play music over a medium quality setup is like serving a Big Mac on a golden plate: it looks really nice, but it will still taste the same, and it's just wrong! This is far from Hi-Fi quality, but for a medium amplifier and speaker setup it's good enough. Specs on the sound card: 16-bit audio at a max sampling rate of 48 kHz. It would probably even be a cleaner looking solution. In retrospect they are a bit thinner than I had expected from the photos, and I guess it should be no problem to use a box-type usb hub. I decided to go for a cable-type of USB hub, because I wasn't certain that the spacing between the inputs on a box-type hub would be sufficient for the sound cards to sit next to each other. If your amplifier has RCA inputs, you will also need to buy three jack to RCA adapters. 3x cheap eBay USB sound card (3 x $1.00).The materials you need in order to complete this project are: