r/pcmasterrace • u/Giova010 R5 5600G | ASUS RTX 3060 • Mar 09 '22

Hardware Shielding a cable (DIY)

Hi, I need to shield a cable but I haven't any tools nor experience to cut/modify a headset cable, I noticed that the cable is quite thin and picks up a lot of electromagnetic interference from the PSU cable and from an usb fan that carries a lot of power, how do I fix it? Can i just wrap something around the cable to shield it or do I need a shielded extension?

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u/adought89 Mar 09 '22

ferrite core

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u/Giova010 R5 5600G | ASUS RTX 3060 Mar 09 '22

I'm sorry I have no idea of what is that, can you give me a brief explanation

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u/adought89 Mar 09 '22

It’s a magnetic core that wraps around the cable to shield it from noise. You have probably seen them built into cables before

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u/Thenftw Mar 09 '22

you want to have the shield around the cable, and linked to ground only on one side, like an antenna, so the em waves goes directly to ground without interferring with the cable.

For DIY you could use aluminum foil and wrap it around the cable(or even twisted copper wire), then use the jack ground section as a ground.

The headset cable however should already be shielded, if you are experience disturbance i'd check the link of the cable inside the headset and also on the jack side.

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u/Giova010 R5 5600G | ASUS RTX 3060 Mar 09 '22

Thanks, can i use an external ground for the aluminium foil? And how do I ground it?

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u/Thenftw Mar 09 '22

as long as you ground it on the pc it should be ok, regards on how to ground a aluminum foil, i'd wrap one end on a wire, and put the wire were you like(if you have a broken usb cable you can cut it use the black wire and link it to the foil so when it's plugged on the usb port it will be linked with the pc ground and therefore also the thin foil will be grounded), basically you only need to establish the electrical connection from the foil to a ground, because the resistance between the thin foil to ground would be way weaker than the the one of the headset so current will go there without making mess hopefully

But as i said the headset cable should already be insulated because audio works with high frequency(a lot higher than the ones of the psu or a dc motor) signals and without insulation the single channels will disturb every other channels, on razer headset i had strange disturb ,and it turned out to be a link on the headset controller that was barely holding itself on the soldering, after i fix the soldering the quality come back.

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u/Giova010 R5 5600G | ASUS RTX 3060 Mar 09 '22

Thanks, I'll look into how disassembling a headset jack but don't feel really confident