Pinnacle choked USB cables?

[Gary34]

I’ve seen that some of the cables going from the pinnacle 510 capture cards to the computer have a ferrite bead on the cable and some of them don’t. Is there any improvement to using a choked cable there or does it matter at all?

[aramkolt]

Haven't done the tests myself, but plenty of capture cards use ferrite beads/chokes - including the Datavideo TBC-1000 on the inside. Chokes actually are multiple times more effective if the cable is wound multiple times around the ferrite core. The idea is that they dampen high frequency noise that may be present on the line from things like switching power supplies and various ICs. The actual noise you'd be trying to suppress should be visible on a high enough bandwidth oscilloscope if present, so you should be able to see it go away with the core if you've got the right type of core and enough windings.

[Gary34]

From what I’m reading the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD UPS that LS recommended has filters in it for EMI/RFI. I connect my capture computer and gear to that UPS. I Connect my card to a rear USB 2.0 slot on my computer. It should be really clean power so I’m guessing a ferrite bead wouldn’t really help there but it probably wouldn’t hurt either.

[aramkolt]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Gary34

From what I’m reading the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD UPS that LS recommended has filters in it for EMI/RFI. I connect my capture computer and gear to that UPS. I Connect my card to a rear USB 2.0 slot on my computer. It should be really clean power so I’m guessing a ferrite bead wouldn’t really help there but it probably wouldn’t hurt either.

It'll have filters for the input line power, but it won't really do anything for switching power supplies adding noise or wireless radio interference. Pretty much all power supplies have their own line filtering as well. The big one is that any sort of wireless radio interference can get onto lines if they aren't appropriately shielded as they can act like antennas. I've heard ham radio operators have to put ferrite beads on a lot of things that you wouldn't believe would be affected by those transmissions, but don't have experience with that myself.

Having everything connected to the same ground also helps to prevent ground loops which can cause some odd things.

I've even seen LCD displays add noise to video captures depending.

All of this would be a bigger deal if you live in a congested downtown metropolis like NYC, LA, Detroit, etc.