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Montenegro, Podgorica
1 Level
688 Review
34 Karma

Review on πŸ”Œ Enhanced Connectivity and DisplayFlexibility: Cable Matters Certified Aluminum Thunderbolt 3 Dock with DisplayPort (Excludes Notebook Charging) by Keith Wolff

Revainrating 3 out of 5

Ground loop noise on audio interfaces

This Thunderbolt hub comes with a power supply that contains a ground loop that creates high-pitched hum in your speakers/monitors, and this is especially true with USB 2.0. connected audio interfaces. I am connecting a Steinberg UR44 USB2.0 audio interface to this Thunderbolt hub in my 2018 MacBook Pro. Macbook Pros since 2016 are completely unusable with USB 2.0 due to audio dropouts. So the only solution is to get an external certified Thunderbolt 3 hub (not one of the cheap options, but something like the caliber of this Cable Matters hub). However, plugging a USB2.0 device into this hub immediately causes ground loop hum and noise in my studio monitors. This has long been a common problem in PCs with cheap power supplies. The only solution is to use EBTech's Hum X or an unsafe 3 pin to 2 pin adapter available at any hardware store. Or if Cable Matters will replace the PSU with a clean one with no ground loop, but I doubt it. Aside from the ground loop issue, which might not matter to most consumers but is significant to anyone dealing with professional or semi-pro audio, this Thunderbolt 3-certified hub works as advertised and is a good fix for Apple's unnecessary Problem with the need for an external connection. ports and keys.

Pros
  • Good
Cons
  • Legacy model