Hey everyone! I received my XDR Display Friday (I was one of the first few minutes to order, originally had the December 20 - 30 ships by date, then strangely got an email a few days ago that said it was slipping to January 8 -11, but crazily it still arrived on the 27th.
I'm currently driving it from my new MacBook Pro 16" top of the line and it's GORGEOUS...
BUT - I'm experiencing a very strange noise issue when hooking up to external speakers. We do audio production, so we need nice studio monitors. I'm traveling now with it, so I don' have my home studio.
At first, I tried to hook up two external KRK Pro Studio Monitor Speakers just using the headphone jack of the MBPZ, and the audio distortion was horrible, it's like you can actually hear the computer thinking through the speakers - all kinds of interference (it even sounds like you hear disk writes and reads (which is silly because its an SSD, but you get the idea).
HERE'S THE DISTURBING PART - If I unplug the XDR Pro Display from the laptop, ALL DISTORTION goes away. Monitors sound fine. I was suspecting interference from the thunderbolt cables next to the microphone port - so I changed sides (power / display on opposite side of headphone jack), and distortion got a little bit better.
Hoping this was a microphone jack issue not happy powering studio monitors, I went and sprung for the latest version Universal Audio's $1000 Twin X USBC 3 Audio Interface, a studio quality audio interface that hooks up via USBC to your computer, then it has it's own external sound card and is now driving the monitors.
Sadly, about 20% of the sound noise and distortion is still there - they are constantly crackling and popping and giving "computer noise" (when you scroll through a web page or do something on screen, you "hear" it in the speakers as noise.). It's much better through the external sound card but still there.
AND AGAIn - HERE IS THE DISTURBING PART - if I disconnect the XDR Pro Display, all sound distortion goes away and they sound pristine and perfect like they should.
I'm starting to worry the Pro XDR display is causing interference issues - radio/magnetic/something - either through it's cabling or just in general giving off interference to the speakers. When it's unplugged, everything is fine, when it's powered up - speaker noise.
I will have to wait until I get back home to try on my studio setup by hooking up the display to iMacPro and different higher quality studio monitors... but this making me nervous.
Surely Apple tested the Pro Display with studio monitors near it.
Many are aware of the horrific issues the first LG 5k monitors had when they came out (they were Apples attempt to deliver a "supported" 5k monitor through LG when Apple discontinued their Cinema Displays and the first batch of them (until fixed 6 months later in version 2) had massive shielding issues - they hadn't properly shielded the monitor and it was causing all kinds of interference issues with speakers, wi-fi, bluetooth, etc. It was a disaster for Apple and LG.
I'm having nightmares this is the same issue all over again with a $5,000 display.
Hoping to hear from anyone else who will get an xDR and use in a music studio environment with studio monitors speakers, some kind of sound interface, etc, and see if they get the sound interference I'm getting when the display is connected.
