First off, hello Long time lurker here, but finally decided to make an account.
So my current setup has a late 2013 Macbook Pro Retina playing FLAC or Tidal HiFi through Audirvana Plus through USB to my two DACs, a HRT Music Stream II+ that I had since college (excellent for its price btw) and a Audio-GD NOS-11 I picked up just last week. The signal is then amplified through either of the 3 headphone amps that I have (NOS-11 built in amp, or Schiit Asgard 2, or Little Dot Mk. III) and played through the Audeze LCD-2 that I had for years.
With the new NOS-11, I am starting to hear A LOT more details than I used to able to with my older gears, particularly after some mild EQ through VST plugins such as BMG Equilibrium or TDR Nova that bumps up the treble by 3-5 dBs. However, I also started to notice that the EQ processing would create occasional artifacts, which sounded like a very faint popping noise. This tends to occur every minute or so during playback, and quite distracting for musics with high dynamic range and/or low volume sections.
This occurs during any EQ'd playback, either through using the VST plugins through Audirvana or just the through Soundflower and AU Lab, so I am inclined to this is caused by the noise on from the computer's motherboard and such. Problem goes away if I disable the EQ plugins, or just use my old Music Stream II+, which just aren't transparent enough for faint details such as this.
So I am just wondering if there is any way to reduce such noise/artifacts from occurring... LCD-2 sounds just so much better with some minor EQ...