Eta follow up question because curious:
I’ve always been told when a street lamp has a loud buzzing/droning that it’s a bad ballast. Were they talking about a part within the transformer?
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I suspect “wine” is a typo but I don’t know what the correct word would be. Can you clarify?
Cheap transformers. It’s almost always the power supply that does this. Capacitors can make some funky noises when they discharge tho.
As others mentioned: you are usually hearing the “transformer” operate. A transformer takes one type of electricity and converts it to another type (ELI15: often they convert AC to DC and step down the voltage). The whine or hum comes from the fact that the transformer is physically vibrating while converting the electricity (ELI15: because it is a magnet and the core is getting pulled by the electromagnetic field).
It can be “fixed” by replacing it with a higher quality/newer transformer. It’s not practical to “fix” the existing one.
There are different types of noise from electronics but one you may be asking about could be from capacitors. Capacitors are electrical components that can hold some electric charge. In most common circuits you have capacitors constantly charging and discharging really fast, like thousands or millions of times a second. The actual functionality of the circuits are beyond a eli5 but most circuits will have this. For example the circuit driving the screen in your phone or the circuit driving your WiFi, they all have capacitors that are charging an discharging really really fast.
The noise you hear happens because there are some types of capacitors that very slightly flex when they are charged up. Since they flex and unflex really fast, they vibrate and it can come out as audible noise. It is just an inherent property of these components and it can only be fixed with good design, like mounting the circuit board to something that will absorb the vibration or tweaking the circuit to use frequencies that can’t be heard by humans.
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