Time to educate some of the newer Sneapsters who don’t know what this one is, for I had no clue what it was until yesterday.
Since I built my new computer I’ve been experiencing some rather irritating noises through my sub. It drove me mad, mad to the point where one night I spent around 6 hours fucking about trying to isolate the issue. I’ve also lost a good few hours of sleep thanks to it, but alas, I have fixed the blessed thing.
Now, turns out this is apparently a very common problem- have you guys ever heard hard disk noise or mouse movement noise through your speakers and been extremely pissed off by it? A 60hz annoying hum through your speakers or amplifiers? Scrolling up and down to screeches in your web browser? You’ve probably got a ground loop or electronic insulation issue.
The main problem is extremely weird, and arises from the differences in power points around your house/studio. Each power point around your ghetto is essentially supplying dirty power, fluctuating up and down slightly all the time. These fluctuations are not great enough to cause an actual outage in your gear because electrical items have a fairly large range in which they can actually operate. However, this can certainly fuck majorly with your audio systems.
I had my A7’s and computer powered off one socket, and the sub and a variety of other crap off of another. Because it is all connected together in a loop of sorts to make it actually work, this was enough to cause it. Socket 1 was obviously fluctuating up and down, and so was socket 2, creating a horrid power variance in my system, which was reflected through the speakers.
Anyway, step 1 is to make sure all audio cables are at least 5cm away from any power cables you have. Step 2, a simple one- route all your gear into the same plug socket (be careful not to overload it). A power conditioner can come into play, smoothing out these voltage spikes but wont necessarily fix it. From a brief search, Marcus used an ebtech Hum X to solve his issue back in 2008- a $70 solution though which is a bitch, but could be a great investment.
There are some great videos on youtube about it, especially taylor guitars. Here is a pretty cool one:
Hopefully this will serve as a useful and time saving post for people with the problem in future.
Since I built my new computer I’ve been experiencing some rather irritating noises through my sub. It drove me mad, mad to the point where one night I spent around 6 hours fucking about trying to isolate the issue. I’ve also lost a good few hours of sleep thanks to it, but alas, I have fixed the blessed thing.
Now, turns out this is apparently a very common problem- have you guys ever heard hard disk noise or mouse movement noise through your speakers and been extremely pissed off by it? A 60hz annoying hum through your speakers or amplifiers? Scrolling up and down to screeches in your web browser? You’ve probably got a ground loop or electronic insulation issue.
The main problem is extremely weird, and arises from the differences in power points around your house/studio. Each power point around your ghetto is essentially supplying dirty power, fluctuating up and down slightly all the time. These fluctuations are not great enough to cause an actual outage in your gear because electrical items have a fairly large range in which they can actually operate. However, this can certainly fuck majorly with your audio systems.
I had my A7’s and computer powered off one socket, and the sub and a variety of other crap off of another. Because it is all connected together in a loop of sorts to make it actually work, this was enough to cause it. Socket 1 was obviously fluctuating up and down, and so was socket 2, creating a horrid power variance in my system, which was reflected through the speakers.
Anyway, step 1 is to make sure all audio cables are at least 5cm away from any power cables you have. Step 2, a simple one- route all your gear into the same plug socket (be careful not to overload it). A power conditioner can come into play, smoothing out these voltage spikes but wont necessarily fix it. From a brief search, Marcus used an ebtech Hum X to solve his issue back in 2008- a $70 solution though which is a bitch, but could be a great investment.
There are some great videos on youtube about it, especially taylor guitars. Here is a pretty cool one:
Hopefully this will serve as a useful and time saving post for people with the problem in future.
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