Odd guitar setup - noise/power problem.

[Tesseract]

Yow peeps,

Wondered if someone can help....

Basically the setup I use in tesseract is a rack which consists of:
Power Conditioner
RME Fireface 800 Soundcard
POD Pro XT x2
Sound Sculpture MIDI A/Bs x2
A few EQ pedals, Boss noise gates, tc preamps etc...
Home made patch bay

The rack houses the pods and pedals for both me and the other guitarist. We each have a Mesa recto setup.

The nosie we're getting is some kind of earth problem but i'm not sure whats causing it. It's coming through both my amp, the other guitarists amp and both our pods. Also the lights in the rehearsal room cause more noise in the amps but thats probablly because the power is shit there.

I remember it was really noisy at one gig and we solved it by making sure both our amps and racks all ran off the same power supply ...from the power conditioner basically. I forgot to test this out again today at rehearsal...but im wondering if theres another way around this to fix it? Or to get to the root of the problem somehow?

Obviously & ideally yeah we'd each have our own rack and then a small rack for the sound card/laptop but at the moment this will have to suffice.

Any suggestions?

 

[Kadmium]

Try to make sure you're using balanced cables wherever possible, although depending on what's running into what, that might not be possible in your case. Really speaking, the only real solution is to start with as simple a configuration as possible (ie just the Recto) and add one piece at a time, to see what's causing it. Things with switching power supplies are likely culprits. Laptops are the most common cause.

Once you've found the problem, fixes include replacing its power supply, isolating its output with a transformer, running it off of batteries or doing without it.

Incidentally, best of luck with the album; we're all looking forward to it .

 

[Tesseract]

Ahhhh didn't think about the laptop power supply...will give that a shot at next rehearsal.

I've only used balanced cables in a guitar setup when i've reamped a few times. Do they work in pedals ok...swear i had problems once...maybe that was the TC preamp since its pretty old.

And thanks dude appreciate it! We should have 4 songs finished by next week. Few more parts almost finished then we're just gonna record two old songs and a newen. Almost there!

 

[Kadmium]

Only use a balanced cable when connecting a balanced output (Fireface, POD XT Live, possibly some effects units) to a balanced input (Fireface, possibly some effects units).

 

[John_C]

it's almost certainly the laptop power supply, they cause that problem all the time

running off one power socket can fix things, but you gotta be careful running too much gear off one as the Amps (as in amperes, not amplifiers) will start to get large