Snap, Crackle, Pop

F

Formyson

New member
We tried something different over the weekend and setup to record in a different part of our house. We wanted to see what our drum tracks would sound like in a much larger room with vaulted ceiling and all of us were pretty impressed with what we got except we were getting the dreaded snap, crackle and pop. I was sure it was a bad input connection and I tried to troubleshoot each mic one at a time. Long story short I could not figure out my problem that day. We decided to live with it since we are just playing around with a demo and I am now cleaning up the track files one at a time in the file editor.

Next day we start to play around with the bass guitar track. We had left the interface and Mac where we it had been setup the day before and plugging straight into the interface by itself I was still getting the snap, crackle and pop. It dawned on me that I may have some kind of power issue and sure enough, after running an extension cord to another room, all my problems went away.

I have not ever had to deal with this and I am curious why what I am calling some kind of ground issue would cause this. The Mac is just handling the file processing so I would not think it would matter and the interface does not seem to require a ground because the step down transformer that powers it only has a two prong plug. Hoping someone can help me understand this a little more clearly.
 
They are appearing on all five of the drum tracks and at random spots on the waveform. I double triple checked to make sure it was not a peak issue at the time and even have it in random spots of silence. I will see if I can bounce an earlier take (if they did not get deleted already) but I have already penciled them out on my final takes.
 
A bad ground would typically result in a hum. There's something on that circuit causing interference INTO the circuit. It could be as simple as a bad breaker.
 
Same circuit as a fridge or air conditioner? Something that switches on and off with heavy current draw?

Alan.
 
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