Hum Eliminator? Noise Gate? What to quiet my rig?

[dialtone]

I am looking to Quiet my rig, Do Hum Eliminators cancel alot of unwanted noise? What about a Noise Gate, What are the advantages/cons of each?

[homerecor]

Are you using all balanced cables? If you are not, that may be the cause of hum and buzz. Balanced cables are designed to reject outside electrical interferance. Unbalanced cables invite it in. But then, maybe you already knew that. If you use quality components and cables, your system should be quiet.

[dialtone]

Is there a way I can look at the cord and tell if it is unbalanced or not? I know that on Unbalanced Neg and Ground share the same path, could I unscrew the fastener by the quarter inch plug and tell by looking at that?

[fldrummer]

A balenced connection has a postive negtive and ground wire. Cables like XLR and TRS(look like insturment but have a tip ring and sleeve like a stereo cable)

Cables like insturment cables have a postive and ground which are called TS(Tip Sleeve)

[Blue Bear Sound]

Originally posted by fldrummer
A balenced connection has a postive negtive and ground wire.

Well.... more precisely, it's 2-conductors sharing a common ground... ie, 2 positives and a ground.

[fldrummer]

Oops, Sorry...I was still in the ballpark tho

[StevenLindsey]

Depends on what kind of rig you're talking about and what kind of hum you're talking about. If it's ground loop hum....60 cycle hum from your line, a Hum Eliminator might do the trick or maybe just changing where you're plugging your stuff in. Check your ground on your wall socket. Plug all your stuff into the same circuit. If you're talking about a noisy, high-gain guitar setup.....a Behringer Denoiser is absolutely great. If you're talking about hiss from noisy preamps and mics, get a good quiet preamp and a quiet mic and used balanced cabling if applicable.

[eeldip]

my guess is that unless you are running 100 feet or so of cabling, your problem isnt balanced v. unbalanced.

as someone said, hum and noise are two pretty different issues... perhaps you have both?

two different cures.

for hum you need to isolate the ground loop or just dont use your hum source, for noise you have to identify your noise source and possible upgrade/replace/avoid it.

i am in the middle of building a little hum isolation box myself to deal with the grounding issues of my effectron and spring reverb. pretty simple thing to build, mabye $20 job if you get the transformers from ebay.

the jensen transformer site has the schematic. before you get scared, the schematic consists of like 3 parts. anyone can build one. basically you just hook the audio up to the transformer, and put a little cap and a little resistor on the ground....

about as hard as makin cables.

as for noise issues, are you recording digital? for me, i have a bunch of things that i love the sound of, but are a bit noisy. i just record them and deal with all the noise gating at the computer. it is something that computers are great at... stripping silence, auto fades, noise gates (computers know the future).