Hi all,
I'm new to this forum, so please be gentle with me.
My setup is a Dell Inspiron laptop with an Echo Indigo PCMCIA audio card for recording, the output of which goes to the TAPE IN inputs of my little Behringer Eurorack mixer. The TAPE OUT outputs of the mixer go to the input of the audio card. I have some Sony monitoring headphones, a mic, guitars, etc. Everything's been peachy up until now.
I went out today and bought a pair of KRK TR5s for monitoring. (Regardless of what you think about those speakers, they fit well with my music and I thought they sounded the best to me. I'm not here to fight over monitors--I got bigger problems.) For starters, I hooked them up to the control room outputs of the Eurorack mixer via 1/4"-RCA cables and used the unbalanced inputs of the monitors.
Anyway, everything is fine when the laptop is running off the battery. There is no digital noise whatsoever. The output from the monitors is nice and clean. The problem comes in when I plug my laptop's power supply into the laptop. All of a sudden, there is a TON of digital hash and noise from the soundcard output. I notice the very same thing when I hook up the TR5s directly to the soundcard output rather than taking the output through the mixer. When I plug my monitor headphones into the soundcard output, I don't really hear the noise. It just dawned on me now that the noise is probably more prominent in the monitors due to the fact that they are amplifying everything at the input, whereas the headphones aren't.
I am aware that switching power supplies are noisy little beasts, but there's really no way I can record using battery power alone--the CPU usage with all the verbs and compressors I throw on the tracks takes a lot of juice.
So what should I do? My first instinct is not to blame the cabling. I figure that the PCMCIA soundcard, being powered by the laptop supply, is picking up all that nasty crap, and I should be using some sort of external USB device. Furthermore, I believe I should get an externally-powered USB device, you know, one that uses a little plug-in wall wart (or, better yet, a 9V battery or something), so that it won't use the power on the USB line, which, after all, would still come from the laptop.
I humbly ask for any advice or assistance:
1. Does my hunch sound correct? If so, can anyone recommend a fairly decent externally-powered USB audio device (better yet, one that maybe takes batteries)? I don't need much in the way of features--just a stereo 24-bit input and output would be fine, though I'm open to other features, and of course, good driver support for XP.
2. If someone suspects something else, maybe the cabling, or some other techniques I should try, I'd appreciate it. I've tried relocating the laptop power supply to different outlets, trying different cabling, etc., with no success. But as soon as I pull that laptop power supply and go on battery power, everything is clean as a whistle.
Thanks all,
chikin
I'm new to this forum, so please be gentle with me.
My setup is a Dell Inspiron laptop with an Echo Indigo PCMCIA audio card for recording, the output of which goes to the TAPE IN inputs of my little Behringer Eurorack mixer. The TAPE OUT outputs of the mixer go to the input of the audio card. I have some Sony monitoring headphones, a mic, guitars, etc. Everything's been peachy up until now.
I went out today and bought a pair of KRK TR5s for monitoring. (Regardless of what you think about those speakers, they fit well with my music and I thought they sounded the best to me. I'm not here to fight over monitors--I got bigger problems.) For starters, I hooked them up to the control room outputs of the Eurorack mixer via 1/4"-RCA cables and used the unbalanced inputs of the monitors.
Anyway, everything is fine when the laptop is running off the battery. There is no digital noise whatsoever. The output from the monitors is nice and clean. The problem comes in when I plug my laptop's power supply into the laptop. All of a sudden, there is a TON of digital hash and noise from the soundcard output. I notice the very same thing when I hook up the TR5s directly to the soundcard output rather than taking the output through the mixer. When I plug my monitor headphones into the soundcard output, I don't really hear the noise. It just dawned on me now that the noise is probably more prominent in the monitors due to the fact that they are amplifying everything at the input, whereas the headphones aren't.
I am aware that switching power supplies are noisy little beasts, but there's really no way I can record using battery power alone--the CPU usage with all the verbs and compressors I throw on the tracks takes a lot of juice.
So what should I do? My first instinct is not to blame the cabling. I figure that the PCMCIA soundcard, being powered by the laptop supply, is picking up all that nasty crap, and I should be using some sort of external USB device. Furthermore, I believe I should get an externally-powered USB device, you know, one that uses a little plug-in wall wart (or, better yet, a 9V battery or something), so that it won't use the power on the USB line, which, after all, would still come from the laptop.
I humbly ask for any advice or assistance:
1. Does my hunch sound correct? If so, can anyone recommend a fairly decent externally-powered USB audio device (better yet, one that maybe takes batteries)? I don't need much in the way of features--just a stereo 24-bit input and output would be fine, though I'm open to other features, and of course, good driver support for XP.
2. If someone suspects something else, maybe the cabling, or some other techniques I should try, I'd appreciate it. I've tried relocating the laptop power supply to different outlets, trying different cabling, etc., with no success. But as soon as I pull that laptop power supply and go on battery power, everything is clean as a whistle.
Thanks all,
chikin