EMI or some like it

  • Thread starter Thread starter brendandwyer
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brendandwyer

brendandwyer

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I'm having a bitch of a time isolating the cause of some nasty interference creeping into the audio chain in my setup.

When i boot up the Mackie SDR, i can hear the EMI representation of the hard drives spinning in the monitors. When i turn everything up there is definately EMI noise present in the mixer.

I have everything patched to bays. The Dsubs from the mackie are patched to the bays, then normalled to the 32-8's tape returns. When i unplug the Dsubs, the noise goes away. Obviously there is a problem in either the bays, or the dsub cables. If is present in all 3 (8 ch) dsubs. When i swap they are still there. I swapped bays, it is still there. I moved the mackie into another room, still there. I don't run inputs through the mixer so thankfully, none of this garbage has made it onto the indiv. tracks, but when i mix down, it's in the mix. which is not acceptable.

Any advice besides, unplug everything until you find it? Caus i've done that, and i've narrowed it to the connections between the mackie and the bay. Bu because i've swapped everything and no improvement, i'm still stuck.

Shanks
 
Are you running balanced cables?
If so, are you sure the Mackie supports balanced connections on the ports you are using, as well as the patch bay?

I'd try bypassing the patch bay, and try different cables. Also maybe try relocating the power supply's location.
 
brendandwyer said:
I moved the mackie into another room, still there.
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Brendan,

I'm assuming you're referring to the SDR here? If that's the case, I'd hazard a guess that the spin-up noise and the persistant mix noise have two different sources.

You might have one of those bad batch of 32-8s that xstatic was complaining about a few threads ago that has a noisy mains buss that needs repair.

G.
 
glen, i recently did a re-patch of the studio and the problem did not exist prior to that. I think i can rule out the 32-8 because with all channels muted, and say a cd player playing through the ext input, there is no noise.

I'm thinking now that i mistakingly bought a couple of unbal patchbays. i will yank them out and repatch using a balanced bay to troubleshoot. Plus, the power supply is close, so i'll remove that to the machine room anyway. Thanks guys. i'll let you know what works and what doesn't
 
brendandwyer said:
glen, i recently did a re-patch of the studio and the problem did not exist prior to that. I think i can rule out the 32-8 because with all channels muted, and say a cd player playing through the ext input, there is no noise.
Click to expand...
Glad to hear that, that's good news :).

Yeah, I'm with you and tarnation. Good luck with the troubleshooting.

G.
 
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