Recording in a cold room

  • Thread starter Thread starter James K
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James K

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Hi,
I'm doing some recording today and my studio is freezing cold (and I can't really afford to put the heating on). Is this going to be a problem and is there anything I should do about it? I don't want to risk damaging my machine.

Thanks
James
 
I dunno what temperature range you're looking at but it might be worth starting it up early to give the equipment a chance to warm up, say 30. Analogue electronics tend to be rather temperature-sensitive - oscillators in particular will drift in response to it.

Depending on how much kit you have you may find it warms the control room up nicely anyway - 2 decks and a dozen rack modules make my study the warmest room in the house.

Beyond that and the fact that Quantegy tape prefers being kept between 4 and 32 degrees Celsius, it's not something I've done much of myself.
 
Thanks,

I've switched everything on to warm up. It's a pretty big room so I'll probably still be cold though.
 
The official word is that the equipment is designed to work at room temperature so if things do not work well such as shifting levels then you can not blame the machine. Do some trial recording in the warm up period while you try to stabilize the machine. Electronics usually like the cold but then this Teac stuff is not built with Mil grade temperature components. Some products over time will fail due to excessive heat so you will have this beat at least for now. If you do some testing and see that the machine or recording process goes well then don't worry about temperature. on video equipment with helical scan drums the temperature might be an issue as the dew sensor would keep the machine from running. If you have any ADat that could be an issue to be dealt with.
 
James K said:
Hi,
I'm doing some recording today and my studio is freezing cold (and I can't really afford to put the heating on). Is this going to be a problem and is there anything I should do about it? I don't want to risk damaging my machine.

Thanks
James
Click to expand...

How cold are you talking about exactly? 10 Celsius (50 F) is not too cold for recording equipment, but might feel cold to a person sitting in it.
 
Yeah, it may even help prolong the life of your equipment because they will run cooler than in a warmer room. Heat and electronics are not friends.

Cheers :)
 
There is a chance that the low temperature will reduce the self-noise of your audio equipment :)
Read about Johnson–Nyquist noise in Wikipedia :)
 
About the only domestic electronics that were affected by cold AFAIK were portable radios, carry about and especially car radios (which were outside all the time of course) .

The local oscillator necessary for a superhet receiver would fail to start at near 0C temperatures. I had an old Ford radio that would never work for an hour or so in the winter until the bulkhead space got warm enough.

It is possible I suppose that a tape machines bias osc' could fail to start at very low temps' but since most are "push pull" not likely.

Low temperatures have little effect upon thermal noise, at least at temperatures humans can endure! Dropping a 200Ohm R from 20C to 0C result in the noise going from -129.67dBu to -129.978dBu a massive noise reduction of 0.11dB!
In any event, the biggest noise bug for you analogue chaps is tape hiss and that is not temperature dependent!

I know only too well the cost of keeping warm but I would have thought quality of work would suffer along with the suffering?

Dave.
 
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