The latest loopop video focuses on a practical matter for musicians – ways to eliminate unwanted hums and buzzes from your setup.
The video covers 6 ways to troubleshoot and eliminate hum, buzz and ground loop noises.
Topics covered:
0:00 Intro
0:20 Use one outlet
0:50 Balanced gear
1:30 Isolators
2:30 Ferrite chokes
3:10 Using filters
3:35 Advanced tools
If you’ve dealt with other types of unwanted system noises, leave a comment and share your experience!
In the UK you can’t just remove the earth pin, because the socket won’t open without it. So “someone I know” just wrapped a piece of paper round it. This was back in the day… it was tempting because no-one wants to spend gear money on isolators and so on. Thankfully no-one was hurt.
There’s a trick for guitars that uses a dummy coil to cancel out noise. The coil has no magnets so it doesn’t pick up strings, but it picks up the noise, and is wired backwards so the noise common to the dummy and normal pickups is cancelled.
Similar tricks can be employed using other sources- like mics. Sometimes you can invert a noisy track to cancel noise on another track.
The earth is there to protect you against fault current aka to try and prevent you from harm if the appliance becomes live. Do not mess with it.
The best way to remove any earth loops is to connect all the equipments grounds together on an earth buss. remove the earth wire from each piece of equipment, and connect the reach buss to the supply strip you are using. But before you connect the earth Buss to the earth do a simple ohm meter test. between earth and that wire, should have many mega ohms on the display. i have used this technique on my stuff and. PA system i built for a club i worked as a front of house sound engineer. We never had any hum. Which was great for 15K, of course always had problems with guitarists.
I have come across many problems with earthing. i worked for a company they supplied equipment to factories all around the world. We had sold a couple of machines to a company in Korea. they had been installed but were giving erratic results. i was sent to try and fix them. Both machines were next to each other. I did a test by touching the metal work of each machine. I felt a slight shock. This told me there was a general earthing problem with the building. I turned the machines off, then did a continuity test between each machine and then between the machines an d a pipe near by, which should have been earth. An open circuit, but the pipe was earthed, this told me that the machines earth supply was not connected to earth, solution was to connect a large stake and put it deep inside the ground outside. Then turned the machines on. Instant result.
Connectors are very important as you probably know copper gets an oxide coating if it’s left in free air. the oxide acts like an insulator thus resistance. Volts and resistance equals current. So i have experiment with different connectors swapping out some equipment with coaxial connectors ptretty goog results. I am now trying to use light between each device which would give great isolation.