Electric guitar hum hell
Posted: Wed Apr 16, 2008 4:17 pm
OK I'm a first time poster to this August forum so a little background. I'm a late 40's muso and studio guy. A shop teacher by day. I understand the basics of electricity and electronics. I know how to read a basic schematic and a multimeter.
Here's the deal. I have pretty cool home studio in a residential
neighbourhood here in Vancouver Canada. My studio is in the (just below grade) basement. For better or worse the electrics main panel sits on one of the external walls in my studio space.
In the interests of trying to get the best power I wired a dedicated breaker from the panel for only the studio. In order to suppress electrical rfi/emi I installed inline commercial power line filter(Nemic Lambic) power filter that came off a high end server.
Further more I've driven a 4 foot long 1 inch brass stake into the damp Vancouver earth and attached a #4 ga wire i.e. welding cable which I have star grounded .
All is for naught. Running my studio from either the pristine ? power or from a extension plugged into random circuits there is precious little difference.
Tonight's experiment:
I set an amp (Fender Stage Lead) In my back yard-at least 20 ft away from any thing electric. I tried plugging it in to various outlets through the house but the diffs were minor.
I tried four guitars and one bass. Guitars were a custom wired and copper shielded 65 fender jag, a copper shielded early hamer, a protone strat and a parker tele and finally a copper shielded profile P-bass copy.
In order to have objective results I used my dosimeter to measure the ambient noise output
of the various guitars.
No surprise the copper shielded guitars did d over all better. Overall ambient hums ranged from 73 db to 100 db but here is the burn:
I can take the same setup to work--where there is 3 phase power all around including some houge transformers 10 m from my office and the whole setup is quieter!
Everything else is dead quiet--this is driving me nuts!
Here's the deal. I have pretty cool home studio in a residential
neighbourhood here in Vancouver Canada. My studio is in the (just below grade) basement. For better or worse the electrics main panel sits on one of the external walls in my studio space.
In the interests of trying to get the best power I wired a dedicated breaker from the panel for only the studio. In order to suppress electrical rfi/emi I installed inline commercial power line filter(Nemic Lambic) power filter that came off a high end server.
Further more I've driven a 4 foot long 1 inch brass stake into the damp Vancouver earth and attached a #4 ga wire i.e. welding cable which I have star grounded .
All is for naught. Running my studio from either the pristine ? power or from a extension plugged into random circuits there is precious little difference.
Tonight's experiment:
I set an amp (Fender Stage Lead) In my back yard-at least 20 ft away from any thing electric. I tried plugging it in to various outlets through the house but the diffs were minor.
I tried four guitars and one bass. Guitars were a custom wired and copper shielded 65 fender jag, a copper shielded early hamer, a protone strat and a parker tele and finally a copper shielded profile P-bass copy.
In order to have objective results I used my dosimeter to measure the ambient noise output
of the various guitars.
No surprise the copper shielded guitars did d over all better. Overall ambient hums ranged from 73 db to 100 db but here is the burn:
I can take the same setup to work--where there is 3 phase power all around including some houge transformers 10 m from my office and the whole setup is quieter!
Everything else is dead quiet--this is driving me nuts!