John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Folks,

I'm in the process of building out a home studio, and I'm starting to work on the plan for the equipment. We have several circuits running to the control room, each of which are star grounded. There are going to be a few racks of outboard equipment, and the plan is to put an UPS in each of the racks (I'm an IT geek in my day job, and I have been thoroughly convinced of the value of UPS's everywhere for up time, power filtering, and the like). For the DAW and I/O units, I'm good with the UPS selected -- those are all going to be in an ISO box, so the noise is more manageable. However, the other racks are open.

Does anyone have any recommendation for an online UPS that are quiet as possible and/or silent (fanless)? A rackmounted unit would be preferred, but not required. I'm very familiar with APCs and TrippLites, but data centers are so noisy that any given UPS is a rounding error when it comes to dB levels. For what it's worth, when I reached out to APC, their comment was that they would have few -- if any -- UPS units that would be quieter than ~40dB. Are there boutique UPS manufacturers for studio work?

Thanks in advance.

Most locations don't need full-time UPS units and their attendant problems.

Speedskater wrote:Most locations don't need full-time UPS units and their attendant problems.

While I appreciate that most do not, my strong preference is to have full time UPS units based on past experience with flaky power and expensive equipment. Any suggestions would be greatly welcomed.

If you are going to have a UPS at all, then I would put it outside of the studio. You might be able to get one that is quite when in standby, but when it kicks in it will be noisy.

- Stuart -