John Sayers' Recording Studio Design Forum Archive

Hey all,

You can see my full studio plan here, for reference.

Part of that plan is a ceiling cloud consisting of three 48”x24”x2” pieces of wrapped Owens Corning 703 in a wood frame. I want to dress it up with some LED lights in between, similar to the photos I’ve attached below.

I have a dumb electrical question, and if you can point me in the right direction I can probably fill in the blanks. But given the uniqueness of this situation I haven’t had any luck with Google.

I plan to put a 20A receptacle in the ceiling and I want to plug my lighted ceiling cloud into it. I’ll probably make it a switched outlet so that I can easily turn it on and off. I suppose I could forgo the receptacle and hard-wire the cloud but I’m all about future flexibility.

These small, can-less, LED lights (120v) have a driver box for each one and you just daisy-chain the wiring together into a string. But how do I take the last light and convert it into a three-prong plug? Is it as easy as buying a cord and connecting it to the lighting wires with wire nuts? Or do I need a transformer or something in-between the wiring and the cord? Again, these are 120V lights. My primary concern is safety/fire and I feel like something is missing.

Again, if you can point me in a direction I can do the follow-up research to figure this out.

Thanks in advance.

Todd

you could add a 3 prong lead to the power box, or if it has one, then the outlet in the ceiling would be switched. beware that the LED lights with all the converting HW for power in it may be electrically noisy. so you might test the product to see if there are EMI generated which would defeat a lot of the work going into your studio.

gullfo wrote:Beware that the LED lights with all the converting HW for power in it may be electrically noisy. so you might test the product to see if there are EMI generated which would defeat a lot of the work going into your studio.

Hi Glenn,

Dumb question: Is EMI still an issue if all of my audio gear is on high-quality, separate, dedicated circuits? I suspect the answer is yes.

I plan to have quite a few canless LEDs in the studio (nine arranged in three banks of three for a 21’ x 13’ room, not counting the little lights on the cloud). I do plan to use a Furman power conditioner for my most critical audio gear, but avoiding the interference to begin with would be the preferred route.

I’ll have to do some reading on which canless LEDs produce the least EMI.

Todd

definitely test if that is an option (order from Amazon and return etc) and see if they cause issues in your existing setup (if you have one).