star ground or balanced power

jdf · Post by **jdf** » Sun Dec 12, 2004 11:32 pm

hello all

i am building a studio in my basement and i am near the start of running
my wiring. almost all of my recording will be done on my daw and most of my processing will be done in the box as well. also, i will not have video gear.

so my question is what should i do? star ground or balanced power?
can someone clarify when to use what?

if it makes a diff. my service is 100 amp.

thanks in advance

jdf

Post by **Aaronw** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 3:12 am

Hi JDF...

Even if you do balanced power, I would suggest doing a star grounding scheme. I don't know how much gear you have or how well your power is or what all you have on the same power box. Do you HVAC or anything that will possibly inject noise into your electrical?

jdf · Post by **jdf** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 7:06 am

hi aaron

yes my whole house is on this box. including ac. i have two open circuits
that i will use for the studio(unless you suggest otherwise).

my only gear at this time is just my G4 and my Motu interface everything
else that i use to process is a plug-in.

do i even need to have balanced power or will a star ground take care
of what i need?

thanks
jdf

Post by **Aaronw** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 8:16 am

Have you looked under the Stickies above and been to Equi-tech's site? There's nothing cheap about balanced power. Fo as little amount of gear that you have, if you do get a unit, just get the small rack mount version. Really, you probably don't need one. But I would recommend a UPS w/ surge protection. I guess the main thing, if you're not having issue's w/ the power, you probably don't need to spend $1500+ for balanced power unless you have the budget. At some point I would like to have balanced power myself, but I doubt I'll really need it. At least for the time being.

The star grounding allows all ground points to have a central location where they all meet. See the stickies...

I don't know if that helped or confused you more. Steve could probably answer this much clearer. Balanced power is still farely new to me. I've known about it for years, but have never worked w/ it.

jdf · Post by **jdf** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 12:56 pm

that being the case, do you think that i should even bother with the star ground?

thanks again

jdf

Post by **Aaronw** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:39 am

The only thing different w/ doing star grounding, is running individual ground wires for each outlet and bringing back to a central location and also using isolated ground outlets.

I would say yes.

knightfly · Post by **knightfly** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:57 pm

I would go even further, and say DEFINITELY... Steve

jdf · Post by **jdf** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 12:38 am

thanks aaron and steve. i'll do that.

jdf