My drum track got RUINED by a bad ground loop mid-session

I was tracking drums in my backyard studio last Saturday around 2 PM, finally getting a good take on a song I've been working on for weeks. Everything sounded great through my headphones, but when I played it back on my monitors, there was this LOUD 60 Hz hum that totally buried the kick drum. I spent like 45 minutes unplugging every cable and isolating gear one by one. Turns out it was my cheap power strip daisy chained into an extension cord running from the house. I swapped it for a Furman power conditioner I got used for $60 off Craigslist, and the hum disappeared instantly. Has anyone else had major noise issues from their power setup in a detached shed or garage studio?

2 comments

2 Comments

wyatt_fox687d ago

Man, I've gotta disagree with you on this one. That Furman is just a fancy power strip with some surge protection, it's not actually filtering out ground loop hum in a real technical way. You probably fixed your issue by getting rid of the sketchy daisy chained extension cord, not by buying the power conditioner itself.

the_jenny7d ago

Wait, isn't a power conditioner actually doing something different than just a surge protector with the way it filters noise across the whole frequency range? I've seen plenty of setups where swapping out the cable alone didn't fix the buzz, but plugging into a proper conditioner did the trick.