Hi Guys,
Thanks for the feedback. Actually, we ended up purchasing a couple of
DI's and all our problems went away :)
FYI Backyard Soiree's, a new series of headphone recitals (Brisbane,
Australia), ran a night of live coding earlier this week. We recorded
the performances and I'll try to put them online in the next day or two.
Cheers,
Andrew.
On 15/08/2008, at 1:48 AM, Kassen wrote:
> 2008/8/14 nescivi <nescivi_at_gmail.com>
> Way late reaction...
> but we did experience this problem in the C-Base in Berlin during
> the LAC2007.
> We didn't find a solution for it, other than playing one of the
> pieces from
> two computers with manual synching.
> Frank Barknecht's performance suffered completely from this and we
> didn't
> project unfortunately... but you could look at his screen instead...
>
> Yet later, I wonder now why I didn't reply before but it seems
> nobody so far pointed out the option of lifting the laptop's
> adapter's ground This is -in my experience with laptop performance-
> nearly always essential. The one exception seems to be some
> soundcards that can be powered using their own adapter but even then
> many situations benefit.
>
> Wherever possible keep lighting and sound on separate electrical
> groups, mainly because of light dimmers. This is what all larger
> clubs do. Of course for livecoding you may not typically end up in
> large professional clubs but you can "fake" it in more improvised
> situations running a long power-cable to the local kitchen. Kitchens
> (or bathrooms with a bath) tend to be held to higher grounding
> standards by law, I had good experiences doing that in some squats
> that didn't have a high electricity that was "clean" enough to run
> the notoriously sensitive MMT8 off. Yes, that will raise eyebrows,
> just do it, if at all possible find the socket meant for laundry
> machines and roll off the whole cable if you intend to power a PA
> off that.
>
> Also; DI boxes. I sugest always using DI's wherever available with
> the exception of the situation where your own mixer or soundcard can
> supply real ballanced XLR/ or TRS jacks to the PA.
>
> Some types of power plug can be inserted in two ways, even grounded
> ones (this is typical in the EU with the notable exception of
> Belgium). If you have hum it can help to take such plugs out,
> twisting them 180° and re-inserting which can bring different
> appliances in phase. Obviously there is no need for that in
> situations where you can't do that (grounded US / UK plugs).
>
> If none of that helps you can start randomly switching ballanced and
> unballanced audio cables around for especially supicious
> connections... which sometimes helps for hum but won't cure
> "crackles" caused by mishevaing latop adapters leaking to the grid
> and mucking up the sound of things like analogue effects (in my
> experience BBD's hate them).
>
> That's most of my hum-removal bag of tricks, perhaps it'll help
> people avoid some of the disagreements with sound-men and torn out
> hairs I had to have to build it up. If you only remember one thing
> of this list make it the lifitng of all laptop adapter grounds in
> sight.
>
> Yours,
> Kas.
>
Received on Thu Aug 14 2008 - 23:08:19 BST