Chasing a Quieter Studio: What I Learned About Power Bars, Noise, and Grounding
Over the past year, I ran into a weird problem in my studio that taught me something I probably should have known already. Like most people running a small studio, I have a mountain of gear and all of it needs power. So naturally, I’ve always had a bunch of power bars plugged into the wall, often daisy-chained or hooked up through a rack-mounted surge protector like a Furman. When I moved my setup back into my house, I wired things up the way I always do but I started noticing issues. I was getting some nasty RF interference and ground hum on certain pieces of gear. I got it down to a workable level eventually, but I couldn’t shake the question: why was it happening in the first place? I asked my good buddy, Chat GPT what the problem could be and it brought up something I hadn't considered. Using multiple surge protectors with different pieces of gear can actually create grounding issues and inject noise into your audio chain. Turns out, almost every power ...