I just spent the whole day – daytime day, I quit at dinner – rewiring my studio to better isolate the AC power lines from everything else, because it’s pretty clear at this point that our AC power is just scary with RFI, and the new high-gain preamp is AC all the way to its motherboard, unlike everything else, which is DC power once you get past the adaptors.<\/p>\n
Result? All this did NOT A FUCKING THING for the high-gain preamp. In fact, it’s worse tonight. Enough that were I trying to use it, it’d be difficult and I’d have to be stupidly careful with cable placement, or something<\/em>, and hope I get lucky.<\/p>\n At that point I thought I’d achieved nothing at all, and had in fact fucked it up somehow – which didn’t make any sense but that’s never stopped me before – until then I poked at my primary input board for semi-unrelated reasons, and HOLY HOPPING CHRIST ON A POGO STICK the difference.<\/p>\n SO MUCH QUIETER so much quieter<\/em><\/p>\n Even at max gain, zero input shows up as zero on my main input board. It’s not actually zero – I can hear it – but it’s too far down to light the metres, which puts it at somewhere around -75db.<\/p>\n So at least I didn’t fuck things up. That is a thing which is good to know. I actually achieved my design goal for the rewiring, to a surprising – nay, astonishing – degree of success!<\/p>\n And it did absolutely fuck all<\/em> for the problem.<\/p>\n goddammit.<\/p>\n I’m still sure AC Power is a problem though, because if I plug the preamp straight into the wall, the RF pick up is REALLY LOUD; through a computer power strip (which filters, some) it’s less; through the battery-backup and<\/em> power strip, less still. I suppose it’s possible<\/em> there’s another reason for that, but I don’t know what it would be.<\/p>\n