battle with noisy pickups

[Night Owl]

Re: battle with noisy pickups

If the noise that you're hearing is actually coming from outside your house there's not much you can do (short of building a giant farraday cage around the room that you play in. That's a rather inelegant solution to your problem though . . .

That's what I'm trying to figure out with my experiments. If I can prove it is something outside, then I'm stuck with trying some sort of shielding. If it is so strong that shielding isn't practical for a guitar, then I'm outta luck. I'm hoping it isn't that, I'd rather find something dumb I'm doing wrong or can fix in my wiring.

Here's my overall approach to this:

At the moment, I think I've proven that it is not EMI from something inside my house. That means it could be outside EMI or not EMI.

I'm assuming that if it is not EMI, then that means a wiring problem. Are there any other options at that level?

If it is either outside EMI or not EMI, then if I can get a shielding solution to work, then I've proved it is outside EMI. Then it is a question of whether or not there is some effective, practical form of shielding.

On the other hand, if I can prove that no amount of shielding impacts my problem, then I know it is not EMI and I must have a wiring problem of some sort.

If I divide wiring problems into "house" problems or "rig" problems, I think I've discredited rig problems by taking my rig to a different location and seeing that it worked OK. That leaves house problems, like we're looking at now. However, wiring, particularly grounding, can be a little tricky, and as everyone has probably already concluded, I'm no electrical engineer. So I'm hesitant to say that I've "proven" much about my wiring. But the evidence is accumulating that wiring may not be the problem.

I have to be very careful, though. Suppose it is some level of outside EMI and I have a wiring problem. Perhaps if I fixed my wiring problem, then shielding would work. So I'm being very careful to measure everything to prove I'm not goofing something up.


Have you measured the power that you're getting from the wall? Is it 110 v/AC, or is it dipping up and down wildly? Your monster 'power conditioner' does not do anything to prevent noise/damage to equipment caused by dips in power. You would need a voltage regulator for that.

My Monster units display the voltage all the time. I have a couple of them plugged into the top and bottom receptacles of the same outlet. One displays 123, 124, or 125 volts from second to second - mostly around 124. The other displays 122 volts pretty constantly. A third one on the same circuit, different outlet displays 123. At least that's what they are doing at the moment. I think that's pretty typical. I don't watch them all the time, of course, but that's about what they usually display. Probably the lowest value I've seen is 120 and the highest 125, but I could be off a volt or two either way.

 

[Night Owl]

Re: battle with noisy pickups

Ugh! I got some of my response included in the quote above.