Spent 3 hours chasing a ground loop hum in my backyard studio before realizing it was my laptop charger sitting 2 inches from the audio interface cable

Moved the charger to the other side of the desk and the hum vanished instantly, has anyone else dealt with a stupid simple fix like that taking forever to find?

2 comments

2 Comments

jade6183d ago

Man, that's brutal. I had one where I was chasing a hum for three hours in my pedalboard setup. Turned out it was my phone sitting in my pocket. The interference just bled right into the pickups. Feel your pain on the simple fixes. My buddy spent a whole weekend redoing his home studio wiring. Ended up being a cheap LED lightbulb in the room. Dimmed it and the hum stopped. Drove him crazy. Sometimes you just gotta walk away. Come back the next day. The dumb stuff always shows itself when you stop looking.

lucas9723d ago

bro that "moved the charger to the other side of the desk" line hit me right in the soul. same exact thing happened to me except it was my phone charger sitting right next to my guitar cable. spent like 4 hours swapping out cables and checking my power conditioner before i just moved the damn thing 3 feet away and it was silent. the thing is with ground loops it's almost never the fancy stuff, it's always some dumb little thing like a power strip being too close or a USB cable laying across an XLR. i swear half my troubleshooting time is just me refusing to believe the fix could be that simple. now i just keep all my wall warts and chargers on a separate power strip far from any audio cables and it saves me so much headache.