lighting

[drumdude]

I'm turning my garage into a band practice room (practice, no recording).

I've heard florescent lights can effect audio signals in studios, but how will they effect a practice room? I already have 4 florescent lights in the garage, each with 2, 48' bulbs. A friend of mine suggested pulling out the florescent lights and install track lighting instead. Do I have to go thru this added time and money?

Thanks.

[5454stevef]

I'm turning my garage into a band practice room (practice, no recording).

I've heard florescent lights can effect audio signals in studios, but how will they effect a practice room? I already have 4 florescent lights in the garage, each with 2, 48' bulbs. A friend of mine suggested pulling out the florescent lights and install track lighting instead. Do I have to go thru this added time and money?

Thanks.

Fluorescent and neon lighting produces an AC field that can be picked up as a buzz at 60 cycles per second or some multiple of that. Whether this is a problem or not depends on a couple of things - how picky you are, and how sensitive the pickups on things like electric guitars are. Most other things, like mics, etc. usually have balanced outputs so are not affected much by this. The field from fluorescent lights is not as strong as what you will get from neon, but in certain situations it can still be a problem. If you are using single-coil guitars and play with lots of gain, as in metal-type distortion, it could be an issue. A lot of fluorescent light ballasts also produce an audible buzzing sound in the room that can be pretty annoying.

I'd take your most high gain amp and noisiest guitar out there, fire it up, get crazy with overdrive and see how much interference you get. If you can live with it, you're probably good to go.

One other thing, if you install track lites, installing typical cheap dimmer switches will create an even bigger noise problem. Those things work by changing the AC sine wave of normal "house" electrical into a square wave and varying the widths of the pulses. this works great for dimming lights, but creates a whole lot of RF interference, way more than fluorescent lights.

SF

[Rad]

Those things work by changing the AC sine wave of normal "house" electrical into a square wave and varying the widths of the pulses.
SF
From an audio viewpoint, all I can say is ":scared: AAAARGHHH!!!!:eek: "
I can't imagine anything worse than a square wave to have to filter into a regular sine. Some Furmans can do it but dimmer switches are too much for the basic units like 8M to handle - I've experienced it first hand. Think of how brutal this sqaring must be for a unit with a built-in frequency filter to be affected.

[5454stevef]

From an audio viewpoint, all I can say is ":scared: AAAARGHHH!!!!:eek: "
I can't imagine anything worse than a square wave to have to filter into a regular sine. Some Furmans can do it but dimmer switches are too much for the basic units like 8M to handle - I've experienced it first hand. Think of how brutal this sqaring must be for a unit with a built-in frequency filter to be affected.

Yeah... actually I mis-stated one thing - dimmers don't actually turn the AC sine into a square wave, they use Triacs that turn on and off chopping the AC waveform off at intervals; so the part of the waveform that's left is still sine, but it has those brutally sharp corners that are characteristic of square waves, which are where the noise and all the harmonics come from.

The place where my band used to rehearse had a couple of them and boy, my poor old Strat buzzed like a chain saw.

Sorry about the misinformation.

SF

[drumdude]

Thanks for all the info, but I plan on having the lights in my practice room just turn on/off, no dimmers.

[yeahforbes]

I don't think anybody is about to "dim" their equipment outlets... and if they do they probably deserve what comes of it! :smokin:

[5454stevef]

I don't think anybody is about to "dim" their equipment outlets... and if they do they probably deserve what comes of it! :smokin:

Huh? Did anyone suggest that someone might do that? wtf....

My comments were directed more to RF interference which of course will be picked up by anything that's not shielded very well. But, as Rad has mentioned, dimmers also can cause all kinds of trash in AC lines just by being connected to them.

I imagine somewhere there is someone who has tried to make a variac type setup using a dimmer... I'm sure that works great... heh...

SF