power spikes trouble

[jaimeparedes]

hi, I am having clicks and pops during audio recording due to power spikes, I don't understand what is going on because I am using a FURMAN power conditioner and 2 boxes of APC surge protectors, so every piece of gear is plugged either to the furman or to APC, anyway I am worry because those spikes are coming quite frequent and I can hear it and see it on the audio waves. Any advices????? thanks in advance.

[alpha audio]

I'm not so sure you're having power strikes. Sounds like you may not have enough ram memory for all your tracks. I really need to know more but I've had this problem in the past when I had a huge amount of tracks going. You can check your recording software and see if you can make some adjustments. Check the net for this too. Put in 'clicks and pops' and you should see a bunch of articles. Good luck!

[jaimeparedes]

I don't think its is a ram issue because actually is happening in a session with 2 tracks at the moment, the whole story is that I just moved to a new place and right after I finished the whole studio setup I started with a session with just the piano recorded and I was adding a vocal track when I noticed this problem I never had before.

[TimOBrien]

Unfortunately, LOTS of things can cause pops.

Run on a UPS, not a power conditioner. A ups runs your system off a constantly recharging battery, giving you a clean stream of power. If the pops continue, it's in your computer.

Are you recording to the system drive? Housekeeping chores by the OS and apps can stop the stream of data as the drive has to stop and move to do other things. You should ALWAYS be recording to a dedicated secondary drive in any daw.

Low ram or low disk space ditto. Same with errant processes.

You need to do some digging to find out what's interrupting the data going onto the disk....

[jaimeparedes]

I am recording on a dedicated drive (fire wire) I had the same setup a few months ago when I was living somewhere and I never had this issue, now I moved to an other city, and I blame the electric stream, my external drive as well as my computer are plugged to the APC only some pieces of gear are plugged to the furmann. (so you mean tha a APC box is more reliable than a furman strip dedicated to audio aplications???) thanks for any advice.

[trondned]

I am recording on a dedicated drive (fire wire) I had the same setup a few months ago when I was living somewhere and I never had this issue, now I moved to an other city, and I blame the electric stream, my external drive as well as my computer are plugged to the APC only some pieces of gear are plugged to the furmann. (so you mean tha a APC box is more reliable than a furman strip dedicated to audio aplications???) thanks for any advice.

Power-spikes will either go unnoticed or they will fry your equipment. They won't manifest themselves as clicks or pops.

90% of the time clicks and pops are caused by wordclock-errors. If you have equipment connected using digital connectors, be sure you use the same bit-depth and sample-rate on all equipment. Also be sure to have one word-clock master, the rest of the equipment should be slave. More about this in the manual.

Good luck on resolving your problem.