Computers are great…until you have to listen to one in all of your recordings. “I have a small project studio based around Cubase VST running on a Mac. One problem that plagues me is the noise level of my computer. Do you have any good suggestions on how to reduce this noise level without having to put the computer in another room?”
This is a common problem we all have to eventually deal with one way or the other. I’ve seen many solutions. You can always build an acoustically isolated box for it, but you still have to ventilate that box. If the box is big enough this is fairly easily done with several low speed (read quiet) fans. It’s pretty much just a matter of putting lots of sound absorptive material on the inside. The component that makes most of the noise is the fan in the power supply. Our service department has done modifications in the past that allow just the power supply of the computer to be put in a remote location. This works great because it keeps all of your drive bays easily accessible. It is somewhat costly though. The best overall solution we’ve found is to put your CPU in another location. This may seem like a pain at first, but there is a company we deal with that makes some excellent solutions for this type of thing. ExotendoIt makes many different products for remoting and unusual computer interfacing issues. This makes it easy to put the noisy CPU far away from your keyboard and monitor. They even have simple solutions for having Macs and PC’s share monitors. Just remember that no matter where you put your computer you must have some ventilation. Computers and drives put out a lot of heat and it’s really not a good idea to let them get overheated.
