Today’s question comes to us all the way from one of our readers in Estonia.
A good grounding scheme would probably help and I do recommend it. On the other hand that may not be the specific problem you are encountering. It may very well be the power you are using. But there could be dozen other things causing it too. In the United States there are fairly strict regulations and standards for power delivery. As such we do not often run into situations where the power we are using is causing this type of problem. However it does happen from time to time. Sometimes it is necessary to get the Power Company to put monitoring equipment on the line for a few days to see what is happening so they can track down problems like this. If you have any way to get this kind of monitoring done I would suggest it. If they find no problem then at least you have eliminated one big variable, at which point I would start substituting other mixers until I could come up with more clues about the cause.“I have a home studio with two audio consoles: HH 16-8-16 and a Roland ME 24. The ME 24 stereo output is routed into the 16-8-16 two input channels. I get serious hum in the output stage of both consoles, funny enough after working a few hours and mostly in the evenings. The hum goes away for a little while if I disconnect the 16-8-16 and comes back in a few minutes. I have isolated the problem somewhere to the power supplies of the consoles, no cabling to blame here. I have had the consoles checked and nothing was discovered. It seems that the hum comes from the mains and increases by evenings, it might be neighbors using their washers/dryers/TV’s etc. What shall I do? My house does not have a good grounding and I wonder if having that would help?”