[LAU] Hum pickup in DI boxes

Bill Purvis bill at billp.org
Sun Jun 13 07:00:59 CEST 2021


On 08/06/2021 21:09, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 08, 2021 at 03:54:31PM -0400, Brandon Hale wrote:
>
>>> Don't do this - ever. You could easily destroy your mic input(s) if the laptop
>>> power supply isn't as isolated as it should be (quite common), or the laptop's
>>> headphone output if there is phantom power on the mic input.
>> That was my bad in assuming he's not using the microphone inputs, but the
>> Behringer's aux inputs that have quarter inch jacks.
> Wouldn't make much difference. If the laptop is mains powered and happens
> not to be grounded you could easily have a hundred volts on the laptop's
> 'ground'. High impedance, almost 'static' and hence not lethal to humans,
> but more than enough to kill an audio input. Watched it happen more than
> once, the more spectacular case was when a certain university professor
> deciced to cut of the ground connection of his laptop's power supply in
> order to get rid of the hum. He didn't do that again.
>
> Anyway, without transformer isolation and separate grounds you will never
> get rid of the broadband interference generated by both the laptop itself
> and its switching power supply.
I bought a Behringer ULTRA_DI DI20 active DI box and that seems to work 
well.
Only thing is the Ground Lift switch seems the wrong way round to me. In the
'lift' position I get hum when feeding from the laptop with mains power, but
in the ground position the hum disappears. No hum either way on battery 
power.

Thanks for all the responses!

Bill

-- 
+----------------------------------------+
| Bill Purvis                            |
| email: bill at billp.org                  |
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