[LAU] Awful noise out of FA-66

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 I plugged my spiffy new linux laptop into an amp tonight and used it as an instrument with a band, using an M-Audio Axiom49 as a MIDI controller. Not everything works yet on this new machine, but what I needed most for tomorrow night's show (specimen, with a couple specialized samples), worked fine. Except for the noise. The FA-66 was producing the most awful, buzzy, glitchy digital background noise. I ran the following chain, and got horrible aliasing noise: Laptop -> ExpressCard Firewire -> FA-66 -> SWR bass/keyboard amp The FA-66 is powered by its wall-wart, since the ExpressCard doesn't power it (even though it is a 6-pin connector). My question is this. What's up with that awful noise? Tonight's workaround was to unplug the FA-66 from the amp, and plug it in only for the few bars at the end of the one song where I need to trigger the samples, and then unplug it again. The laptop's power supply is grounded (three-prong) but the FA-66's wall-wart isn't. I thought of trying to ground the FA-66 to the power strip's ground, but then I noted that: 1) This doesn't sound to me like 60-cycle hum, though it has a little bit of that too (bummer I didn't think to record it and post it). It's digital noise, and I'm not sure grounding would help. 2) I have no guarantees that the club I'm playing at tomrrrow night will have a decent ground. I've been in some that have pretty sketchy electrical systems. Alas, I'm borrowing this amp, and I don't have an amp anymore, I play through my stereo. The FA-66 sounds amazing through the stereo. So this means that I don't have the ability to duplicate the problem at home. I didn't think to try my Audiophile USB interface, because the FA-66 is much "higher end" and I didn't expect the lower-end interface to be immune to this problem if the higher-end one has it. However, a possibly-related problem is that the FA-66 has really low-level line outputs. I notice this when playing through my stereo too, but I didn't think much about it until now. But maybe it is related? Anyway, I'm not much of an audio engineer, so I figured I'd ask here, in case someone's been through this and fixed it. - -ken