On Sun, March 31, 2013 7:06 am, jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com wrote: Where does the mic get its power from? The M-Audio pulsar is a phantom powered mic, the passive DI does not supply power and also would block power from going through. The 1010lt does not mention sending phantom power... does the mic have a battery? (the user guide says it requires phantom power, so no battery) Why a DI? A DI is not for a mic, the mic needs a mic pre. The 1010lt has a mic pre, so all you need is a phantom power box in between. I do not know if the pulsar will work with only 18v (most battery powered phantoms are 2 9v batteries) or if it needs the full 48v. you should not be getting any audio through the mic at all. So if you turn the gain up high enough you might get hum. What electric plug? The gear above would only have power to the computer. Is the computer a laptop (doesn't make sense, it has a 1010lt PCI card in it) All desktops have a standard grounded power supply. If yours has had the ground removed replace the power cable. (for safety if nothing else) They are dirt cheap and lots of people have never been used ones hanging around somewhere anyway... as in free. So either you have not described you gear fully/correctly, or you are using the wrong hook up. However, assuming you have just described your setup incorrectly... and there is a phantom power box and not a DI. My first guess is a bad mic cable from the phantom box to the audio card. Your grounding path _should_ be: - Ground rod (many houses use the city water for this which is fine) - house wiring (this may be something to check, it is possible the outlet you are using for your computer is no tproberly grounded) - computer through it's power cord - 1010lt pin 1 in the xlr connector or sleeve if you are using line in with mic pre. - mic cable shield to phantom box - mic cable shield to mic. Adding another wire for ground should just add a ground loop and more hum, better to fix the problem. -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net

On Sun, Mar 31, 2013 at 12:25:02PM -0400, jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com wrote: Been using it ? If the mic requires PP and the soundcard doesn't provide PP, it can't have worked at all... Ciao, -- FA A world of exhaustive, reliable metadata would be an utopia. It's also a pipe-dream, founded on self-delusion, nerd hubris and hysterically inflated market opportunities. (Cory Doctorow)

On Sun, March 31, 2013 9:25 am, jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com wrote: Is this the way the whole house is wired? (or garage or whatever) This may very well be some of your problem. It would seem that your whole setup is floating. I would feel comfortable fixing the wiring to make sure I had proper grounding even if it just meant running one wire for that purpose. If there are any grounded outlets in the building (washing machine for example), I would run an extension cord from there. I have not had hum like that from a mic. If you have no grounded outlets at all in your house... In North America that would be over 50 years old... then running a good thick wire (14 gauge would be good) to the chassis of your computer from the cold water pipe if you are on city water and it is metal all the way out of the house... or a 6 foot piece of re-bar pounded into the ground would work too. If you are on well water the whole water system may be above ground or plastic. Also check the main power panel as the power company may have that grounded regardless of the rest of the house. A friend who is an electrician would be a great asset at this time :) They could probably figure things out in less time than it took you to read this. You are getting sound from your mic... therefore it must be a dynamic mic. It is quite possible that whatever I looked up on m-audio's website is not what you have. So it is not worth worrying about getting phantom power to it if it is working without it. That would be the way, but if you are getting sound at all, your mic either has power already or doesn't need it. If it was indeed a phantom powered mic you would get no audio from it at all, so I think you have a dynamic mic of sorts. :) I suspect you will not hear much if any difference. The transformer in the DI may pull some of the high end sharpness if you run the amp into distortion all the time. Not knowing if the VOX you have is tube or transistor, where you are getting the output from, etc. I really don't know. The value of a DI is in long cable runs often found in a live situation or in the case you only have balanced inputs. If your amp has a direct out, it should work fine into one of your line ins. If it is a speaker out, the DI may do a better job of matching things. In any case your ears are the best judge of this. -- Len Ovens www.OvenWerks.net

On Monday 01 April 2013 08:08:15 Len Ovens did opine: I doubt if it is 'floating', and we've had something resembling the NEC codebook for more than half a century now. What I would be concerned with in a house with wiring old enough to not have the 3rd, round pin in its duplexes, would some folks, and I have found this before in my travels, that the wider of the two slots in the duplex, which was supposed to be connected to the white wire which in post knob & ball wiring days, was always assumed to be the neutral side of the wiring. The black wire was supposed to be connected to the narrower slot, and was assumed to be the hot side of the line. By electricians... I can drive to what was a greasy spoon about a mile from here, in an old frame building, where every appliance in the kitchen was hot enough to buzz the help, the whole damned building is wired backwards! She finally moved her business about 2 years ago, into a much more modern building. THE IMPORTANT PART of this msg: At the lumberyards, like Lowes or Home Depot, in the electrical aisle, they have shirt pocket sized electrical 'Sniffers" not much bigger than a pen or pencil. Often their power switch is the pocket clip, you grab the end and squeeze the clip shut, then the other end has a plastic coated blade, and it will trill like a canary & blink an LED you can see when that blade is within 1 to 2 inches of a live wire. They sell for something in the ten dollar range, very cheap for something that can save your life by finding hot stuff that isn't supposed to be, like your refrigerator, often installed within reach of the usually well grounded stuff of the kitchen sink? So please get one ASAP. If not sooner. /THE IMPORTANT PART. The rest is optional but hopefully educational. I have 2, and they have saved me from many a potentially lethal shock over the last 25 years from stuff that was wired by folks who claimed to have known what they were doing. If you find a reverse wired duplex, where the wider slot is the hot side, it was probably wired bass-ackwards and has been since a roll of wire came on the premises 65 years ago. Yes, its been that long since I wired my parents house for electricity as it was being built in 1947. I was then 13 yo. Not knowing the white was ground by convention in the electrical trade, and already used to a grounded wire in a radio being black since I was already doing radio service for smoking money back then, I did it backwards & had to go back and fix it a month later when we were wiring the crawl space dugout for a water pump, the pump was a people buzzer when turned off. One of the steps in the education of Gene, who has now chased electrons to make therm do useful work all his life since, the last 50 in broadcasting. Oh, and I haven't had a cigarette now for 25 years. quit cold turkey, sick of being half sick with a cold that seemed to have hung on for more than its allotted 2 weeks. Maybe. One of my boyhood best friends followed in his fathers footsteps and got his Journeyman's card by the time he was 20. I had a problem & called him in on it (somehow life had put us back in the same town) when he was about 45, because I was at the time up to my butt in alligators as I had just become the CE at a tv station & the wiring to the studio lights was being a smoking problem child. Electrical stuff letting out the smoke usually means keeping fire extinguishers handy... He came in, we made all sorts of measurements & did a lot of head scratching for a couple hours one afternoon, then sat on the back stoop & had a beer, still playing what if games but reached no consensus as to why were were measuring many times the expected current in the neutral wires of one electrical box but not the other, the source of all the smoke & sparks. He was stumped as was I ATT. So I went home to dinner, still thinking about it, and the lights came on while I was scarfing up a hamburger steak. I went in about 5AM Sunday morning & verified the error. One of those 2 boxes was miss wired. Hard to fix as there wasn't a big breaker to kill the whole box that was miss wired, so I had to work on it hot. NBD to me. The problem was related to it being a 3 phase system. There was about 50 kw worth of lights in the studio in those days so there was 2 boxes full of 15 amp breakers. One box was a Federal, one box was a Square-D. I forget now which was which, but one box ran one phase A down the column of breakers on the left, and phase B down the 2nd column of breakers on the right, and one boxes bus was formed like a pair of combs teeth facing each other positioned between the teeth of the other phase, so that the top row was fed by phase one, the next row by phase 2, the 3rd row back on phase 1 etc to the bottom of the box. The electricians? who wired it weren't cognizant of the differences that would make and blindly wired both boxes so that the lamps, 1500 watt halogens, were wired up with a pair of 12 gauge wires to the hot side, and a single 14 gauge wire bringing the neutral back for BOTH lamps. So one box had 29 amps coming back up the flea weight 14 gauge neutral because both lamps were on the same phase, where the other box only had about 3.5 amps on this same neural wire because thats about what you get when you do the vector math for 2 legs of a 3 phase system. So the solution was to remove the right hand top wire, move it to the left hand side at row 2, take that wire back to the top right breaker, and basically do a step & repeat till I got to the bottom of the box. The breakers themselves could have been moved, easier, except that would have tangled up the wires even worse & the connections needed tightening anyway. Just good practice IMO. Problem solved for the life of the facility. Wrong boxes in the first place, should have been 3 phase boxes, but it was built by idiots working on the cheap & they would probably have had to special order the correct 3 phase boxes. A good electrician should have grokked that little detail instantly. But the vector math for a 3 phase system was not in his knowledge banks at all even if he was working days at one of the coal fired power station facilities being expanded that light up Los Angeles at the time, time being the late 1970's, place being Farmington NM. I never had the heart to tell him that his education was incomplete. Life leads folks down an infinite multitude of paths, always according the the Peter Principle I think. Or is that Parker? Never could (shrug) keep those 2 guys straight. [...] Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! My views <http://www.armchairpatriot.com/What%20Has%20America%20Become.shtml> "Plaese porrf raed." -- Prof. Michael O'Longhlin, S.U.N.Y. Purchase I was taught to respect my elders, but its getting harder and harder to find any...

Le 01-04-2013 00:59, Len Ovens a écrit : Fortunately, no. It is only an extra wall the previous owner has made in the basement. The setup is now connected via a 3-prong extension to an outlet that is grounded. No More Ground Noise. This is so nice. I've gotten the specs from: http://www.m-audio.com/images/global/manuals/060817_PULSAR_UG_EN01.pdf This is the mic I have. It says Pulsar on it. Not Pulsar 2. Bought it in 2006 or so. Looks same as in the specs. Same accessories, same everything. The specs specifies a 48V phantom power. But from your comment and Fons', it seems that the phantom is actually the music recorded by it ! And this is not from a guitar amplifier. I record acoustic guitar and bass. Can have a magnet effect of some sort in there. So now this mystery remains. I was by the music shop today but they were closed. With the phantom and all, I'm not sure I'd get a phantom power supply on April Fools anyways. But the Pulsar mic works. Just recorded again some other things earlier today. Is it possible to probe the microphone's pins and by the impedance or something find out if it is made for having a phantom power supply ? I have a meter that I can put to good use.

Le 01-04-2013 09:58, Gene Heskett a écrit : The reply was an entertaining read ! Now if I understood the above correctly, a hot device would be one from which someone would get a shock by touching it, is it ?

On Monday 01 April 2013 19:37:44 jonetsu(a)teksavvy.com did opine: That depends to a surprising extent on the surroundings. If everything is hot, then so are you by capacitative coupling from the environment, so a shock is not real likely because the currant would have no place to go. OTOH, if standing on a metal railing that is grounded, and bare foot too, then touching anything electric without first probing it with one of these sniffers could be the last thing you touch. I have found also that even if the metal surfaces are well painted, you can often detect a hot item by touching it very gently with the back of your hand and sliding along it with the touch. A hot item will feel faintly as if its vibrating, whereas the properly grounded item will have no vibration as the back of the hand is brushed across it. HOWEVER, if there is even a remote possibility of more than the std 127 volts of AC in the area, I don't recommend it. If the paint has a pinhole, you can get a quite nasty buzz. In this regard, DC is the much more dangerous situation as you probably won't feel it until it has a good grip on you. IOW, get the sniffer AND learn how to use it, although that part isn't at all difficult. I don't care if you're flipping burgers at Mac's for minimum wage, it could save your life. Something else to consider is that there is a lethal "window" to the currant passing directly through the heart. It can develop a rhythm loss and go into fibrillation at currants above 20 micro amperes, a lethal situation because its just sitting there shaking without moving enough blood to sustain life. You have maybe 1 long minute to get that fixed else brain damage is bound to occur. This can happen at currants so low you may not even feel the shock. And the defib machine paddles will be needed a very large percentage of the time as its a condition that isn't self fixing. The shock from the defib paddles works by momentarily freezing the heart, and when it next beats it will beat in unison with itself. Most of the time... If not, the techs will let it charge again, and slap you 2x harder, wash, rinse & repeat until you are either running, or the machine has hit you with its max jolt quite a few times. Going up in currant, at currants above 20 milliamperes the heart just freezes. There, you have that same long minute to remove the shock before brain damage will set in, but when the currant is removed, the heart usually starts right back up and goes about its business as if nothing happened. Typically the major after effects of that will be caring for the 2nd degree burns it causes, and often, because your immune system has been knocked around pretty badly, a few days later a session of the shingles will set in for about a 2 month visit. BTDT, ain't no way in hell you could call _that_ fun. This sniffer I preach about doesn't work well for high voltage DC, beeping once or twice as its brought near, and one or 2 times as its pulled away. The characteristic coaches whistle trill they do is because the AC field is turning it on and off at 50 or 60 hertz. But high voltage DC isn't normally a worry for the general public except around high power broadcast transmitters, some of which use over 20,000 volts. And TBT, I don't often write this stuff for its entertainment value, it is supposed to be educational. If I throw in a little humor, its as much to keep you reading as for the humor in it. Cheers, Gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) My web page: <http://coyoteden.dyndns-free.com:85/gene> is up! My views <http://www.armchairpatriot.com/What%20Has%20America%20Become.shtml> What about WRITING it first and rationalizing it afterwords? :-) -- Larry Wall in &lt;8162(a)jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV&gt; A pen in the hand of this president is far more dangerous than a gun in the hands of 200 million law-abiding citizens.

On Mon, 2013-04-01 at 20:32 -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: There must be a difference for the potential to get shocked. German repair shops must use isolating transformer, to safeguard galvanic isolation! Btw. galvanic isolation also is the reason, that even cheap measuring bridges with a laboratory power supply, still need a battery. Direct current voltage <= 60 V and alternating voltage <= 25 V are values that in Germany are considered as riskless, for medicine there are anyway other values. The advantage of microphones with metal cases that are hot is, that nobody will sing or speak to close to the microphone ;p. Ok, some times a proximity effect is wanted, but usually it's a PITA that so many idiots touch the mics with their lips. Regards, Ralf

On Tue, 2013-04-02 at 10:44 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote: Perhaps I'm overcareful, when an audio signal accidentally was that loud that the sound was played distorted by my headphones, I always feared that the relatively expensive headphones get damaged, but now they are 30 years old and still ok. Perhaps a microphone and maybe especially a more expensive one, could take it, but I wouldn't risk it. The MD 21 quasi is professional Telefunken quality of the 60s, capacity to withstand stresses and operational life span might be different to nowadays mics. I'm less overcareful with short circuits, but I anyway don't like the idea a kill-switch does work, http://www.google.de/imgres?q=killswitch+buckethead&hl=en&sa=X&… So as long as I'm not very rich, I try to avoid to do things that the gear is unprovided for, even if there is (nearly) no risk.