Down to earth in the podcast studio

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

When I’m not busy editing components, it also falls to me to produce our monthly podcast. It’s a fun sideline, and this month I’m particularly excited because we’ve just got our hands on an M-Audio Fast Track Ultra audio interface. This little box of tricks promises to give us a significant boost in audio quality, and it’s also greatly simplified the cabling situation in our podcast studio. Look, if you squint it could almost be a proper working environment:

As always with technology, though, there’s a catch. In this case it’s the several hours I spent yesterday and today trying to track down the cause of an annoying buzzing noise on all the microphone channels. The fact that the buzzing went quiet whenever I touched a microphone strongly suggested that the problem was related to earthing; but no matter how I switched around the Fast Track’s power supply, and no matter what I tried to connect to what, I couldn’t get rid of the noise.

The problem was eventually solved thanks to the wisdom of Mr. Ross Burridge, former reviews editor of our own title, now head honcho over at iGizmo. He it was who noticed that the cable connecting the laptop’s power supply “brick” to the socket used a two-pin C7 power connector (a.k.a. “figure 8″) – in other words, the Fast Track Ultra was fine, but the laptop wasn’t actually earthed at all. Switching to a different power supply – one with a three-pin C5 connector – fixed the problem immediately.

As so often when it comes to troubleshooting computing problems, the moral is that a little lateral thinking goes a long way: as often as not, the problem lies in a completely different place to the symptom. Oh, and, on a side note: Sasha, I’ve borrowed the power supply from one of your Asus laptops.