Dave, Are some of the drives and the sound card USB? If so, it might be worth making sure they are on separate USB controllers/hubs. Sometimes there is more than one built into a computer, so experimenting with putting them on different USB connectors could be worth your time. With the quality of the sound card, you wouldn't expect this sort of thing, though. If the drives are not USB, where is the controller? If your M-Audio board is in a slot next to a HD or USB controller, I suppose that could cause a problem, but these are not usually separate boards any more and are on the mother board.
I saw another response that suggested a ground loop isolator. While I wouldn't discount that as a solution as ground loops can do some strange things, my experience has been that ground loops generally result in at least some 60-cycle hum as well as additional noise. If you're specifically getting hard disk noise without a noticeable amount of hum, it seems as though you are getting leakage into the sound outputs outside of a ground loop path. Also, is there any chance you are running the volume at a low level somewhere because of gain in your speakers and equalizer? If you run your output at a higher electronic volume but you are experiencing some sort of overload, attenuating the output in some other way than turning down the electronic volume control is worth exploring. Best regards, Steve Jacobson On Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:16:02 -0700, Dave bahr wrote: >Hi list, >This is a characteristically longwinded message from yours truly. you've >been warned!! >I've noticed upon hooking up my behringer 31 band eq that if I raise up >the higher bands I'm getting the feedback of my internal hard drive's >motor and some power static. the connections are as follows. >a pair of male xlr connecting to two rca outputs on a sound blaster x-fi >pro external sound card. >Two standard xlr male to female cables connect from the eq to two >nearfield active studio monitors, adam audio a7x's. >The power is grounded on all three-pronged plugs. I have an internal >soundcard which is an m-audio delta 1010 lt. That's the audio side of >things, here comes the computer side of the equation. >a thermaltake atx mid-tower case holds an asus wd5 delux motherboard, >don't quote me on the exact name. The hard drives, there are 3, are all >sata 2 drives, 2 500 gb drives and a 1.5 tb drive. The two 500 gb drives >are a few years old, they make more noise than the 1.5 tb drive. The >catch is that one of them is my main drive for program files and the >like, so I don't want to put it in an enclosure. The other two could be >taken out and enclosed. >My main concern is editting, the feedback won't get through to the >digital transfers, but I'm not sure if I can deal with this high pitched >noise, it's a high b-flat. I'm wondering if anyone has run into this and >what a good solution might be? >-- >Dave C. Bahr >To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: >pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org To unsubscribe from this list, send a blank email to: pc-audio-unsubscr...@pc-audio.org
