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Post subject: Getting Rid of Amp Hum and Buzz
Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 3:34 pm
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(NOTE: I originally published this in the Lounge. I deleted it there and put it here -- no replies were lost -- to put the topic in a more appropriate home.)

I have several tube amps here and now that the winter is descending, I'm turning off the AC and all my fans and I can finally hear how my amps really sound in a dead zone.

I am disturbed by the newly disco discovered buzz and hum of my new VOX, Blues Jr and Amp Champ. I thought it was some of my single coil guitars. Those guitars have a little expected hum, but not the obnoxious, overwhelming, hum I was hearing.

All my cables are Mogami, with a Mogami Platinum Silent plug into the guitar -- so the hum had to be coming from somewhere else and even the ISP Decimator pedal couldn't remove the annoying hissing and throbbing sound.

Then... history struck me... as I had my VOX AC4TV set to the 4 watt max... and I heard Morse Code and other voices speaking to me... and I was propelled back a decade to the early, awful days of cellular technology and the awful interference they could cause with any electrical equipment.

I looked for my iPhone and it was sitting – RIGHT THERE! -- a few feet from my VOX. I knew my cellphone was getting picked up by the VOX, so I moved the phone upstairs and the hum and interference were 100% gone!

The Blues Jr. and Amp Champ were similarly quiet once the cellphone was removed from the room.

So... if you have an annoying hum... make sure all the cellphones in the house are far away from your tube amps... and you might be able to finally find that quiet amp sound we're all searching for every moment of our waking, playing, lives.


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Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 5:24 pm
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That's a very interesting tip for hum avoidance. As an old school tech, I never considered that source of hum. Thanks for the advice! ART

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Posted: Sun Oct 18, 2009 6:27 pm
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aclempoppi wrote:
That's a very interesting tip for hum avoidance. As an old school tech, I never considered that source of hum. Thanks for the advice! ART


Yes, it was an "ah-ha!" moment as I heard the buzz and hum and interference because I was immediately transported back to the early 90's when you could listen to cellular conversations on scanner -- not that I ever did, heh! -- and I was getting that same sort of sound on my amps. That's when I started looking around to see where my cellphone was in the room.

The iPhone is notorious not keeping a 3G signal and EDGE is well-known for causing a lot of interference with electrical things as it searches for a signal.

My basement music room is my office is my electronics center, so I have all sorts of junque plugged in and "humming" withing 10 feet of each other. My WiFi signal, my TV, my computers and speakers are all near around the amps yet none of them make my amps buzz... except, that is, for my now-guilty iPhone.


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