Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo lots of hiss/white noise, even on low volume

Hey all,

This in regards to some non-Axiom equipment, so I hope it's okay to ask advice about this issue (don't worry, I own quite a bit of Axiom gear). I do some work as a composer and have a little studio in my den where I have an old pair of Alesis Monitor One's powered by an Alesis RA-100 amp and a Mackie 1202VLZ mixing board. Lately, when I turn everything on, there's an awful lot of white noise coming through my speakers, even at a very low volume. In the past few weeks, it's gotten so bad and is so distracting that I've just been using headphones. I've heard about dust getting into the mixing board that can cause this, but I don't know how to clean it. Could it be that or something else? Any ideas?

Thanks a bunch!
-JT

I guess the first thing to do is make sure you know whether it's the amp or the mixing board introducing the noise. I don't know what connectors you have on them but I imagine the line levels are standard so could you either try running the mixing board out through a receiver/amp from your stereo system or try running some stereo kit (maybe a CD player) through the studio amp and speakers ?

I haven't touched a mixing board in 25 years but my first thoughts would be :

- start with a can of compressed air from rat shack or equivalent to blow the dust out of all the controls (probably want to blow from the inside out rather than blowing it further into the innards)

- wiggle all the controls which have signal going through them when the noise is happening and see if any are crackling implying a loose (high impedence, more noise prone) connection. Hit them (or maybe all) with some cleaner. Alan has an article on cleaner selections :

http://www.axiomaudio.com/tips_cleaning_staticy_controls.html

Is the noise on both/all channels or just one ?

Hey Bridgman,

Thanks. I'll try what you said. The noise is on both speakers. I'm pretty sure it's an issue with the mixing board, not the amp. Also, I can turn the gain up on each channel and there's no increase in noise. It's just when I turn up the volume on the "main mix" knob. Any further ideas?

Thanks so much, I really need to fix this problem soon as I have some big projects coming up!

Unfortunately I'm way out of my depth already. I can't think of anything offhand that would inject noise into both channels unless you have a noisy input preamp on some mono feed after the main inputs (I'm really guessing here, just have this vague memory of something like that) that can be mixed/panned into both output channels after the normal level controls. If you have something like that I would look there first.

Again, just a guess. It's been too many years for me to remember much, even the proper terminology.