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Old 09-04-2017, 10:04 AM
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Default What's the noise floor in your home studio?

I imagine a lot of you are (like me) recording and mixing in the same room with your computer. I've got my room pretty well tuned and am now dealing with getting the ambient and mechanical noise minimized. Using the Decibel 10 app on my iPhone I measure the ambient noise floor at about 32 dB.

32 dB is higher than you'll find in pro studios but for a home studio in a spare bedroom it seems close to the practical limit. (I can't put my computer and drives in a separate room.)

I'm curious to know what noise floor others here have achieved in home studios. Have you done better than this? How have you done it?
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Old 09-04-2017, 10:18 AM
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If home alone it's probably for the most part the microphone's self noise. Have a silent computer and acoustic panels on walls and ceiling.
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Old 09-04-2017, 10:23 AM
Brent Hahn Brent Hahn is offline
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The $$ solution is to go to a laptop and a solid-state drive. But I haven't done that myself, so why am I even saying it?

The things I have done are getting the computer off the floor and walling it off with "micro-gobos," both of which have helped. Poking around inside my Mac tower, it looked like it might be possible (with considerable effort) to decouple the fan from the case, which would probably quiet things down a bunch. If you do that, you're a far better man than I.
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Old 09-04-2017, 10:39 AM
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Yup getting my UPS off my oak floor is my next step. It has a cooling fan and there's some vibration traveling through the floor to my mic stands.

I've got some sorbothane feet coming for the UPS and some of these mic stand isolators on the way as well.
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Old 09-04-2017, 10:54 AM
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When I did a bit of tracking in the same room with my PC I added back-to-back boxes between the recording room and an alcove ajoining the room. This let me put the PC in the adjacent space. I was totally amazed at how quiet the room was after moving the PC.

I moved to the even better solution of using a stand-alone recorder based on CF memory storage for capturing audio. Any tracks could then be moved to the PC where machine noise didn't matter for editing or mixing.

One of the benefits of doing that is being able to record noiselessly virtually anywhere. Being locked to the PC location stifles the creative process, and the dead-simple process of tracking on my Zoom R24 took all the hassle out of the recording process. It also allows me to do mobile recording for small band projects if I choose to.

There's a bit more about the process at the web archive of my old home recording website:

http://web.archive.org/web/201603282...ecording1.html

Last edited by Rudy4; 09-04-2017 at 11:03 AM.
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Old 09-04-2017, 11:11 AM
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I built a quiet PC for recording (Antec quiet case with quiet fans, rubber grommets, no cpu or video card fans, etc.). My room is fairly well treated. That takes care of it for my purposes.
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Old 09-04-2017, 12:05 PM
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I am up in an insulated attic :
My 2010 Mac Pro is actually pretty quiet. My Avid Omni interface can at times (like running for two or more hours on a hot day) have more fan noise for short cycles than my computer . So what I do make sure I do any recording first thing after booting up my system.

Then I also use a an iPad with the V - Control Pro app which allows me to remotely control Pro Tools ( and most DAW's) from my recording position which is about 8 to 10 feet from my desk. And finally I have some GIK 2ft. by 4 ft. by 4 inch thick absorber panels on some wood stands I made, and use them as gobo's between my recording position and my desk . So I have the ambient noise level down to about 25 to 28 db. When the air conditioning is on downstairs it runs 27 to 30
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Old 09-04-2017, 12:29 PM
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I have all SS drives and the room I record in is about 30dB.

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Old 09-04-2017, 12:48 PM
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I made readings in my other rooms for comparison and my recording studio has a noise floor that measures 1 or 2 dB higher than the quietist part of my house. It's probably not enough to worry about since I'm miking things somewhat close.

The furniture and structure borne noise is probably the logical thing to address next. It surprised me when I discovered how much mechanical vibration noise was traveling through the wood floor boards and up the stands into my mics despite using pretty good shockmounts.
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Old 09-04-2017, 01:49 PM
Rudy4 Rudy4 is offline
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All I can say is that I made a recording before moving the PC to the other side of the wall, moved the PC, and continued the track with the identical settings.

Holy Horse Pocky! That "pretty quiet" PC sounded like a waterfall!
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Old 09-04-2017, 02:16 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by runamuck View Post
I have all SS drives and the room I record in is about 30dB.

Jim McCarthy
Thanks! That's exactly the kind of info I was looking for. I'm getting pretty close to the practical limit for my room. There are a couple of cooling fans I'd like to eliminate. One is in my UPS. Does anyone know of a true sine wave UPS that doesn't have a cooling fan?

I've been keeping an eye on SSD prices. A thunderbolt SSD for recording is on my wishlist.
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Old 09-04-2017, 05:40 PM
rockabilly69 rockabilly69 is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Brent Hahn View Post
The $$ solution is to go to a laptop and a solid-state drive. But I haven't done that myself, so why am I even saying it?

The things I have done are getting the computer off the floor and walling it off with "micro-gobos," both of which have helped. Poking around inside my Mac tower, it looked like it might be possible (with considerable effort) to decouple the fan from the case, which would probably quiet things down a bunch. If you do that, you're a far better man than I.
Not so with all laptops and solid state hard-drives....

One of my biggest headaches was dealing with the fan noise of my HP8760w Elitebook which has a solid state hard-drive. The 8760W is a ridiculosly powerful laptop, but mainly due to the video card, and the heat generated, the fan kick would kick on prematurely and loudly! I had to download third party software to control temp and fan speed (notebook fan control), but really the best fix was to upgrade my video card and now it's under control.
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Old 09-04-2017, 05:58 PM
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Cooling fans are the loudest computer component. Hard drives a little bit. Do love SSD though. Use them on all the computers I have built recently.

I built a computer for recording music. Here is info on that:
http://acousticguitarforum.com/forum...d.php?t=317927

Note there is no video card. Motherboards have plenty of built in video capability (outside of 3D gaming play anyway).
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Old 09-04-2017, 08:37 PM
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I just checked mine and it's at 32db. I'd say that's pretty quiet for a home studio. I might knock another db or 2 off by waiting till traffic dies down late at night, and sometimes I even throw the breakers on other rooms (like the kitchen), which takes it down another notch.

But I think what's maybe more useful is to measure your recorded noise floor for the kind of music you record. I generally get about -70db if I record a solo acoustic guitar and normalize it to 0db. You can affect that by how close you mike, what mikes you use, how loud you play, etc. If you were recording something loud, electric guitar, drums, even a singer, you might do better, since you'd turn the mic gain down. If you want to mic further away, play quieter, record something quieter than guitar, you'd have a higher noise floor on the final recording. By measuring the final recording, you'll be including self-noise from your signal chain, as Rick mentioned. The raw room's useful, tho, of course!

I use a Mac Pro and place it in a separate room - just running cables to keyboard, monitor, etc. Seemed easier than dealing with the whole silent PC thing (especially the "PC" part...)

Last edited by Doug Young; 09-04-2017 at 09:36 PM.
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Old 09-04-2017, 09:00 PM
DupleMeter DupleMeter is offline
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My home studio is in my finished basement. Measured ambient noise of 27dBspl (C Weighted) just now. I can live with that, though I will likely bring that down a few more dB since we recently moved and I still haven't finished treating this space. I imagine I'll get it down to 23 or 24dB when done.

I record to a MacBook Pro with an SSD, though my recording drive is an external drive (USB 3). It's a very quiet system.
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