Static Is Killing Me, Using The Scientific Method Options

[zelen0]

what I meant to ask was, does that particular UPS state it provides 'line conditioning", that is what he's after. There's gear that specifically does that task, and while some UPSes do it properly, a lot do not.

I don't know if the line is the source of the static, but it very well can be.

[sfsurfer]

Thanks so much for all the suggestions! I'll try to go through them all and explain what I've done - nothing seems to have solved the problem unfortunately.

The UPS does have voltage line regulation, so that shouldn't be a problem any longer

I am not recording with anything else plugged in to the room (no dimmer switches present either) except the bare minimum of computer equiptment that I need (CPU, monitor, mixing board).

I tested the brilliant, yet obvious suggestion of using something else as an input device. I decided to use my headphones as a microphone and plugged them in to both the mixer and the PCI card directly. In both cases, any recording resulted in static.

I don't have any MIDI equiptment hooked up to my system.

I also have everything set for the input clock as internal input (not exactly sure what that means)

I believe everything is being sent at 44.1 kHz, but I need to do a little research on my mixer to see if that's true. It is being recorded at 44.1 kHz for sure

I have tried to burn a CD of the audio and it also contains the static

I have tried other channels on the mixer, and they all have the static.

From the above testing, it appears to me that the problem is residing in my PCI card or computer since using a microphone (my headphones) directly into my PCI card gave the same result.

I've tried to adjust the buffer size in Deck, but it seems to always reset itself to 512, no matter what I set it to. I'm using Deck LE, so if anyone has experience with it and can give me some advice there if that's unusual, I'd also greatly appreciate it.

One thing that I didn't mention before is that my 3 hard drives (plenty of free disk space) are all connected to a Sonnet Tempo ATA133 PCI card since I was hoping for some faster disk performance for A/V applications in my old sawtooth. Could this be causing some problems since the input and writing to the HDs are both on the PCI bus?

I'm going to try to post some samples on a web page soon (I'll post a link here), if any of you are interesting in assisting me further by taking a listen. Thanks again for all your suggestions and I welcome any more of them.

[lepetitmartien]

(head scratching)

well… it may be something in the mac polluting… the trouble is what…

i'll look, well, hear forward your sample, it may be of help…

[sfsurfer]

Well, everyone, I'm sorry that I didn't get around to posting my audio clips, but it seems as though I may have solved the problem. I was tinkering around with GarageBand because I was wondering if maybe there was a problem with the fact that my Mia audio card is 24 bit and Deck can only handle stuff at 16 bit. On a whim, I had set the GarageBand preferences for both input and output to my Mia card, although I don't have any speakers plugged into the output of the Mia. (I normally don't have it set up that way because I have my cheap speakers plugged into the Mac's audio output.) I recorded a sample and then plugged in my headphones to the output of the Mia card to listen to the track and NO STATIC! Needless to say, I repeated the performance with Deck's preferences set similarly (normally they are set for audio input for the Mia card and output for the Mac's) and again, no static. Then I set the preferences back to the way I normally have them and static everywhere again! So, for those of you who don't use the same input and output - that may be the cause of your problems like mine!

Thanks so much to everyone for their help in figuring this one out.
MacMusic users are great!