ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, we’ve seen how a production facility, in all its forms, involves the interconnection of various digital and analog devices to create a common task-to capture and produce good music without adding clicks, pops and spurious noises to our tracks. This brings us to two aspects that are often overlooked in the overall design of a facility:
1. The need for proper grounding techniques (the way that devices interconnect without introducing outside electrical noises)
2. The need for proper power conditioning (the purity and isolation of a room’s power from the big, bad outside world)
GROUNDING CONSIDERATIONS Proper grounding is essential to maintaining equipment safety; however, within an audio facility, small AC voltage potentials between various devices in an audio system can leak into a system’s grounding circuit. Although these potentials are small, they are sometimes large enough to induce noise in the form of hums, buzzes or radio-frequency (RF) reception that can be injected (and amplified) directly into the audio signal path. These unwanted signals generally occur whenever improper grounding allows a piece of audio equipment to detect two or more different paths to ground.
