Earthing cable for EMU 1616 revisited

Hi, I was going to update my old thread on earthing cable, but, it was closed probably due to me linking to an ebay seller who was selling custom lengths of it.

Anyway, I've been very busy, but, the search for noise-free recording is still on my mind. After continued research I now have improved the solution.

On my EMU 1616 there is an earthing screw at the back which around 18months ago I bought an earthing cable for. This cable I would attach to say a radiator to reduce some of the noise coming from the pickups picking-up electro-magnetic interferance like from my monitor. Unfortunately, while this worked, it still exhibited ground-hum like noise.

WARNING TEST THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK! THIS SOLUTION REFERS TO UK POWER PLUG.

So, my final solution is to buy a standard 3 pin plug and wire the earthing cable to the centre pin (earth) and plug this into the mains. You DO NOT need to turn the power on, it will earth your EMU fine leaving the power switch off. I recommend using a spare wall-socket to do this.

OK, so now the EMU 1616 is properly earthed. This reduces noise and electrical hum a heck of a lot! Unfortunately, I still have noise which is coming from my new 28" LCD monitor and PC/fans. The plus of using this solution is less noise-reduction is needed in GR4 and therefore I do get a little more tone back from the input sound which makes my guitar sound a little bit better.

Using a longer guitar cable and moving as far away as possible from my PC and monitor further reduces noise to a minimum. This isn't ideal for recording situations though which is where some users have other means of controlling their preferred DAW. You can ofcourse alleviate this problem a little by adding extra time to your recording track before it starts so you can walk to your recording space. Easy to do with any DAW especially if you snap the tracks.

Hope this helps someone out there, thanks for reading...phew!