Power related crashes?

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Drickey
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 14:29

Power related crashes?

Post by Drickey »

Hey there folks, I'm wondering if anyone here has had stability problems caused by a lack of power or too much noise in the current when playing at a venue?

At a recent show I experienced frequent crashes in my setup which, after plenty of tweaking, I'd thought as stable as feasibly possible.

I've not had a chance to look have a good through the system but the venue's power was quite suspect, our bass amp managed to trip the circuit during set up (the laptop and such weren't plugged in at that point).

At one point our APC40 stopped responding which leads me to think we might of been drawing too much power (we've a fair amount of equipment) but then laptops and such don't draw that much electricity.

Would getting hold of a power conditioner be a good idea?

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gpvillamil
Posts: 550
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 03:33
Location: San Francisco, California

Re: Power related crashes?

Post by gpvillamil »

When I moved to New York, I started having issues with my video editing computer. I'd start a render job, and the following morning the computer would have rebooted, and the job would be unfinished. I figured maybe during the move ram or video cards could have come loose, so I rejiggered everything. Still had crashes.

I put in a battery-powered UPS, one that emails you whenever power is lost.

No more crashes. All render jobs finished fine.

Also, I would get an email from the UPS once or twice a week saying that power supply had dropped, and it had switched to battery power.

Clearly the power in our (very old) building was not very good.

Drickey
Posts: 4
Joined: Sun Sep 28, 2008 14:29

Re: Power related crashes?

Post by Drickey »

Reading that a few other posts I found round and about the internets (interesting stories about gas stoves re-setting Ableton and such) I'd say that it’s definitely was a dirty power issue.

Which I’m actually pretty glad to hear since all other avenues relating to stability have been exhausted!

We’d been experiencing the (very) occasional spontaneous reboot at the rehearsal studio and popping noises through the vocals tracks, all apparently symptoms of dirty power and interference caused by plugging many components into the same source.

It all makes perfect sense but ah the things they don’t tell you when you decided to get into this digital thing.

Will be ordering power conditioner ASAP.

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