aaaaaggggghhhhhhh!!!!! my mixer and monitors just blew

damn

so i come home from work and before i am even in the building i hear a nasty electrical hum blasting from somewhere. little did i know that somewhere was my apartment . i get inside and my mackie is just pumping out this awful noise, but there was nothing else on or feeding it. the thing is just f'ed up. my whole apartment smells like cat piss because the insides of my speakers were heating up something and stinkin up the place. i am lucky i didnt have a fire. my monitors are totally juiced too. the subwoofers are all shriveled up and nasty looking. i am pissed.

just had to get that off my chest.

so, anybody have any monitor suggestions? i was thinking about the event tr8.

whoa that sucks, best of luck to you

arent mackies 800 a piece to? damn

anyways I got m-audios, they arent the best but they do the job good.

the mackie was the mixer, the 1202. i had tannoy reveals. they were decent. man i dont like talking bout them in the past tense, o well.

I am going to try out these Samson monitors at Sam Ash. I should be getting them this week so I'll let you know once I hook them up.

Peace,
D. James

I'm curious, did you have your stuff plugged into any kind of surge protector?

itchyvinyl wrote:I'm curious, did you have your stuff plugged into any kind of surge protector?

yep

i think somthing melted in the internal circuitry and the thing went haywire. i plug it in with different power cables in different outlets with nothing plugged into it and it blasts the meters to just below red. its done.

Yo mesh, how could I avoid that from happening to my mixer and monitors?
Do you suggest keep everything unplugged when i'm not using it?

By the way, the Alesis MK2 are great monitors. I have those powered by a pioneer sx-201, 190 watt amp. Great results, no hiss. and I use a Behringer 1202 in my setup. The Behringer is a great buy for 80 ballz but depending on what you input to it, you may not be able to monitor at high volumes without the "hiss".

im using the Alesis M1 Active MK2's myself. they are well priced and very good, though they might be a bit bass heavy in some rooms (you have to set your monitors up right obviously)


as for what happened to you... a power spike might have friend the mackie and a classic short circuit (yeah a spike can melt solder!) lent itself to some serious hum action.


how to prevent? well if you plug it all in one socket/board turn that off when you leave the studio space

also, invest in a power filter, or better yet ahefty UPS filter.

at the VERY least EVERY studio rig should be protected by a powerfilter. NO EXCUSES.

it was going thru the surge protector, i think it had just been on too long and fried the circuitry, which then in turn fried the monitors.

remedy, turn off your sh*t more often. i had just left it on for too long, no excuses really. i had it hooked to where i could have been flippin it and everything else off and on with one switch, but i guess i got lazy and it bit me in the @ss.

it really hadnt been on that long, but it is an older mackie and i guess its time had come, too bad it recruited my monitors to go with it.

damn equipment, never fails, right when i am about to get something new, a g4 and digi 001 in this case, i gotta go blow the money on stuff i wasnt plannin for.

but now that i am in this situation i am rethinkin my situation. i could reinvest in a small footprint mixer like the mackie and then later on hook up the g4 for more fire power, or i could stick with my current computer rig of a g3 ibook with DP and look into a larger format mixer to do some analog style mixing. this new possibility is temtptin, but i dont know what i want to do. i definitely need new monitors so i am gonna get the event tr8 on thursday at the sam ash sale and with that i will get a free, cheap 6 input mixer that i can use for a little while while i figure it out.

so who likes mixing with the slightly bigger mixer primarily and just editing wiht the computer?

dont u have a warrenty on those?

bakebeatz wrote:dont u have a warrenty on those?

mixer never had one, 2nd hand.

the monitors have passed there 1 year warranty.

Do you have a pic of the fried speakers? I never heard of that sh*t before.

i'll try to get one soon

I fried a pair of speakers and amp once because the outlet I was plugging into was wired incorrectly -maybe this is your problem. So here's a cheap way to check that this won't happen. Get a voltage reader and an outlet analyzer (it's called something like that). They cost about 10$ each at radio shack. The outlet analyzer will check that the hot-cold-ground connections are wired properly. The voltage reader tells you how much current is coming through the outlet. You should be at 120V +or- 5V. Anything outside that range can be dangerous for your equipment. It's really easy to do, you just plug these testers into the outlet and that's it. You should check the voltage every so often especially in the summer where voltage drops are more common. Surge protection won't necessarily help you if your outlets are delivering 108V. If you do have electricity problems, then you need to research voltage regulator devices, although proceed with caution here because the claims that these companies make are questionable and many people think that the units can mess up your sound.

jontakiff wrote:I fried a pair of speakers and amp once because the outlet I was plugging into was wired incorrectly -maybe this is your problem. So here's a cheap way to check that this won't happen. Get a voltage reader and an outlet analyzer (it's called something like that). They cost about 10$ each at radio shack. The outlet analyzer will check that the hot-cold-ground connections are wired properly. The voltage reader tells you how much current is coming through the outlet. You should be at 120V +or- 5V. Anything outside that range can be dangerous for your equipment. It's really easy to do, you just plug these testers into the outlet and that's it. You should check the voltage every so often especially in the summer where voltage drops are more common. Surge protection won't necessarily help you if your outlets are delivering 108V. If you do have electricity problems, then you need to research voltage regulator devices, although proceed with caution here because the claims that these companies make are questionable and many people think that the units can mess up your sound.

interesting comments on electricity altering your sound.

it WILL alter the sound of ANALOG gear, such as the roland TR-909, because these units are using electrical currents to create sound by way of analog circuitry.


i see no logical reason why minute electrical variations would affect digital gear (inclusive of chips in amps/mixers etc).