Mumetal shielding

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Viitalahde

Well-known member
Joined
Nov 7, 2005
Messages
727
Location
Kuhmoinen, Finland
A thought..

I have a Lynx Two-A soundcard in my DAW.

http://www.lynxstudio.com/lynxtwo.html

As good & remarkably silent for a card with in-the-box converters it is (the specs given by the manufacturer do seem to match up), I can hear the digital crap when I crank the monitors up and add some ~15dB of gain on an DA-AD loop.

I know, it's an extereme and I wouldn't worry about hiss and that kind of noise, but the sound created by mouse movement, HD operation and all is just too stupid to not care of.

Since the card is in the PCI bus with the solder side all exposed to the power supply, processor and all, I was wondering if it could be a worthwile experiment to shield the card from the solder side with some sort of a L-shaped mu-metal plate connected to chassis potential?

Or is this kind of crap typically already present at the circuit board (bleeding from digital ground)?
 
I would expect nearly all the noise inteference inside-the-box to be of electrostatic, not electromagnetic nature.

This means that any conductive material should work, but that expensive mu-metal wouldn't give you any benefit over e.g. copper or aluminium foil.

Try some normal aluminum foil - it would probably be best to get it laminated inside a plastic envelope in order not to short out things in your computer. When you get it laminated (e.g. at your local copyshop), remember to put in small wires for soldering onto..

Jakob E.
 
[quote author="gyraf"]Try some normal aluminum foil - it would probably be best to get it laminated inside a plastic envelope in order not to short out things in your computer.[/quote]

Good tip, the lamination! :thumb: Off to Clas Ohlsen's for some foil shopping. I think I'll buy some extra for a foil hat. :razz:
 
a friend of mine put some cooper between cardboard in order to remove the noise from relays on a rocktron midi switcher.
don forget to conect it to ground. and provably the cooper is better than
aluminium foil because solder a wire to aluminium is hard to do. if not imposible.

tell us if It work. I have some noise with my turtle beach , but not shure if my layla get that noise.
 
I just tried a 1mm aluminium plate covered from both sides with cardboard and a ground wire stapled to it. Put the plate directly on the solder side of the card and grounded it to chassis -> zero difference. :? I'm afraid the noise is already present at the board trace level..

..Still very small noise. Audio masturbation is just cool. :twisted:
 
I did the aluminum foil thing with my interface...

I wrapped about 1' of the interface cable near the computer to get rid of a noise problem I was having... I was getting some 60hz, some monitor noise, and some hard drive scanning noise. Fixed! :wink:
 
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