Struggling with EMI

Community General
#1

Hey guys! Really happy for this forum.

I am willing to bet there are other people facing the same challenge I am. I live in an apartment in the city and I have a lot of struggles with EMI.

I have a room with a desk against the wall but there are (maybe) cable tv lines running along the wall on the outside for my whole 5 unit building. That and all the appliances have made it a real challenge finding the correct position and orientation to record “noise free”

Really no other spots in the house to work. How do you handle EMI? Do you just live with it? Do you remove in post somehow? Any tricks to reduce it?

#2

Hey Brian!

I had the exact same problem while living in Milan, the flat where I lived was plagued with EMI and I tried to do everything in order to get rid of it. Short answer: I couldn’t get completely rid of it, but I managed to bring the noise down to manageable levels by:
using a headphone amplifier (I’m using an Audient iD4, which suffers from crossfeed from DI input to Headphone out - it was picking up ‘microphonic’ noise from the guitar ‘listening’ to the headphones - adopting this solution brought the EMi noise down a lot)
trying to not have other devices connected to the same outlet
avoid facing the pc screen

by turning a little bit away from the screen, with the guitar facing slightly down the noise went down even more.

#3

I’m interested about the headphone out crosstalk but I don’t seem to have any issues when I take my laptop away from my house, if I sit on battery power in my car in a parking lot I can record perfect.

When I’m off mains power in my apartment I still pickup the sounds of the alien invasion