Its winter, keep it humid

[routlaw]

Not sure this is the best place to post this but since it directly applies to my digital setup thought I would place it here. 

Now that winter has set in, and quite severely, up here in the northern hinterlands the humidity in our house is very low. The hygrometer we keep in the HT/Music room has been at an all time low recently running at about 5% give or take a few points. More trouble than its worth to spin vinyl under these conditions but it never occurred to me it could be this problematic while spinning cds. Last night while comparing coax and AES cables my coax connection kept dropping out the signal for a brief second then resume. I finally gave up trying to work with the coax but oddly enough this did not happen at all while using an AES connection, in this case a Mogami AES made by Performance Audio in SLC. If anyone is looking for custom built cables I highly recommend this company and their prices are great.

The dropouts occurred using two different coax cables, a Pangea and a Belden made by BJC, so clearly it wasn't a malfunctioning cable. Had some spare time today and started digging a bit deeper and what I found was severe static electricity was causing the issue. If I touched a screw on the light switch (completely different circuit) in order to dissipate a charge it also caused the coax connection to drop out for a second, but that's not all. All of my speaker drivers are either aluminum or titanium and by merely touching any driver while playing music via the coax connection I would still receive a brief dropout. It gets worse and even more weird. So we have one of those high density foam rollers for your back in the room which can be very susceptible to static and all I had to do was touch the darn thing laying on the floor and zap a brief drop out but the strangest thing was picking up the ERC-4 remote while music was playing and yet even while not touching a single thing on the rack created a dropout in the signal.

Sounds preposterous but the moral of the story is don't let the room where your audio and video gear are setup become too dry. Probably not an issue for those living in the deep south or coastal areas but out west the issue is far more severe than I had previously thought. Its still puzzling why coax and not AES cables make such a difference regarding this issue. BTW I was using the RMC-1L for the DAC/Pre-amp.

[Boomzilla]

Wow - Living in Louisiana, I never even thought of such a thing. But since I'm moving up North sometime in my future it's good to know. Maybe a humidifier?

[novisnick]

I learned this lesson years ago in my first year of college. The very small apartment (generous description) had forced air gas heat. First morning I woke up I could barley breathe. There was no moisture in the air at all. Starving student spent what little he had for a humidifier as home remedies were not sufficient. Best money I ever spent. Bonus in my current setup is that I don’t have the static problem, especially spinning LPs. If you don’t have a Hygrometer to test the humidity in your room, just spin an LP for a minute and pick it up. You’ll feel the static electricity in your hands if the room is very dry.

[novisnick]

Jan 5, 2022 23:44:15 GMT -5 Boomzilla said:

Wow - Living in Louisiana, I never even thought of such a thing. But since I'm moving up North sometime in my future it's good to know. Maybe a humidifier?

Humidifier? Most definitely if you like breathing! 😁

[405x5]

Jan 5, 2022 19:15:59 GMT -5 routlaw said:

Not sure this is the best place to post this but since it directly applies to my digital setup thought I would place it here. 

Now that winter has set in, and quite severely, up here in the northern hinterlands the humidity in our house is very low. The hygrometer we keep in the HT/Music room has been at an all time low recently running at about 5% give or take a few points. More trouble than its worth to spin vinyl under these conditions but it never occurred to me it could be this problematic while spinning cds. Last night while comparing coax and AES cables my coax connection kept dropping out the signal for a brief second then resume. I finally gave up trying to work with the coax but oddly enough this did not happen at all while using an AES connection, in this case a Mogami AES made by Performance Audio in SLC. If anyone is looking for custom built cables I highly recommend this company and their prices are great.

The dropouts occurred using two different coax cables, a Pangea and a Belden made by BJC, so clearly it wasn't a malfunctioning cable. Had some spare time today and started digging a bit deeper and what I found was severe static electricity was causing the issue. If I touched a screw on the light switch (completely different circuit) in order to dissipate a charge it also caused the coax connection to drop out for a second, but that's not all. All of my speaker drivers are either aluminum or titanium and by merely touching any driver while playing music via the coax connection I would still receive a brief dropout. It gets worse and even more weird. So we have one of those high density foam rollers for your back in the room which can be very susceptible to static and all I had to do was touch the darn thing laying on the floor and zap a brief drop out but the strangest thing was picking up the ERC-4 remote while music was playing and yet even while not touching a single thing on the rack created a dropout in the signal.

Sounds preposterous but the moral of the story is don't let the room where your audio and video gear are setup become too dry. Probably not an issue for those living in the deep south or coastal areas but out west the issue is far more severe than I had previously thought. Its still puzzling why coax and not AES cables make such a difference regarding this issue. BTW I was using the RMC-1L for the DAC/Pre-amp.

Problems generated by dryness/cold/static electricity.absolutely true….
Interconnects playing a role in it….absolutely false

[routlaw]

Jan 5, 2022 23:44:15 GMT -5 Boomzilla said:

Wow - Living in Louisiana, I never even thought of such a thing. But since I'm moving up North sometime in my future it's good to know. Maybe a humidifier?

Yes a humidifier would be a good investment however I would steer you away from the Ultrasonic variety especially for a room with electronics. These type of devices assuming your don't use distilled water will deposit very fine powdery substances over the entire room. Effectively separating the minerals such as calcium and magnesium that exist in the local water supplies. We learned the hard way on that one. How dry your new home will be depends on lots of things however, that being elevation to some degree, the actual relative humidity of the area you will be in and what type of heat you will have. Obviously AZ or UT will have much lower relative humidity than MN or WI plus the air itself due to higher elevations will be significantly thinner to begin with. Forced Air furnaces will not be as dry as electric heat and probably hot water heat. 

We have radiant floor heat in our basement where the HT/Music room is, then upstairs we have hot water registers rather than radiant. Its an old house and we were reluctant at the time to do radiant under an almost hundred hear old wooden floors. We have had nearly a month of near zero to below zero temps on most days with lots of snow and under these conditions interior air dries out very rapidly unless humidified.

Note with forced air furnaces it is possible to include a built in humidifier which will humidify the entire house, however there can also be a downside to this. Windows will acquire lots of condensation and if they are aluminum clad wooden windows this can be a problem. Worse still once temps drop to near zero or below zero that condensation will turn to ice and that is on the interior side. 

Hope this helps in your future plans.

[routlaw]

Jan 6, 2022 0:04:52 GMT -5 novisnick said:

I learned this lesson years ago in my first year of college. The very small apartment (generous description) had forced air gas heat. First morning I woke up I could barley breathe. There was no moisture in the air at all. Starving student spent what little he had for a humidifier as home remedies were not sufficient. Best money I ever spent. Bonus in my current setup is that I don’t have the static problem, especially spinning LPs. If you don’t have a Hygrometer to test the humidity in your room, just spin an LP for a minute and pick it up. You’ll feel the static electricity in your hands if the room is very dry.

Oh yes installed a hygrometer many years ago and also have a humidifier in the room, I just get lazy this time of year and don't want to fool with it on a daily basis so I just turn to digital music vs vinyl and thought this would mitigate any need to for humidifying.  Wrong. A few years ago after a new acquisition of my VPI turntable which has a solid metal platter, I went to flip the record over and it literally would not release from the platter. I was pulling so hard the record looked more like and empty taco shell until finally it released and went flying out of my hands. Fortunately I was able to catch it before any damage occurred. At this point I went out and bought a humidifier. Problem solved for vinyl. 

[routlaw]

Jan 6, 2022 9:23:08 GMT -5 405x5 said:

Problems generated by dryness/cold/static electricity.absolutely true….
Interconnects playing a role in it….absolutely false

I assume you have some empirical evidence that a digital coax cable (in this case) and its associated circuits cannot be susceptible to static electricity? Can you please share? More importantly, assuming you read the entire initial post, how would you explain what I was experiencing. Thanks, look forward to your response.

[AudioHTIT]

Never had a problem with interconnects that I’m aware of, but I keep a humidifier running in my loft/studio for the health of my guitars.

[405x5]

Jan 6, 2022 11:53:18 GMT -5 routlaw said:

Jan 6, 2022 9:23:08 GMT -5 405x5 said:

Problems generated by dryness/cold/static electricity.absolutely true….
Interconnects playing a role in it….absolutely false

“I assume you have some empirical evidence that a digital coax cable (in this case) and its associated circuits cannot be susceptible to static electricity? Can you please share? More importantly, assuming you read the entire initial post, how would you explain what I was experiencing. Thanks, look forward to your response.”

Absolutely !

[routlaw]

Problem solved, whew! But first I would like to share what Blue Jeans Cable had to say about this and thought there were be people interested in hearing from industry experts. Will post the solution in a followup post for those interest.

Quote from BJC folks. 

Interesting. It's hard to say specifically WHY it's happening in any
highly specific sense without running about the room and trying to
shield different points and whatnot, but in a general sense I suspect
it's pretty simple. Coax carries an unbalanced signal, AES a balanced
signal. With a coaxial connection you are relying on shielding to
keep out noise, so when there is some electrostatic discharge, if the
shielding keeps that below a certain threshold you'll be fine, and if
it gets past the shielding too well you won't. Very likely, since the
coax is extremely well shielded, the entry point is in one of the
devices -- but that's the sort of thing which, if you really wanted to
know, you'd have to spend some time sniffing out. No shield is 100%
effective, and some things, especially the lower-frequency end of some
types of noise, can be devilishly difficult to shield. Sometimes,
inside of a device, the center pin of a coaxial connection just goes
to a bit of unshielded point-to-point wiring, or to an unshielded
trace on a circuit board, and then the shielding effectiveness can
depend on the device case and chassis. Sometimes that's plastic, and
consequently of no shield value at all, but even when it's metal and
well-grounded it may or may not be effective.

So why is the AES signal getting through without this problem? The
shielding on an AES cable is almost always not only no better than,
but actually INFERIOR to, the shielding on a coax, so you might think
the problem should be worse, not better. But AES is run balanced, and
if a balanced circuit has been correctly designed (which is not always
simple), then you get the full benefit of a noise-rejection phenomenon
we call "common-mode noise rejection." Basically it works like this:
in an unbalanced circuit, there's one signal conductor, and ground.
If noise gets into the signal conductor, it gets into the signal,
period. In a balanced circuit there are two opposite-polarity signal
conductors, "plus" and "minus," as well as (usually) a ground. If
this is done right (I won't bother talking about how it can be done
wrong here, but it's fair to say that "done right" is not a given in
all cases), the noise will vanish. The reason is pretty simple:
imagine that the noise causes a brief one-volt positive pulse on the
line. In a balanced circuit, this noise will hit the "plus" line and
the "minus" line at the same time, raising the voltage on both legs by
one volt. But the receiving circuit isn't comparing "plus" to ground,
as in an unbalanced circuit. It's comparing "plus" to "minus." So if
the unpolluted signal were, say, +1 volt on the "plus" side of the
line, it'd be -1 volt on the "minus" side. Difference: two volts.
Now introduce the noise. The polluted signal is now +2 volts on the
"plus" side and 0 volts on the minus side: the difference is STILL two
volts, and it's as though the noise never happened.

My guess would be that you have a well designed balanced AES circuit,
and that CMNR is saving the day. There are various ways this can
fail, but when it works right, it's practically magic.

[routlaw]

I'll probably never know exactly what causes this between these two pieces of audio gear, the ERC-4 and RMC-1L but it wasn't for lack of turning over every stone possible. Effectively I did the following:

1. Humidified up to 40%, did not help

2. Ran a ground wire between the two chassises, since the ERC-4 does not have a ground pin at the AC inlet, did not help

3. Installed another outboard DAC (Holo Spring) using coax input and balanced output to the RMC-1L, problem solved absolutely no dropouts. At this point if you've been following along you probably know where I'm going with this.

4. Changed coax output from ERC-4 to input Coax #4 instead of Coax #1  on the RMC, did not help one iota, back to dropouts. 

5. Wrapped a small piece of ERS cloth around the barrel of the coax cable at the RMC input, viola no dropouts made it through an entire album where as before the dropouts would occur every track to track and a half sometimes more often. The addition of the ERS cloth does have an overall affect on the sound and I am inclined to think for the better or perhaps just wishful thinking.

I can only summarize there is something being transmitted inside the RMC that is affecting the coaxial signal while the AES cable with its better rejection of noise is unaffected. Either that or some static charge is having an affect on the coax circuit. If others have had issues using these inputs on the G3 processors I would be interested in hearing about it. For now it looks as though Emotiva has yet another issue with these G3 processors. 

Thanks