Hi Kelly,
It may be a problem with your grounding. There are a few variables at play and breaking them down will help you find the reason behind your hum.
1. Home circuits -- older building/home in the UK may not be correctly grounded - worth checking. Have you tried powering your modular somewhere else? Same result?
2. Power supplies -- are you running a single power supply for the TKB/Aries or separate supplies? If the latter make sure the Serge TKB is grounded to the Aries supply. Can you ground the power supply elsewhere? Most Serge supplies allow for grounding to a screw in the power plate to ground it.
3. If the power supply was working ok (from your prior post) then take a look at your step up transformer.
a. Make sure it can provide ample power for what you need. Underpowered transformers do not behave well when asked to do more than they nominally do.
b. Quality/age -- could it be defective?
Hope the above moves you forward to isolating the culprit.
Cheers -- Bill
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"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within." -- Will Durant
On Jun 22, 2011, at 12:07 PM, Kelly Snook wrote:Hi guys,
I hope this question isn't outside the scope of this mailing list, but I thought some of you might have experience to help me. I've got a beautiful old Aries modular synth that my dad (Carl Fravel of Gentle Electric) built in the 70s with a Serge touchpad sequencer that my dad traded him for a CV keyboard. Unfortunately, all the circuits in this old synth are American, and they really don't like my step-down-transformed power. Both racks hum terribly and i think they really want the 60Hz AC they were built for.
Does anyone know of a nice US -> UK (or european) power transformer that also outputs reliable 60Hz power, or do you think i'm going to have to modify my dad's power modules to better handle 50Hz power?
Sorry if this is a dumb question.
Warmest,
Kelly