Nord User Forum

Phun Tunes wrote:Humbuckers still had noise but reduced and only needed to be about 10-12" away from the front of the keyboard to be quiet.

As far as anybody realistic about EMI/RFI is concerned, this is entirely reasonable. I consider this a non-issue and so would any pro sound engineer. Nobody expects a guitar to work right up against a power supply of another unit.

23skidoo wrote:

Phun Tunes wrote:Humbuckers still had noise but reduced and only needed to be about 10-12" away from the front of the keyboard to be quiet.

As far as anybody realistic about EMI/RFI is concerned, this is entirely reasonable. I consider this a non-issue and so would any pro sound engineer. Nobody expects a guitar to work right up against a power supply of another unit.

Again you are not paying attention or reading something different into what I wrote.

The noise (and it is NOISE not a hum) is reduced with humbuckers but it is still there. And when a guitar is strapped on it is difficult for the guitar to be 10" away unless you flip the guitar around to your back. But if the strap is not truly secure, that guitar will be on the floor. Not my first choice of how to deal with the noise.
And I worked as a Studio Engingeer & Producer in large west coast studios for years as well as doing live sound and this noise is not acceptable. You keep referring to "Pro" this & that but am wondering if you actually know any.
Lastly, as now this is the third time mentioning this and other people on here have said as well, we do not have this same noise issue with other keyboards. Its primarily a Nord issue.

Great, I wish you good luck in not having any noise issues with any other keyboard or musical computing device ever, then, instead of taking proactive and time-tested steps to resolve a commonly encountered issue with many diverse types of gear infiltrating instruments who have been known for nearly a century to be highly sensitive to it. That's all I'll say on this issue, and good luck getting Nord to acknowledge what isn't their problem, or for that matter any of the other venders I'm sure you'll not encounter whose gear also makes EMI/RFI (I never said hum, by the way, but thanks for not reading what *I* wrote when accusing me of not reading what you did).

I'm outta this one, I offered the solutions that are best known to solve this problem already.

Well many other boards have "wall wart" power supplies which will move the noise from the keyboard to the floor.

The bottom line is, unfortunately, that there isn't a simple way to resolve this unless the transformer is moved away from the kbd (somebody did exactly that and posted photos here).
Just out of curiosity I made a sensor with a 2mH inductor I had from some old dismantled circuit and an audio cable: the MODX power supply makes a higher pitched noise than the NS2. The JX8P generates a hum on the right side, next to the power cable, although at a lower level than the NS2. Maybe you have been lucky, but Nords are not the only instruments to have this kind of problem.
You probably heard of the problem of stacking an electronic kbd on top of a Rhodes? People used to use a grounded metal sheet between the two, or do some lining of the inside of the cover with metal foil and connect it to the ground.
I suppose that by now Clavia knows about this, so whether they can or want to resolve it is another issue.

23skidoo wrote:It's not a fault of the Nord. It's a problem with the stupid single coil unbalanced audio design of the guitar which is extremely vulnerable to interference. Humbuckers were invented (in 1934 no less) to fight this exact problem back then. Blaming the Nord for making electrical noise when your single-coil guitar is close to it is like blaming your car for sliding off the road when you're the one driving on slick ice and going too fast - this is a known problem with single coil pickups (and unbalanced cables - as @Phun Tunes notes - even when unplugged) and has been since their invention.

This is a difficult argument to make.

Single-coil-pickup guitars have been around for seventy years, and to argue that one should use a completely different guitar (with a completely different sound) instead because one single keyboard apparently hasn’t been designed around the ubuiqity of Stratocasters and Teles is...not working.

The problem is the unshielded transformer that Nord use in the power supply. I suffered from this too and in the end I remote mounted the power supply. not easy but it solved the problem. nord-stage-forum-f3/noisy-emr-stage-sw7 ... 123#p94616

As part of company developing professional electronic audio gear also for studios I can say that an electrical noise is usually eliminated at the source.
Only when unproportional very high effort need to be done then exceptions are considered.

Hello,

For your information, I have played my electric guitar (single coil on clean sound and humbuckers on overdrive) next to my Nord gear : Electro 3 then stage 2 then stage 3.
I solved all of my previous interference noises (not specific to Nord by the way) using an ISP Technologies Decimator II G-String, a noise gate using direct guitar output to control noise in the loop of your amp.
You should maybe give it a try, this device is so simple : Only one threshold knob to turn until you're happy.
This did the trick for me.

Regards