building a silent enclosure for a G5

[studio_651]

i have a dual 2.5 G5 and when the fans kick in, it's very loud in the mics. i'm curious if anyone has built an enclosure for their G4 or G5 to try to silence the fan and drive noise for recording?

if so, what was your design? which specific fans and power adapters did you use? can you vary the voltage of your fans? how did you prevent the intake fan and outake fan from creating a "feedback cycle" where they would just keep recycling the air from the other without cooling the air in the enclosure?

i've seen the enclosures built by silencecases.com , acoustilock.com, and iso-box.com, but i'm trying to avoid paying $700-$1500 on a computer enclosure that i can probably create for about $100 from a studio rack i already have.

any advice would be very welcome, thanks!
matt

[soulful strut]

In System Preferences/Energy Saver/Options have you tried setting Processor Performance at Highest instead of Automatic? That cleared up every fan noise issue for me. Before doing so, the fans would rev like a takeoff at Heathrow....

[studio_651]

i'll definitely try that. thanks!

if that doesn't fix the noise enough to cut vocals and other acoustic instruments next to my computer, i'm still going to build this thing, and i'll post my materials list and pictures on this board.

most people must be either putting up with the noise, or not bothered by it because they don't record much with mics. or if you have a control room, and never record in it, i guess it doesn't matter much. i only have one room so i have to figure this out, and there's no way i'm spending $1000 + to do it!

[markwayne]

Several years ago I got fed up with noise in general in my mix environment and moved all my computers into the next room. I got a KVM switch so that I could share a keyboard, mouse and two monitors with all my boxes, ran some conduit through the wall into the next room for cables and that was that. I close the door and it's dead quiet in my studio now. This gives me better noise specs than a iso box would have (assuming I could find one capable of holding my four studio computers) and worked out to be much cheaper as well.

[motuguy]

Originally posted by studio_651:
i have a dual 2.5 G5 and when the fans kick in, it's very loud in the mics.

any advice would be very welcome, thanks!
matt

Perhaps you already solved your problem.

Not sure if this is doable on a G5 have you thought about changing the fan/motor?

Although I don't have a G5 I had the fan/motor changed on my G4 and now we have silence. My MacTechGuy told me that for some their cost saving reasons Apple installs "cheap" fan/motors.

[studio_651]

i don't think i want to mess with changing out the fans on the G5 - there are a ton of them anyway. with as high powered as these processors are, i don't doubt that they need a good bit of wind to cool themselves down (no complaints on my G5's performance!).

i did go into the system preferences > energy saver >options and switch the processor performance to "highest" and it did help, but it still doesn't make it silent by any means. i think the only option that will really allow me to track quiet instruments and vocals in my (one room) studio is to build an enclosure.

is there anyone out there that has done it? any pointers?

thanks again for everyone's suggestions - this bulletin board seems to be a very cool community!

[markwayne]

Take a look at this guys's personal studio. He built an enclosure for his PC. It's not pretty but then anything's better than looking at a PC and I bet it works great. It's very close to a design I was working on before I decided to just move all the noisy stuff out of my studio to a closet. I can't overstate the advantage of an "equipment closet" - less noise, less heat and more space in my main room. Here's the link: http://johnlsayers.com/Studio/Mainpage/MP-laptoppop.htm

[studio_651]

thanks mark,
you're right - that enclosure's not much to look at, but it's an interesting design.
you're totally right about putting all the noisy equipment into its own room being the best way to fix the problem. unfortunately, i don't have the space to set aside a closet or other room just for machinery.
someday. . .

[mortvillefugitive]

I have the same problem. They're just noisy! I'm working on an alt country project right now, and recording chill acoustic parts and dynamic vocal parts is sometimes challenging. One thing that I've found... The fans usually kick in more when I'm doing overdubs, because it's reading the tracks and writing, which is obviously harder on it. I haven't tried muting some of the tracks out, but that might help. I think there's a preference for setting it up so muted tracks doesn't use system resources. Just a suggestion. I'm definitely planning on trying the "high performance" setting.

<small>[ June 01, 2005, 08:50 AM: Message edited by: mortvillefugitive ]</small>