No this isn’t about drinking yourself stupid or making yourself semi-comatose by any other means of chemical influence - I’m referring to that annoying occurrence when you have a buzzing noise coming out of your speakers that sounds like an angry bee in your ear.  Some folks call it a humming noise, others call it a “sixty cycle hum” or buzzing or 60Hz hum.  The proper technical term is called a ground loop or ground loop interference.  And this is not to be confused with electro-magnetic interference or radio frequency interference (EMI/RFI), hiss, static, pops or any other assortment of terms that have been used interchangeably (and incorrectly) for it.  (more…)

Well after a short breather from writing laptops suck articles, I found another conversation about laptops that sparked my creativity and gave me the next great idea of telling you why laptops suck (for DJing that is).  This conversation, like way too many to count, talked about issues with the audio noise/interference coming from a laptop and ways to (cheaply) work around it.  Of course these threads where someone complains about a laptop doing this or not doing this is far too often also followed by some form of statement where the laptop-sufferer is looking for a free or the cheapest way out of their laptop blues - but I digress…  (more…)