Recording in cabin with no power

[deneris]

Hey Guys,

Looking at doing some sessions in a cabin in a tiny island off the coast of vancouver.

Cabin is an a-frame, about 18-20 feet tall, all wood with some small glass and stone areas (I think it will make fabulous drum sounds!), well shielded from outside noise, with a loft to set up as a control room. Mattresses abound for isolation purposes. Only problem is... there's no power (aside from kerosene lanterns and small car batteries for charging cell phones and such), or cars, as it's only accessible by boat.

So - what are some options for powering a laptop, interface, 6-8 preamp channels, guitar amp (not necessarily at the same time as all the preamps), and a couple A7s?

Would that power be clean, and is this even realistic??

[Berolzheimer]

Microhydro web portal

Micro Hydro Power

[Jake Dempsey]

Boat a generator in and put it as far away as you can. I've never done it, but it seems like the logical thing to do. Back everything up religiously throughout the sessions. Maybe use a power conditioner with a voltage meter to make sure you're getting consistent power.

Would this cause ground issues?

Sounds like fun!

[Kiwiburger]

The absence of AC buzz & hum will be an absolute pleasure ... do you like single coil guitars? Lucky you.

If you have the money, get some solar panels to charge your batteries. Or a little petrol engine generator (or both).

Laptop & firewire interface is already sorted.
Good Class A preamps draw a bit of current. I would make sure you have some generous capacity deep cycle batteries (checkout marine stores).

Consider paralleling a few of these together. You could buy some strips of brass and make your own heavy duty buss bars, and mount these in a builders chest. There are good high current 12V accessories now, because of the powerful automotive sound systems available now. Some large capacitors can be useful for peak transients too. Fairly heavy and expensive I know - i'm halfway through doing the same thing.

With the buss bar, you can connect up whatever power sources you have - solar, generator, or back home - lab power supplies or just a battery charger.

Maybe this is overkill - depends on how serious you are. If you want 16 mics around the kit, you will need a lot of current.

You could always run a sinewave inverter if you need AC - but try to avoid that, because then you are back to having AC hum issues.

All guitar amps run on DC.... ultimately. Even tube amps, the plates run on high voltage DC. So all that AC hum and crap is largely unnecessary, and the result of poor quality power supplies and shielding.

I've sometimes wondered how cool it would be to build a tube amp that runs off a bank of batteries to get the high voltage with zero noise ...

But a useful alternative is to use battery solid state amps. There are plenty to choose from - or you could buy a kit or module from an electronics store and use batteries for power. (E.g. - if you need). You could use a Sansamp pedal or other preamp that runs on DC.

Plenty of options.

[deneris]

hmm, interesting. So how does this work with power then? Gas powered generators probably aren't going to cut it, noisewise. Does that leave me only using batteries, and if so, aren't they converting dc power to ac in order to plug all my gear in? Would the power conditioner plug into the battery?

Thanks for any thoughts!

[Jake Dempsey]

There are some gas generators on the market that are fairly quiet. If you stick one out in the woods far from the cabin, you'll probably be OK. If you're just running an amp or two at a time and your laptop/interface, you should have plenty of juice.

[Kiwiburger]

I'm assuming you won't be doing critical tracking 24/7. If you have a decent bank of deep charge batteries, you can fire up a noisy generator to charge them while you are having lunch or watching TV or whatever. Or those solar panels can trickle charge them continuously ...

The actual current draw from most audio gear should be relatively small during idle, and you just need to make sure your power supply can cope with the peak power transients (e.g. kick drum hits). That's where a huge 1 farad capacitor, as sold for automotive sound systems, can store plenty of current.

I really don't like the idea, on principle, of turning your clean DC power back into AC. Your AC devices all turn the AC back into DC anyway - so it's inefficient, and just brings back AC hum/buzz into the equation.

[Kiwiburger]

The Neve Portico range runs off 12V DC, and is a fantastic solution for an AC-free rig.

If you must have AC powered gear, there is a device invented my hometown called the Whispergen. It's basically a Stirling engine that can run on various fuels, and it drives a generator and inverter to supply AC power. The exhaust heat of the device can heat your hot water etc - it's a good solution for boats and remote locations.

WhisperGenTM heat and power systems

[deneris]

That's the thing, I don't necessarily WANT ac power, I'm just curious as to whether my gear can run off of it in the first place? I mean, the adam a7s for example, aren't those designed to draw on AC power (meaning, isn't the AC power converted to DC internally?).

I'm a bit green on electrical engineering sometimes, so bear with me :D

Luckily I do have a portico 5012, I'll most likely be renting a few other A/B pres instead of anything super high voltage. Do I need a special adapter for the portico? And can I plug a regular power conditioner into the batteries?

[Audiop]

All audio gear runs on DC internally.

One should know though that batteries are not as noise free as one might think, there is no hum but still relatively high levels of noise. At a minimum a bank of cap's should be used to filter the supply but it also depend on the internal filtering in the gear.

IMO all gear should be constructed for external power supply (DC in) so one can chose batteries or an external AC/DC supply. If one could set one standard then you only need one beefy DC supply for all gear. It's not going to happen but it would be convenient.

A standardized DC PS for low level electronics could consist of 5V, +/-18V and 50V.

Being able to record and listen even durig a power out, not having to worry about thunder and lightning taking your precious gear out and possibly less problem with hum is some of the positive things with DC.

I have a new romance with singel coils and I'm about to build a DC rig for that reason. Problem is that even though the rig itself is fed DC any AC installations in the same room/house can casue hum.

If you are on the grid and want to run of grid, double up on batteries and run on one track while you charge the other and then you have clean power 24/7. That can be a good thing for on location jobs as well when you don't know the quality of the AC power and if there's a power out, you can paralell both stacks of batteries and hope they last for the job.

Even in homes there should be a central DC supply since we all have a quadzillion of ugly little wall warts in every room these days which I would be glad to never see again.


/Peter

[hv_]

I've grown fond of using a Sound Devices flash/hd recorder for remote location recording. It has top notch very accurate preamps and converters but they are a little clinical. But tracks are so pristine they warm over easily later with a little post processing. Runs on a Sony Li camera battery for around 3 to 4 hours. I have the 4-channel 744T which has 2 mic pres plus 2 line ins. The newer 788T has 8 combo mic/line ins. It has no di but if you add a battery-powered guitar amp you'd be set.

I also have a laptop-based rig that uses an rme ff400 for io. But I tend to use it only when there's ac power available because the laptop battery doesn't get near the mileage of the recorder. I think the recorder's cleaner. But the laptop does run a full daw which can do sound-on-sound which the recorder alone cannot.

Howard

[Remoteness]

I'd use all battery powered devices and charge them by a small genie or car/boat system when not recording.
Bring plenty of (charged) back up batteries for continuous recording.

There are also, battery power devices out there like Galaxy Audio's "Far Out" that can provide AC via battery power.

[Shadow_7]

How long is the session to last? How many tracks? Are you also going to need to power lights in addition to the recording gear.

I can get 5 hours on my Korg MR-1000 with only two sets(2x 8x AA) NiMH batteries. Two tracks, phantom power, max recording rate on the unit, and phantom hungry mics. My laptop would probably only get about an hour or less with an external interface drawing phantom power from the laptop battery.

Can we assume that you have four walls and are otherwise shielded from the wind. If not, you'd want to get some windscreens. Can we assume that the roof is solid and doesn't leak?

Since you're coming by boat, is it a big boat that has AC power to draw current from? Or are we talking boat as in canoe?

[PlugHead]

I'd have to agree with some of the good advice here: inverters/car battery power, and a solar trickle-charger with a gas/diesel gennie for extreme use/recharging.

Gennies can be buried underground, and is a great way to substantially cut noise, tho they need some ventilation, but - being on an island means no deep holes, unless you have lots of dynamite!

Unless you are doing minimal tracks (i.e. no drumkit) I think it might be more hassle than you can afford, tho - I've recorded some of my favourite demos in a log cabin/wood heat and NO electricity...