| Silencing your rig and control room
Hi,
I recently invested in a Mac Mini Server i7 with 8 GB of ram to replace my aging DIY Q6600 computer workstation in my control room. After placing it behind acoustic material on a vibration damping stand and replacing all the 9 hard drives of my previous computer with one external 3 TB hard drive, my control room is now finally SILENT. As my home studio is in residential area, I can sometimes hear some stuff going on outside, some of the pipes in the house and the fridge two rooms away. If I'm lucky and after having closed the doors, I can finally appreciate the noise floor of Sennheiser mics and my Rode NT2000 when doing some recording at home.
Now I recently also bought myself an Audient ASP008, which turned out to be about 10 times noisier than all other gear together. The small 35mm fan had a pronounced wooooosh to it and an extremely annoying whine at 860 and 2,2 KHz, which made it impossible to have in the same room as any kind of music recording gig except loud live gigs (where it actually works quite well). Tonight I took it to my dad and we replaced the fan with a 40mm Fractal Designs (14dBa) fan. While it's still noisier than anything else in my room, I can use it for remote gigs and don't have to have it turned on at home. My MacBook Pro is noisier still due to a mechanical 7200 rpm HD.
I've never worked in a room this quiet before and find it very liberating. Now I'm curious, to what extent do you try to silence your hardware? SSD hard drives, fanless computer cases, acoustic treatment, ISO racks? Where does it matter the most to you? Obviously having a silent rack on stage with the musicians on location is beneficial to sound quality but does it matter as much to you to have a completely silent control room as well?
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. And I couldn't connect USB 2.0 (or 3.0) stuff to it with full speed without a USB extender. I've thought of that too. It's frekkin great to finally have a silent room! 
