Audio crackling/monitor inteferance - power supply issue?

[djevatenna]

I use a macbook pro for audio/music production. Recently I purchased a buffalo 1tb drive station external hard drive for raw data storage. The problem arose when I plugged it in this morning, I plugged the USB leads into the side of the laptop and a loud crackling came out of my speakers and my external monitor turned from the desktop to raw static. Once I plugged it in it was absolutely fine and everything worked okay, including hard drive, monitor and speakers.

I thought the problem must come from the amount of power supplies involved and interference patterns and the laptop's ability to handle it. My laptop was powered from the wall. the external HD, monitor and speakers were powered from a surge protected extension adaptor thing from a separate socket to the laptop's power supply.

My concern is that I'm going to be doing this quite often and there is obviously something wrong. I need to know how to fix this problem before i damage any part of an expensive set up. Have I overloaded the surge extension lead? Is my laptop acting as some sort of crazy conductor? Pretty worried.

Any help with sorting this out is really appreciated because as you can probably relate to, there is a lot of valuable gear at stake.

Thanks!

 

[Detrius]

You should pretty much never plug anything straight into the wall--especially if you have a surge supressor available.

 

[westom]

I thought the problem must come from the amount of power supplies involved and interference patterns and the laptop's ability to handle it. My laptop was powered from the wall. the external HD, monitor and speakers were powered from a surge protected extension adaptor thing from a separate socket to the laptop's power supply.

Circuits inside all electronics make power from separate sockets irrelevant. However, better is to power everything from a common power strip. To have multiple layers of protection.

Ignore that nonsense about protector strips. Protector strips too close to appliances and too far from earth ground have a history of making surge damage easier. Sometimes even cause a fire. Best power strip is one without protector parts.

That power strip has conductors so thick as to even power 15 laptops. You did not draw anywhere near too much power. Did not create interference patterns. Good practice is to power all interconnected peripherals from a common point. Then leakage currents and other anomalies would not create that noise.