[Audio Jester]

There is a stange situation with the electrics in my house at the moment and since I am not an electrician I am not sure if I can explain it correctly so please be patient.

I have noticed that the wall switches in another room near my beadroom cause my desktop speakers to make either a loud pop or small pops when they are turned on/off. This does not occur every time they are used, but I notice it over my PC desktop speakers from time to time... not sure about my headphone rig yet. To make things more complicated I do know that the amp (which is integrated with a sub... as it is a typical PC speaker setup) is dodgey and it has made buzzing and poping noises in the past.

The strange thing though is that it seems to be only these two wall switches that cause this. One is for a ceiling exhaust fan (the one that usually makes the loud pop) and the other is for the lights in the room, which are fluoro's (the small pops). I do not notice any other electrical disturbances just this noise over my speakers. I get the feeling that the large pop comes mainly from the sub, but the smaller ones come through the satelite speakers.

It could just be that my PC speakers have some poor connections in the amp/power, but I thought I might just post this in case it could be something that may damage my rig.

Thanks for you help in advance.

 

[colinharding]

The same thing happens to me at my college apartment when I turn the fan on and off. I have a very high quality surge protector that registers a huge surge when this happens. What I was able to do was go into the ceiling fan, that's where the problem was for me not in the lights, and wire in a ground so that the extraneous surge did not go back into the wiring and instead into a ground source. This is probably the same problem you have, though I would make sure that you have a surge protector. A dimmer switch or fluorescents may also cause distortion.