Chasing unwanted noise? It's usually grounding

Unwanted noise from your Elevate usually traces back to one of two grounding situations. Here's how to tell them apart and quiet things down. A missing ground. The Elevate uses a 2-pin power adapter, so on its own it's ungrounded. If you're only running into headphones, the unit stays ungrounded — which can produce noise, especially at high-gain settings. Connecting to other gear that has a 3-pin power connector — including a PC over USB — grounds the Elevate and often clears this up. A ground loop. This happens when several pieces of gear sharing an audio path are grounded at different points, and it typically shows up as hum or buzz. Using the Elevate's Line Outputs can avoid it: - An unbalanced connection is ground-compensated. - A balanced connection usually disconnects ground on one end, breaking the loop. Sometimes a little noise is just unavoidable — single-coil pickups, no convenient ground, a noisy system ground, and so on. For those cases, the Elevate includes a sophisticated, transparent noise-reduction algorithm to help keep things clean.