Enclosures electromagnetic shielding and ground

#1

For the 1001. time I'm putting my axolotis into a new enclosure. Atm it is 2 boards, having one external input and sending audio and midi back and forth.

Now since I want to make this really tight and professional I was wondering if you guys could recomend electromagnetic shielding for the enclosure. The enclosure is made of plastic but I have this copper tape lying around.

Furthermore I was wondering if it is enough to connect the general ground to the shielding or if the audio in ground would need to be connected too. (or would that destroy the Idea of ground loop break??)

So anybody experiences, Ideas?

@johannes since you know the board the best and are also an excellent electronic engineer, can you give me some Ideas here maybe?

P.S. I had experiences with unwanted noise, also during performances, so I want to eleminate as much reasons for this as possible.

#2

i know this would be another case, but the hammond series aluminium die cast housings are great, easy to work with and have pretty good shielding.

#3

I know but it was a bit expensive and weight is also an issue, I'm trying to stay within hand luggage range. So I took the hammond plastic enclosure.

I turned it into a little cyber christmas party with the copper tape and connected the gnd to the copper. Let's see how that will work out.

axoloti copper.jpg1080x720 212 KB

Noisy analogue input
#4

Its probably a cheap and nasty alternative compared to the copper tape, but I use large thick aluminum foil baking trays you can buy, I have used it in stomp hacks, shielding under the scratch plate on my guitar, haven't had any issues yet.
Its cheap, easy to cut and shape into any size...:wink:

#5

I use copper tape, it is handy and versatile whatever the shape of the enclosure and so far it is good enough for me.

#6

Yes seems to work well. (allthough you usually rather hear when it doesn't work)

I've done that in a portable axoloti amp project as well. It kinda worked but I remembered having a lot of trouble with the ground, that was also because I had several parts sharing the same power supply. After all I had to remove the preamps I was planning to integrate, and I would have weird noises when connecting audio input gnd to the shield, wich is why I'm asking here.