{"id":5698,"date":"2016-05-22T16:11:27","date_gmt":"2016-05-22T23:11:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/?p=5698"},"modified":"2016-05-22T16:11:27","modified_gmt":"2016-05-22T23:11:27","slug":"burning-down-the-house-studio","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/?p=5698","title":{"rendered":"Burning Down The House (Studio!)"},"content":{"rendered":"

No, I’m not talking about the David Byrne song today. I’m going to write about something that happened here in my office a couple of days ago \u2014 that might have resulted in a real disaster. I’m feeling very fortunate that my office, my studios, and my building didn’t burn to the ground when the DVD-ROM drive in one of my PCs caught fire in the middle of the night. I would never have imagined that a single space optical disc drive could spontaneously erupt in flames. But it happened. You might think twice about leaving your equipment running when you’re not around.<\/p>\n

\"160522_DVD-ROM_burned\"<\/p>\n

Figure 1 – The back of the DVD-ROM drive that burst into flames inside my Sony Vaio computer.<\/p>\n

My office is not large. It’s in the front of the building and provides a view of the McLaren repair shop across the street and my driveway. But it’s got a couple of windows and I like having the light. I have three computers located in strategic places. I have an aging Mac tower under my desk that feeds two large displays on my main desktop and there are two PCs on another desk behind me. I use these machines to edit and process audio files (in Nuendo), prepare and upload soundfiles to iTrax, and encode and author Blu-ray discs.<\/p>\n

The authoring system was custom made by my former engineer and still functions quite well for a 6-year-old machine. Then there’s the Sony Vaio machine \u2014 another older machine with a couple of DVD drives and a few hard drives mounted inside. After all of the dust from the recent studio construction, I decided to organize and clean the desk with the PCs, which I did. It’s always nice to work in an area that’s organized and uncluttered. However, anyone that has viewed my office knows that I’m not a neat-nick. I like to be organized but there never seems to be enough time to find a place for everything and put everything in its place. It’s a problem \u2014 especially when I’ve had to downsize a lot to make room for the new studios.<\/p>\n

I’ve never made a habit of turning off my computers or audio equipment when I leave the office or studio. I don’t subscribe to the whole “burning-in” idea; I just find it easier to start the next day from where I left off the previous day. And I’ve never had an issue until two days ago.<\/p>\n

I had been editing the demonstration tracks for the “Music and Audio: A User Guide To Better Sound<\/a>” at the close of Friday. When I opened the door to my office on Saturday morning, I smelled a very familiar odor \u2014 the smell of burned electronic components. It was quite strong but I didn’t notice any obvious problems until I returned to my Vaio to continue editing. The machine was dead.<\/p>\n

After disconnecting all of the external connections, I pulled the case off of the machine and was shocked to see the DVD-ROM drive and power supply severely burned. Take a look at the image at the top of this article \u2014 this is not a simply fried cable or two. The whole unit was toast.<\/p>\n

And the inside of the computer case showed a large amount of burning as well. There was a major flame up inside of the computer. Something must have shorted out inside the DVD-ROM drive and the dust inside the unit accelerated a brief fire. Thankfully, there damage was contained inside of the computer. But I shutter to think how close I came to losing the whole place.<\/p>\n

So I turn off all of my computers when I leave the office now. The audio equipment (amplifiers, console, outboard processors, and interfaces) all stay on, but the computers get rebooted every morning. I thought you might like to know. Fire inside of computer or electronic component can happen \u2014 it happened to me. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

No, I’m not talking about the David Byrne song today. I’m going to write about something that happened here in<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[97,657,50,40,172,1087,1032,1097,70,640,1092,26,639,1043,980,1061,42,298,251,645,638,637,227,643,169,855,1026,1027,150,347,27,116,1098,659,660],"class_list":["post-5698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dr_aixs_posts","tag-5-1-surround","tag-advanced-resolution","tag-aix-records","tag-analog-vs-digital","tag-audio-resolution","tag-axpona-2016","tag-dvd_audio","tag-euphonix-system-5","tag-hd-downloads","tag-hd-music","tag-hd-vinyl","tag-hd-audio","tag-hi-res-audio","tag-hi-res","tag-hi-res-music","tag-hi-res-sound","tag-high-resolution-audio","tag-high-res-music","tag-high-resolution","tag-high-resolution-audio-experience","tag-hires-audio","tag-hires-music","tag-hra","tag-hra-listening-experience","tag-mark-waldrep","tag-mqa","tag-music-and-audio","tag-music-and-audio-a-user-guide-to-better-sound","tag-pcm","tag-spectragram","tag-spectragraphs","tag-surround-music","tag-the-newport-show","tag-uhd-audio","tag-ultra-high-definition-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5698"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5700,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5698\/revisions\/5700"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}