It’s difficult to say which feelings we have are justified and which are not. When we start having to justify our feelings, isn’t that a problem in and of itself? As people, we are entitled to have feelings, that’s the nature of life is that if you are a properly functioning human, that you will feel things. After the feelings, what we do with those feelings is that which will define a given situation, and that is the point where things become a bit convoluted.
I read something once that said any escalated situation is 10% the situation itself, and 90% how you react to the situation. In this case, if you can’t find other accounts of the Polyend tracker exhibiting this much noise in a shared setup, is it possible there is a manufacturing defect that would be covered by warranty?
As far as isolators go, there are 2 kinds which you may already be aware of, the type I was discussing (in-line isolator) is a plug in device such as this:
It is very rudimentary and is a basic tool which, for cabled audio, has advantages and detractors. With your added detail about humming present in the overbridge recording, simply stopping the hum coming out of the tracker may be sufficient to resolve that but the downside is the gain of the audio from the tracker or anything that passes through the tracker will require an adjustment to balance it out and it may or may not lose some character, this is a very inexpensive solution and you’ll have to see if it works for you.
The USB isolator bwo is referring to is this kind:
It is entirely possible that this type which plugs directly into the USB port of a power source and then the cable goes out to the device (tracker) will eliminate the problem at the source and thus you won’t need the inline variety. There are people who swear by these, but there will be someone along shortly to tell you this is a placebo and that they don’t work, or that only certain ones work, and that’s the nature of this kind of device, there will always be conjecture regarding whether they actually work or not and they are certainly the more expensive of the 2 types of isolators. You may have to do some homework on this.
I have also recently tried this for a situation I was dealing with:
And though there are different, more expensive brands, which make similar, I can tell you that this one absolutely did nothing to solve my ground loop problem.
I hope you find some resolution, sorry I can’t give more specific help but the problem (if it is with the polyend) may only truly be resolved by attempting some kind of warranty exchange. If you find that from other people’s accounts that all tracker devices have a similar issue, it may be a more difficult process to resolve this seemingly small isue.
