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Startled at 3am by loud hum


Beer Kahuna

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I have RP3 floor standing mains with built in powered subs in each speaker. At 3:00 this morning I was awakened to a VERY loud humming noise. I went downstairs to find my right speaker buzzing from the sub. I usually leave the subs on all of the time due to "white noise" from the sub when they are powered down manually or go into standby. I thought it was a design flaw as both speakers do it. Now I'm not so sure. I turned both speakers of (and they both started making the subtle hissy white noise) at the speaker as they are too hard to un plug. The entire system was powered off so I know it's the speaker.

This morning I turned the speakers back on and the noise was gone. Does anybody have any ideas? Also, when in standby should they make noise of any kind?

I have had midrange driver failures and also hookup related problems and incompatabilities (see other posts). I'm about ready to throw them out!!!7.gif

HELP!

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While at lunch I tried to think of anything else to help diagnose my problem. The right speaker (the one with the hum) is hooked up using two 6ft RCA cables joined together with a coupler and the left is hooked up with 1 6ft cable direct. Could I be getting some sort of electrical interference or something at the coupler? Is it possible it's a little loose and that is causing it? Tonight I'll pull out my RPTV and check the cabling. Other than that I'm stumped.

Anybody have a thought?

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With everything unhooked but the power cable I have "white noise" from the sub. It sounds the same regardless of which wires are hooked up when in standby.

When I got home yesterday, my daughter told me the right speaker was humming again so she unhooked all the cables and it stopped. I moved my tv and replaced the sub/LFE interconnect cable with a "known good" cable and it hasn't acted up again (in 12 hours). I'm assuming I had a bad cable as all the connectors were tight. Very strange though.

Any other ideas for the white noise?

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The standby noise is hissing and is audible 10 feet away when everything is powered off. The loud hum was a very loud buzz/humm at lower freq. (60 ish Hz?).

As far as ground isolation, RP3's only have a 2-prong polarized plug with no ground. Both speakers, and all my other HT equipment, are plugged into a Monster HT2100 home theater power strip on a 20 amp circuit. If my replacement cable indeed fixes the hum, it must have been grounding out internally in the cable or at one of the ends. It's weird though because it started all of a sudden with no changes to speaker placement or touching any of the cables.

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I would suggest checking all the connections. It is odd that this happened spontaneously.

While off the subject. This reminded me of an incident reported by a co-worker.

The family is blessed with a toddler. The tyke got up early one morning and experimented with the stereo. The tyke managed to get the volume up all the way, and then hit the "on" button. There were a lot of tears and a pair of very surprized parents.

Gil

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My dad and I was trying to find a humm that just started in his two channel setup on suday. We unhooked everything one at a time two or three times. We switched cables with new ones and tryed differnt preamps. We ended up rewiring the whole system with all new wires and pluged everything into a new surge protector and guess what? No humm. It cost some money and we don't know what realy was wrong but who realy cares when the hum is gone right. It might be worth a try. Keep me informed on what is going on, I like this kind of thind.

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