Recently, I had an adventure at home. Actually I am still not quite done getting everything back just the way I want it. What massive project did I undertake? I disconnected, cleaned, re-arranged and moved my entire audio system. If you have read any of my posts you can probably see that there is a ton of stuff to move. Right now, after four days I have one of three systems completely operational and I am listening to the completed system. These "three" systems are actually my main system. I have two other systems in the basement alone. Technically, I only disconnected my main system. I like a variety!
The disconnect went less nice than expected. The nest of wires was significant and there were wires tangled up all over the place. The rubberized coated ones seem to be the most difficult to untangle. It took me about 2 hours to disconnect and sort through all the wires before I could even begin the task of removing equipment, cleaning it and beginning the moving of furniture.
The re-connect was less difficult, I used short cables wherever I could. I tried to keep it as clean-looking as possible. The unfortunate issue that I have right now is I re-positioned the rack about four feet over and some of my cables are too short. I plan to re-add the Adcom speaker switches that I had used before to switch around speakers and amplifiers.
The start up was slow. Do to the re-positioning of the system I have to either splice or replace some cables. I first hooked it up and ran it for a day and thought that I was hearing some noise on the left channel. So I disconnected everything, re-distributed some cables and power hookups to see if I could clear up the noise. I replaced the cable from the Schiit DAC to the Yamaha C-70 pre-amp and the noise was eliminated. At that point, feeling awesome, I hooked up the grounding wire to the pre-amp from the turntable and switched over the the phono input. The buzzing was tremendous! I tried moving the ground wire, and moving the power around once again. No change at all. CRAP!
So, what did I do? I turned it all off and slept on it. Today, when I got home I decided to move the cabinet to the current location from one about 8 feet further away from where it was. I disconnected all the inter-connects between the devices and the preamp and started over with the shortest cables that I could manage with. I powered it up and it still had a buzz, so I moved it once again out so I could access everything. I decided to replace the higher end connecting cables from the two turntables with el-cheapo Radio Shack generic RCA cables. The buzz was nearly totally eliminated. I was pretty stoked.
Continuing on toward re-connecting the home theater receiver and the tube amp to everything will take me the remainder of the week to accomplish. I am hoping not to introduce any more buzz into the system as I add more connections to the mix.
Keep on Listening!
Jeff
