Hum or buzz through speakers

I love the Golden Dragon 6922's. They are great for the money or for any value. I've been using GD 6922's for about 5 years now and love them. The 12ax7's are quite good also. Very reliable, clean and unbiased sound.

Also, Steve designs his amps to be passive pre-amp friendly, i.e. high input sensitiviy. It may be something you'll have to live with.

Helo Eagleman -

The noise is most likely caused by a ground loop created by more than one piece of equipment with a 3-wire AC cord. This problem may also be caused by a cable TV connection if you have any audio signal cable connected from the TV (or any associated equipment) to your audio rig. Here is a link to a good explanation of ground loops and how to fix them: http://www.altavistaaudio.com/hum.html

If you ever want to know what the noise contribution of the amplifier is by itself, just unplug the interconnect cables and replace them with RCA shorting plugs in the amp's inputs. Shorting plugs are so-named because they make a connection from the center-pin (hot) to the outer ring (ground), thus "shorting" the input to ground. This will tell you what the intrinsic noise level of your amplifier is, and this can be useful information when you are troubleshooting system noise. A properly operating amplifier should be fairly quiet - there should be only a tiny amount of noise (or none at all) with your ear close to the speaker.

Beyond that, you should keep in mind that the DNA amplifiers run at slightly higher voltage gain than is typical. This means that the noise floor of your preamp may be more noticeable than it used to be, depending on what amp you have replaced. This is not usually an issue, but I have seen cases where a small amount of preamp noise that had previously gone unnoticed became audible (right at the speaker) with a DNA amp.

I hope this helps. Please call me at 760-732-0352, 10-6, M-F PST (California) if you would like to discuss this further.

Best regards,

Steve McCormack
www.SMcAudio.com

Well,
I changed preamps from the ARC to the TAD-150. The hum or buzz was fairly low and not audible unless I got right near the speakers. When I hooked up the TAD-150 I could hear the hum and buzz from across the room. I unhooked the IC's and it seems to appear when the preamp IC is connected. Sounds like the 60HZ that newbee was talking about. Any other Ideas. This pre sounds fabulous but, I can't block out the noise.....

Eagleman

Did you try putting a cheater plug on the amp PC. Only costs a couple of bucks at the local hardware store and is usually quite effective. That is what I meant by "floating the ground" as the cheater plug removes the ground from the circuit. This is not really a major safety issue if the pre amp has its ground intact, and even then...... Try it.