Charles Hansen of Ayre saved my love for audio

If you recognize the user-ID, you probably associate it with a litany of posts about trying to get rid of an unpleasant dryness, a sort of "reedy" sound in my system, that I've been logging-in to write about, over and over again, for years.

Over that time we've gone from room treatment issues, to power conditioning, to after-market cables, to RF treatments, to treating my IC terminals, and, well, back again, with no lasting success. Each time we've tried something, it's seemed to work for a few minutes (or hours), and then right back to the same old problem. Even the installation of a dedicated AC line made no difference. And the worst part was, I knew there was something actually *wrong* -- and I wasn't just listening in a finicky room, for example -- because what I was hearing was far more noticeable and jarring than any of the room/equipment changes I'd experienced before, and I'd listened in the past under some pretty un-ideal circumstances. Whatever was happening, I just wasn't getting it across in my posts in a way that equipped everyone who was trying to help with the right information to make the right suggestion.

Well, Charles Hansen of Ayre fixed it. And the best part is that he wasn't even trying.

In the past day or two, someone logged in to another high-end audio forum, asking what he could do to "warm up" an Ayre system -- which caught my attention because I'm not in the habit of thinking of Ayre stuff as excessively lean. Mr. Hansen made one quick suggestion and, when I applied the same suggestion to my rig, INSTANT SOLUTION.

Know what it was? Disconnect the TV and the DVD player from AC power when listening to music. Just like that, no more trouble, voila.

I had actually gotten pretty close to this fix by accident, since I had a power conditioner with a toggled power switch, connected to the undedicated AC outlet, managing all of my sources, while the amp and preamp were connected by themselves to the dedicated line, but because *all* of the sources were connected to the power conditioner, I was still dumping the RF crap from the switching power supplies of the TV and the DVD into the signal path whenever the CD player was on.

Now the amp and preamp are connected to the dedicated line, the CD player is connected to the undedicated line, and the DVD player and the TV are connected to the power conditioner, and *then* to the undedicated line. And to think, I only spent about two grand in RF shielding and new power cords and interconnects and speaker wires, that I wouldn't have had to spend if I could write about my trouble in such a way that other people knew what was wrong! :-)

So may I humbly and respectfully suggest that this experience be added to the "permanent record" of tweaker suggestions? So that the next time someone comes in and says, "I've got all of this reedy unpleasantness in my music and I don't think it's the speakers," we might all try suggesting this tweak as an antecedent to any money being parted with? It made all the difference in my system, and saved me from dropping any more ridiculous money on my rig.

Cheers, everyone. Sorry for the long post.

Dave O'Gorman
Gainesville, Florida