Trending Lyricist I

Interesting problem with Amp and turntable

Forum|Forum|3 years ago
June 15, 2023
51 replies
1705 views

Father in law gave me a nice vintage turntable so I ordered the Sonos Amp and received it with much excitement. B&W speakers are on the way but for now I don't have passive speakers which made trouble-shooting interesting...

TT and phono stage to line-in on the Amp streaming to my Arc and one SLs in the other room and... uuuggh... a quiet, harsh, tinny sound with ZERO bass.

So... after hours of fooling around I'm still at square one. In a nutshell this is what I've done:

-Tested the turntable (phono stage has a separate headphone jack... sounds great)

-Used other line-in sources to the Amp... my phone, cd player... all sound great.

-I even hooked up an audio interface to the turntable and then to my Amp. It has a line-out so I was sure I was getting a line level signal. This also sounded great. There's obviously some ADC going on in there and this solved the issue... not sure how?

As soon as I put the exact same same line-out from the phono stage back into my Amp directly I get the quiet tinny sound again. Any ideas of what i might have missed?

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Show previous replies

buzz

Grand Maestro

Check the cartridge wiring.

J

John B

This is a slightly left-field suggestion. It is just that this rings very faint and distant bells from another thread. Could you try removing the surround speakers from the Arc and just play through the Arc. Or try setting the Autoplay room in the Amp settings to one of your One SLs.

I have absolutely no technical justification for this suggestion and it will probably be a waste of your time. It is just that I have sometimes successfully worked to the principle of “when all possible explanations have been ruled out, start looking at the impossible ones”.

Edit - or just try directing the audio to another single speaker in your system if you have one, rather than deconstruct your HT system.

J

John B

Check the cartridge wiring.

If this were the issue, would audio through the headphones work? As it sounds like it does.

buzz

Grand Maestro

I’m having some trouble interpreting the reported symptoms. The observation that one low frequency instrument is missing could be due to a room acoustic issue. If the cartridge is wired out of phase there will be some odd cancellations.

S

swisserAuthor

Trending Lyricist I

I think @John B is trying to say that if there was an issue with the cartridge, the signal through the headphone amp in the phono stage would have the same symptoms. But this isn't the case, it sounds great. Also the turntable was tested with my father-in-law's Sony amp and speakers before it was given to me, and it also sounded great. While it did do a trip across Paris in between... I doubt that caused a rewiring of the cartridge.

S

swisserAuthor

Trending Lyricist I

This is a slightly left-field suggestion. It is just that this rings very faint and distant bells from another thread. Could you try removing the surround speakers from the Arc and just play through the Arc. Or try setting the Autoplay room in the Amp settings to one of your One SLs.

I have absolutely no technical justification for this suggestion and it will probably be a waste of your time. It is just that I have sometimes successfully worked to the principle of “when all possible explanations have been ruled out, start looking at the impossible ones”.

Edit - or just try directing the audio to another single speaker in your system if you have one, rather than deconstruct your HT system.

I'll give this a shot. Thanks.

S

swisserAuthor

Trending Lyricist I

side note: my neighbour lent me his era 100 and told me there was a line in port. I was about to try it with my own usbc-3.5mm adaptor but turns out you need the Sonos one.... what's that about!!

jgatie

side note: my neighbour lent me his era 100 and told me there was a line in port. I was about to try it with my own usbc-3.5mm adaptor but turns out you need the Sonos one.... what's that about!!

Because generic USB to 3.5 mm adapters are line-out, not line-in.

S

swisserAuthor

Trending Lyricist I

So does that little adapter do the ADC? Shouldn't that be in the speaker?

jgatie

So does that little adapter do the ADC? Shouldn't that be in the speaker?

I imagine it would have to be. USB can do analog output, but I’m pretty sure it can’t do analog input.