Extreme low volume.

It is difficult to troubleshoot by posting articles, but it sounds like you tried replacing the key components:- source; amp; speakers. Since this didn't change anything, try the cables. It is possible that either the RCA connector from source to amp, or the speaker cables are the problem. Brian

Thanks for the response. I wrote many people and nobody would even give me a guess. :( I tried the CD player, which is a seperate component from the tuner (receiver). Basically, the system has been never moved for 10 years and has worked fine until the other day. I did isolate each component which gave me the same symptoms. Low volume when I turned the volume control all the way up. The Onkyo amp is an integrated amp taking the place of the preamp and amp. I guess your last comment I already knew, but I did swap each and every thing out. Any other ideas? Thanks again for responding. I will check back tomorrow.

The reason it sounded like the radio was because all wires act as antennas. You will find that if you hook up a long unshielded cable to any stereo with any component on the end, you will hear the radio. The fact that you only heard it at max volume means that there is not much antenna behind the amp. Something before the gain stage of you amp broke. When you say "Then I tried the CD player for a change of music source" do you mean you were using radio as the initial input or what? The basic issue is that from what you post it sounds like you replaced every component and nothing helped. If that is right, then you have multiple broken components or have stuff set up wrong. From what you wrote though, it is not the speakers. You should never get that sort of a problem from a speaker. Broken speakers usually start making really weird noises or none at all. Also you mention replacing your amp and preamp with an amp. Is that Onkyo and integrated amp? Basically whatever you did not swap out is probably what is broken.