Hearing local radio through speakers


I just bought a Rega Cursa/Maia and Planet for my B&W 602s with Audioquest Diamondback interconnects and Monstercable speakerwire. It sounded fantastic. I then took our christmas tree down and i moved my rack about 2' to its normal place. The only other thing i did was coil up the power cords (stock) with a rubber band. There is a local radio station tower about a mile away but i never heard this until i moved my system. Where do i start, Cardas caps, High $$ powercords?? Thanks and happy new year.
dfd9

Showing 1 response by seandtaylor99

Hi dfd9, not sure if the problem will go away, but I agree with gunbunny. You should not coil ANY cable EVER, since a coiled cable is an inductor. Instead of coiling, fold the cable back and forth over itself so there are no loops.

It's very unlikely that there's any problem with the speaker cables, since the signals on these cables are high level, and generally not susceptible to interference (this is why speaker cables are not shielded). Power cords might be susceptible to interference ... I dunno. Perhaps a shielded power cord would help. I would go this route as a last resort, or perhaps try a ferrite clamp on the power cords just to see if it removes interference junk from the power supply.

Interconnects are quite susceptible to interference, so make sure both ends of the interconnect are securely seated on the RCAs. Also, since some interconnects only ground the shield at one end you could try reversing the direction of the interconnect in case one of your equipment has a bad ground.

Lastly, if it's the equipment which is picking up the radio then try to determine if it is one of the sources or the preamp itself which is picking up the interference by checking whether the interference is on all sources (points to the preamp) or only on one source (points to the source).
If you isolate a piece of equipment which is the problem then at least you know where the problem lies. How you'll fix it I don't know .... moving it back where it was sounds the best solution since shielding is very difficult and expensive. Perhaps install a permanent christmas tree ?