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Hissing

When I play albums such as Rolling Stones 40 Licks or any Zeppelin album I hear a constant hiss in the background. The louder my system is, the more apparent the sound becomes. However, on other albums, this hiss is non-existent. I've heard that this is related to the way the album is recorded, but I have heard the sound reproduced much cleaner on other systems. What can I do to reduce this?

Conrad Johnson CAV50 (45W tube amp, with new tubes)
Acoustic Research AR1 (AR's flagship speaker)
Sony CDP-CX450 (Megachanger)
Adcom GTA-7700 DAC ($1000 Adcom solid state DAC)
Wires are simple 14 gauge from Radio Shack (I can't fit thick wires underneath my rug)
mm6485a972e
aball
2,016 posts
 
If you want to stick with Sony, I have 2 of their ES players and like I say, I don't notice it much on my setup. The ES players rock for the money - hard to beat economies of scale. Arthur
phasecorrect's avatar
phasecorrect
2,013 posts
 
Agree...we are talking of analog master tapes that are over 30 years old...even with the improvement of digital and SACD...I think asking for "hiss free" recordings from this time period is a bit unrealistic...they were afterall analog to begin with...which inadherently contains background noise...this being said...on my rather unforgiving system...the new Stones remasters sound have a much more "black background" than their previous releases...even seminal jazz recordings such as "Kind of blue" have some background hiss...the recording is only as good as the master...and in this case...analog tape...let me also state...for me...the great performances of these listed still come through..maybe we being too spoiled by digital...the more important question is the recording any good to begin with?...
johnwa
7 posts
 
Oddly enough my friend has the cav 50 and he used to have Thiel cs 1.5's (which I now own) and never had any hiss.Later he bought some Sonus Fabers and abra-cadabra ...hiss.Not horrible, but enough to realize that it was a result of the speakers.It wasn't that the Thiels were rolling off any freq's or anything like that, they are just different.The Sonus Fabers seemed to like LP's but old recordings on CD just seemed a little hissy.
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