Ringing amplifier


I was near my amplifier the other day with the system off and shouted for some reason and was surprised to hear a ringing noise for a few seconds after the shout. The sound was coming from the heatsinks because it's easily stopped by applying light pressure to the heatsinks with a hand or arm. The amplifier is a Classe CA-200, the later model with the big heatsinks on the sides.

The ringing noise was pretty quiet. If the system was on I doubt I would hear anything when close to the amplifier, and surely not from the listening position. If excited by the louspeakers, I doubt the noise coming off of the heatsinks will do anything to degrade the sound in the room. It doesn't seem like a big deal to me.

Is there something else going on when components ring? Does the ringing somehow manifest itself in the audio signal and get amplified by the amp? I'm wondering why ringing is believed to be so bad if it can't be heard from the listening position.
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Showing 1 response by shadorne

Heat sinks do that. Just brush them with lightly with your hand and you will hear a ringing (brush anything with your hand and you will hear something). Your hearing is extremely sensitive and I doubt you can hear this above even quiet music from across the room.

This has no affect on the audio signals amplified by the amp. In order for metal vibration to induce current flow in metal there must be a strong magnetic field in the vicinity (Maxwell's equations). For example hysteresis will cause tranformers to vibrate and by logical extension transformer vibration will incude a very small voltage signal in a transformer (note by small voltage I mean extremely small becuase a transformer winding is of low resistance and therefore something extremely unlikely to get through the power supply circuitry to th eaudio signal chain)