Shanling T100 owners, please help

As a general rule, tubes will be noisier than SS circuitry. BUT, and this entails a lot of factors, "good" tube circuitry with good tubes can be very quiet. Much of this has to do with the circuit design itself while a good portion may be related to the actual tubes in use. As such, that is why you read about people "rolling tubes" aka "doing tube swaps". Not only can the noise level ( called the "noise floor" or "level of black background" ) change, different tubes can also alter frequency response and transient response ( attack and decay characteristics ). Finding what tubes you like best in a specific component or system can be both fun and a source of frustration to say the least.

Having said all of that, i would contact the place of purchase and / or Shanling and find out why the tube section has a noticeably higher noise floor than that of the SS section. It's possible that you have "funky" tubes and they may replace them under warranty. Then again, replacing tubes may not solve anything if the circuitry itself is not well thought out. All i can say is to push forward and see where it takes you. Hopefully, you'll end up with a lot of good tunes and complete satisfaction with your rather novel approach to a system : ) Sean
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Sean,

I tried your recommendation last night, and the noise is coming from the Tube Output. Is this an inherent Characteristic of Tube gear?

Long

Thanks for your response Sean. I'll try your recommendation tonight after work..:-)..

Long

That's a pretty novel approach and pretty interesting to say the least. Sounds like a really cool set-up, so long as the tube & SS output stages have similar gain curves. Otherwise, you might run into a lack of "cohesiveness" due to different output levels between the highs and lows.

My thoughts are that you've got less line loss / signal degradation while going direct from player to amp. As such, you are actually hearing the noise floor of the unit itself since there is nothing between player and amp to attenuate the signal.

Did you notice if the noise if coming from either section (tube or ss) or both at the same time ? If coming from one section, have you tried running that section by itself and splitting the signal to the two amps to see if the noise is apparent that way ? It is possible that having the two different output stages of the player tied to the two different amps is creating a problem. Since all three components now share a direct connection between their chassis, this could be highlighting some type of AC ground or polarity problem. Adding the preamp or additional lengths / types of cables might have been enough of an impedance change to minimize or reduce the noise to the point that it wasn't noticeable before.

Other than that, i am not familiar with the Shanling other than seeing it once and reading about it here on the net. Sorry i can't be of more help. Sean
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