Strange buzz issue!


Hello audio friends! I’ve got a weird problem. I have an old ARC D-100B power amp (love the sound of it) and bought an ARC LS9 pre amp to match it with. Nice enough. Connected the LS9. Buzz/hum from both speakers. Consistent (clearly audible from listening position) at all volume levels/sources on the LS9. Crap, the LS9 must be faulty, I thought. For fun I connected the LS9 to two other power amps (Yamaha and Vincent). Dead silent. I then connected an old Yamaha pre amp to my D-100B. Silence. Same place, same cables. So, neither the LS9 nor the D-100B are faulty, but together they, or one of them, cause a pretty loud buzz. I’m going mad here! Any ideas? Thanks! 
teppas

Showing 1 response by atmasphere

@jea48 is correct. When this amp was built it had an ungrounded power cord. Someone replaced it and now the amp is grounded to the building electrical ground (per EU Directives).


The trick is to have the audio ground of either the amp or preamp be separate from the chassis ground, with a resistance between the two that allows the audio ground to float at chassis potential, yet is a high enough value to prevent significant ground loop currents. 100 Ohms is plenty high enough! But because the amp is using the chassis as ground you'd have to find all the places the circuit is grounded to the chassis, this kind of repair (since this really should have been done when the amp was built) might be tricky. A technician might be able to look at it and let you know.

Plan B: get an isolation transformer to isolate the ground of one of the units. It would be cheaper to do this for the preamp rather than the amp.