What's wrong with my Cal Delta/Sigma?

Good to hear that it just needed a little tender care. I have to do the same thing to our bedroom system that has been laying around in pieces for the last month.

How long has it been powered up and what were you using as a source before? Might want to check the tubes in the DAC as well. Most of the tubes that I receive in the mail sound like crap for a couple of days (both signal and output) as they seem to be full of static electricity. The same goes for most anything else that has been shipped.

Yohjixme: I am just fishing here, but the digital IC does effect the sound quite a bit (regardless of what the bits is bits crowd has to say about it). It could be the cable, but I kind of doubt it would make the sound awful, as you describe unless there is something wrong with it. I have tried some pretty cheap ones myself and though they did not sound great at all, they were still OK. My DAC (a Bel Canto) needs to be powered up a minimum of three days (a week is better) for the detail to shine through, otherwise it is a little muffled, but I am talking very little here and as the cheap cable went, it still sounds not great but OK. What you may want to try is to clean all of the RCA connectors (both male and female) and then reinstall the cabling (both the digital and analog IC's). It is advisable to power down when doing this, but it should just take a few minutes. If you do not have a special cleaner for this an inexpensive one is electricians grade Isopropyl alcohol (available at electronics stores and probably even Radio Shack), which should be above 99.95% pure and have no additives. I use a cotton T-shirt over a pointed wooden skewer to clean the insides of the male RCA's, but most anything small enough will work fine (I just don't use knife blades for fear of scratching the metal). Following this leave it powered up for a week and see what happens. This won't cost you much ($3 or so) and is good maintenance anyway. Dirty contacts can severely degrade the sound from my experience and even if this does not work at least you will have eliminated this possible cause of the poor sound. Also why you are at it you might as well clean the power cord and IEC contacts.