Calling all Von Schweikert VR-9 owners

Hooper; are you describing an 'electrical buzz' (a kind of hum) or a 'vibration buzz' (something loose that rattles)?

i assume that you have turned off the subwoofer and the noise went away to isolate the noise to a subwoffer issue. btw, i get zero transformer noise unless i actually put my ear on the back plate. i'm sitting about 10 feet away (plus the depth of the speaker)....my room is dead quiet.

one of my VR9's did have that transformer nut you mention not fully torqued down; which i was not able to diagnose until i had resolved some other issues. at first i thought it may have been a bad subwoofer driver. i finally was able to play a 25hz tone continually and then push on the amplifier cover plate and the noise disappeared. so i disassembled the amp module, torqued down the bolt, and all has been perfect since.....and these speakers are regularly challenged with very low frequency music.

i would see if while playing a test tone that causes the noise, you push hard on that amp cover plate (which the transformer rests against) to see the effect. you may not have torqued down that nut a sufficient amount.

as you already know; it is quite easy to do this fix yourself.

one could criticize VSA but after seeing how much i needed to torque down the bolt to stop the vibration; it is understandable that it likely seemed to be ok at the factory. mine were fine for the first month or so.....and i was playing torture tracks 24/7 for breakin......in fact; i may have caused my problem by getting carried away with the break-in. i would never listen at anywhere like the volume i used at breakin for more than a brief moment.

Hooper's VR9's were within the first three or four sets built and mine were about the fifth set built.....so the feedback on these speakers was limited at that point.

My hunch is that the electrical is the culprit.

You make no mention of having dedicated circuits/lines. I will assume you do.

Some to many of your dedicated circuits, lines, and/or outlets may be sharing the same phase / leg at the service panel with major appliances, furnaces, microwave ovens, refrig., and/or dimmers. Have you tried listening with all lights in the entire house turned off and perhaps most appliances off?

Considering that each of your components (including your high current drawing active speakers) should all be on their own dedicated circuits/lines and it appears that you only have two line conditioners, I’d venture a guess that you may either be lacking enough dedicated circuits / lines and/or proper line conditioning for some to many of your components.

-IMO

Calling ALL ?!?! That limits the number of responses. Those speakers never buzzed for me, sounds like you have a ground loop and not an issue with the VR-9's. Check your electricity, the speakers are not likely the problem.

Stehno: You are correct. His problem has nothing to do with the speakers. He is experiencing a "ground loop". Is has been diagnosed and the solution has been presented.

Hooper: I am puzzled as to why you would bring this to Audiogon. We are in touch 2 -3 times a day and Von Schweikert also always takes your calls.

Problem solved!!! In my attempt to isolate the problem, I discovered that the issue was with internal grounding, not with the speakers at all. I've started to experiment with using different grounding schemes inside my DarTZeel amps--the amps allow you to use different configurations--and that has helped. I'll fine tune things once I get back to normal operation after the holidays. So, to summarize, the problem was NOT with the speakers at all. Sorry for causing a panic.