UPDATE:
Last night I went to a friend's house with all of my stuff. The friend's house is relatively new construction in a quiet suburb, far from urban multipaths and overhead wires, and his listening room is carpeted and plushly furnished and big. We dutifully plugged everything in, powered up, dropped in the first disc and....
....and it sounded exactly the same. Terrible.
This experience would seem to suggest that my problem isn't RF pollution or lousy AC main power, or for that matter room acoustics. We experimented a while, at some indeterminate point trying some of his Acoustic Research interconnects, at which point the kind of musuc that the system should be making all the time came roaring in without a hint of buzz or rattle -- as if I'd just bought replacements for everything and put it all together right next to my own rig.
I suppose it's possible that the whole thing will be fixed from this day forward, simply because his cables are more forgiving than mine. Much more likely, it seems to me, is that the problem has something to do with the act of making and breaking the connections. Either there's some sort of fault energy building up in my rig and it's somehow being dissipated by the act of breaking and reestablishing the connections, or there's a cracked connection inside one of the pieces of equipment, or there's some trouble with the terminations on some of my cabling (which is all essentially brand-new, so I want to think this last possibility isn't it).
Any further thoughts, based on this experiment, would be greatly appreciated. My friend bought me two pair of these AR interconnects, on the spot, but I'd be lying if I said that I thought the magic bullet had been uncovered for a total outlay of twenty-four bucks.
Last night I went to a friend's house with all of my stuff. The friend's house is relatively new construction in a quiet suburb, far from urban multipaths and overhead wires, and his listening room is carpeted and plushly furnished and big. We dutifully plugged everything in, powered up, dropped in the first disc and....
....and it sounded exactly the same. Terrible.
This experience would seem to suggest that my problem isn't RF pollution or lousy AC main power, or for that matter room acoustics. We experimented a while, at some indeterminate point trying some of his Acoustic Research interconnects, at which point the kind of musuc that the system should be making all the time came roaring in without a hint of buzz or rattle -- as if I'd just bought replacements for everything and put it all together right next to my own rig.
I suppose it's possible that the whole thing will be fixed from this day forward, simply because his cables are more forgiving than mine. Much more likely, it seems to me, is that the problem has something to do with the act of making and breaking the connections. Either there's some sort of fault energy building up in my rig and it's somehow being dissipated by the act of breaking and reestablishing the connections, or there's a cracked connection inside one of the pieces of equipment, or there's some trouble with the terminations on some of my cabling (which is all essentially brand-new, so I want to think this last possibility isn't it).
Any further thoughts, based on this experiment, would be greatly appreciated. My friend bought me two pair of these AR interconnects, on the spot, but I'd be lying if I said that I thought the magic bullet had been uncovered for a total outlay of twenty-four bucks.