in the past i've written about the troubles i've had with my harmon kardon receiver. the feckin thing gets really hot and develops a nasty hum at times. i've tried lots of different stuff and talked to several techies. yesterday i was bored at the cracker factory and contacted the harmon kardon support department. at first there were a series of e-mails then a techie phoned me and we had a long discussion and i was given several options.
one of the problems is it's a high current beast. it weighs 45 pounds and has tons of features i haven't been able to figure out in 6 years. in the past sonny would fix things for me but now i'm on my own. i don't like being on my own.
last night i took a real close look at the wiring and noticed some speaker wires that weren't totally in the connectors at the back of the unit so i disconnected all the speakers and trimmed the wires and reconnected them. guess what, the hum was gone. i had 3 techies contacting me yesterday with all sorts of high tech suggestions and it looks like i had a few loose wires. i'm not going to admit to these guys that it was merely a loose wire. in my defense it's pretty easy to have a loose wire when there are 8 feckin speakers hooked up. it's actually a job for a chinese teenager with skinny fingers to hook up all the shit.
with the fecking thing being so heavy it's hard to be gentle when sliding it forward to dust and clean the rack. i must have fecked up things whilst dusting. i should have know better than trying to perform a task that best suited to women, dusting.
i love you sons of bitches.
18 comments:
So Billy, is this unit an old-school vacuum tube amplifier? Some people swear the old tube receivers-amplifiers sound better than solid state.
My turntable also produced a hum when running the audio through the pre-amp. I noticed it had a separate green "ground" wire which I screwed to the grounding screw on the electrical power outlet. Hum disappeared as well.
I've always assumed that you had a few loose wires. :-)
Don't dust back there, blow it out with an air compressor and let the old lady deal with the dust after it settles in the room.
I just remembered, you don't need an air compressor, you have a kick ass leaf blower.
robert - no, not a tube amp. i was talked into a home theatre deal. when it works it's fabulous but i can't always get it right.
billy - the leaf blower might be a bit of any overkill but blowing the dust away might be a good idea.
That dust blowing by men chore is best done with a can of air, I hear.
That dust blowing by men chore is best done with a can of air, I hear.
Come on over and I'll blow some of your dust around.
charlene - those cans of air cost a fortune!
My Sony is still down from broken wire syndrome. Some day I may fix it.
Didn't they suggest checking whether the wires were loose? I think you should tell them to further their education.
The techies were thinking too deep, that gives me an odd pleasure for some reason.
I'm glad you figured it out.
I was about to refer you to my son, the audio genius in Nashville, but I see that it was just your usual detached slackitudinousness and nothing high tech whatsoever...what a relief :^)
I'll add Jackson Browne to the long list of preferences we share.
Randy used to tell me that bachelors can't see dust. Maybe all you need is a divorce to solve the problem.;-)
Glad you figured it out. I would have had to find a man to fix it.
bob - i thinks it's cheaper to buy one off craigslist.
gb - yup, one of them did suggest checking the wires.
tex - i'm like the broken clock, i'm right twice a day.
nance - isn't it inconvenient when our sons move out?
ananda - we guys don't notice small amounts of dust but giant chunks of dust are hard to miss.
Hahaha, hoohoohoo! That dusting bit is about as old as your harmon kardon.
Here, from Dave Barry: The obvious and fair solution to the housework problem is to let men do the housework for, say, the next six thousand years, to even things up. The trouble is that men, over the years, have developed an inflated notion of the importance of everything they do, so that before long they would turn housework into just as much of a charade as business is now. They would hire secretaries and buy computers and fly off to housework conferences in Bermuda, but they'd never clean anything. ;)
Sweet that you got that problem fixed BP. We just had the Internet guy come over to hook us up with a faster connection and we had about 5,000 loose and useless wires back there. I told the wife it might not be pretty but it didn't cost you $150. She just gave me a look that basically said you are fired and your attempt at hooking up the Internet skills are no longer needed.
Ha! I agree with your comment to ananda... big chunks of dust breeds dust bunnies! That's never a good thing.
alls well that ends well.
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