Help my MonsterPower HTS3500 is humming


This is so weird. I just moved my audio set-up to another room in the house. I plug my Meridian 508.24 and my Conrad-Johnson PV12 preamp into the MonsterPowerHTS3500. My Bryston 4B-ST is plugged into the wall by itself. Now, when I turn the pre-amp on a hum starts to come out of the powercenter. Also, when I turn the LIGHTS on, a different hum starts to come out of the powercenter. Now the light is on a dimmer switch, and as I turn the switch, the hum changes pitch and intensity. Can anyone tell me what is going on? Thanks.
argent

Showing 2 responses by argent

I have nothing else in the system. CD player, pre-amp, amp, speakers. Pure listening. The only thing else in the room is a chair. I thought the hum might be caused by plugging the amp into the wall instead of the powercenter, or perhaps both of them into the same outlet. I moved the powercenter plug to another outlet, still hums. I DO NOT want to plug the Bryston into the powercenter. Bryston owner manual says that the amp has filtering circuits in it and should not be plugged into a line conditioner or surge suppressor. Also, doesn't the HTS3500 have an extra filtering system that the HTS2000 does not? The hum is quiet, but even though I can't hear it at volume I still know it's there. I originally bought the HTS3500 for my home theater set-up, but by a round-about way I picked up two of them (long story). Anyway, I had an extra one and so I brought it over to the audio system. I've toyed with the idea of taking it out of the loop altogether and just plugging my stuff into the wall. But I know the CD player is extremely sensitive to AC garbage, as are the tubes in my CJ. Of course, the CJ just has that hair-thin zip-cord power plug hardwired from the back panel. Since I can't change out its power cord, I definitely have to plug it into some type of line conditioner. Oh well, back to shuffling things around.
With the lights off (window provides plenty of light), only the pre-amp causes the hum. If I turn on the CD player there is no hum. The weird thing is that when I had the system set up in my other room there was no hum. I can't move it back, though, because that room has since been transformed in my home theater. I'm going to try and plug the amp into the HTS3500, just to see if it removes the hum. If it works, I'll be starting a new thread here to ask everyone who sells the best line conditioner--something I can plug an amplifier into.