Mother of All Ground Loops


Hoping somebody out there has had something like this happen and can help a brother out.

I have owned for the past year Odyssey Stratos Mono Extreme SE amplifiers.

Recently, in an effort to upgrade my system, I got a great deal on a custom Response Audio preamp.

I waited for it to arrive, hooked it up, and there was only the faintest sound of music coming through it.

I then went to make sure that the interconnects in the back of the unit were okay, and in doing so got shocked.

I immediately panicked and sent the preamp back to Bill at Response Audio (awesome customer service, Bill is truly an honest and awesome guy to work with), who thoroughly checked it for any defects. Nothing. Preamp was in perfect shape.

For the few days that the unit was at Response, I had hooked up my Odyssey amplifiers to a receiver to have some capabilities. Everything worked out okay; albeit the sound was not so hot due to the receiver sucking as a preamp.

I got the Response preamp earlier tonight, and hooked it up the same way again to NO improvement. Hardly any sound, and shocked on contact of anything plugged into the outlet and made of metal.

I decided to hook everything up to an Emotiva amplifier I had laying around, and the preamp worked beautifully!!

So, its obvious that there is some major grounding issue with the preamp and the stratos amplifiers...

The problem is, how do you fix this?

I can't afford right now to replace either at the moment, and the sound is tolerable through the Emotiva, but I can tell a lot is missing...

Is there a cure for this problem?? Is it hopeless?

I fear sending back the amplifiers to Odyssey; at what would likely be several hundred dollars to ship and potentially getting damaged during shipping if there is nothing that can logically be done.

What can one do?

kingdeezie

Showing 1 response by bwaslo

Plug them both into the SAME outlet and see if the same happens. This sounds like a miswired outlet problem.

If that fixes it, CHECK ALL THE OUTLETS (get an electrician if you don't have another way) don't guess about which outlet is wired correctly.