Need suggestions please! Electrical noise in my system and it's driving me crazy!


So I have been battling with an electrical noise in my home since I moved in over a year ago. I've had two electricians check it out and have done hours of trouble shooting myself. 

I'm getting a hum or a buzz from anything with a transformer and a buzz through my speakers. Standard driver speakers and my Maggies. The house was built ten years ago and has everything up to code. Underground electrical lines. 2 ground rods outside the house. Just added a ground to all the copper plumbing and gas lines. I have a 200 amp panel in the house and a 100 amp panel in the garage. 

I have a Furman IT Reference 15 power conditioner and it's not doing jack. It's actually humming too. As far as trouble shooting I've mixed and matched equipment, speaker, and cables to eliminate that factor, I've also turned every breaker off one by one to find if it's something in the house that's dirtying up the electrical but even when I only had the one breaker that powered me system on, the noise was still there. 

I'm going crazy because my relaxing time is sitting and listening to my music in a dead silent room with a dead silent background and I no longer have that anymore. I can hear the buz, hum, and even a high pitch noise and it's ruining my hobby. Both electricians I've had in the house have no clue and and think I'm nuts anyway. 

Has anyone had an issue like this before? Could you fix it? How did you fix it? Please help! I'm about ready to sell all my equipment because it's annoying to listen to. 

Thanks,
Brian
gearheadmac

Showing 1 response by bjg

I've had similar issues more than once -  the first time - I narrowed it down to the cable tv box -  so I just don't have it hooked up anymore -  but to nail it down - I removed every component from the system one at a time - power as well as any ground or interconnect that connects any single component to the system - this at least identified the culprit component.  

The second time was a lot more complicated -  i had an annoying hum in one speaker ( ml Clx ). I switched my mono blocks from left to right - hum stayed with the speaker -  i switched boards from one speaker to the other - stayed with the speaker -  removed all Inputs from the amps - still had the hum - now I was convinced that I needed to buy a new panel - and was going to swap the hf panel from left to right to see if it moved with the panel - or stayed with the speaker - I had just bought a new rack - so was plannning on tearing it all down and rebuilding the layout -  getting rid of any redundant wiring connections -  example - having one source hooked up to two different dacs -  or to the same Dac in different ways - USB as well as spdif etc. so I go rid of a lot of redundant cabling -  I took each component into my workshop - took the covers off - blew everything off with an air compressor -  then spent time cleaning every connection on the outside of the chassis with deoxit and pipe cleaners - then again using the gold version of deoxit - do this on all your IC's and power cords as well 
 
Put it all back together -  and the hum was completely gone -

im just suggesting that although it's a lot of work - cleaning the connections is necessary maintenance at some point anyways - and by doing this - you can pull out - and put back in - each component one at a time to nail down the culprit ( if it happens to be a single component -  and benefit from knowing every component now has no oxidation issue that might be contributing -  and when putting it back together