Can someone help me with a popping sound??


Hi all,
I'm having problems with a popping sound (sounds like rice cripies cereal) coming from my speaker & I think I've narrowed it down to possible interference from my subwoofer. My subwoofer seems to be emitting an electrical hum. Is it possible the hum is being picked up through my speaker cables & sent out through the speaker? The popping is only coming through the speaker closest to the subwoofer. If the culprit is the subwoofer, does anyone have any suggestions to fix this problem? I've got a picture posted of the speaker & subwoofer in the "system" portion of Audiogon, if you think this may help. I've straightened the cables out & separated them the best possible (better than the representation in the picture), but I don't have much room to work with. Any suggestions would be much appreciated. Thanks
dsiggia
This does not seem like an induced hum from your description of the sound. If you want to confirm that it's not your sub, disconnect it. If the problem remains, see below - if it's gone, come back and tell us.

If this doesn't seem to have anything to do with the sub after doing the above test, I would suggest swapping your speaker cable left side for right side at the amplifier, to see if the problem then travels to the other speaker. If not, then suspect the speaker. If it does, then do the same channel swap with the interconnects going into the amp. If the noise does not migrate again when you do this, suspect the amp. If it does, reverse the leads going from your source into the preamp. If the problem stays in the same channel after that, suspect your preamp (this is a likely culprit, since yours uses many tubes - this could easily be a tube noise). If it switches, suspect the source. In general, rice-crispies sounds are usually either from small signal tubes going bad, or bad connections at jacks, although other possibilities certainly exist. But try to rule these out first. If this test leads you to suspect a bad tube somewhere in the pre, just do progressive tube swaps channel for channel, swapping only one R/L pair of tubes at a time to limit your variables until you've identified the bad one if it exists. If any of this is helpful (or if it's not), please come back and tell us what you've done and found. Best of luck!...
I've disconnected the subwoofer cable & P/C. Now I've got an high pitch frequency coming out of both speakers. I've never had a problem like this. I turned the preamp off/on & the pitch is gone. I just purchased a new "slightly used" Sonic Frontiers Line 3 SE & added it to the system. I also added Analysis Plus Silver Oval Cables & used them for about 30 hours so far. I don't think the problem lies with the speaker cables because I've swapped them out & the problem remained. I'm leaning toward the tube preamp, but since I'm new with tubes I really don't have a clue. I would appreciate more suggestions, please.
Since you are using tube pre-amp, there is a very high chance that one or some of the tubes inside the pre-amp have problem.
Change all the tubes and see what happen.
Also Sonic Frontiers support is great and the tube sets are cheap! They moved last week but give them a call or I would suggest RAM tubesets.

http://www.anthemav.com/OldSitev1/frames/tubesfr.html

I think you will be stunned by the upgrade in tubes.