My amplifier goes to 20.

[brooksmoses]

So. My stereo amplifier -- a quite heavy old beast in brushed aluminum and faux rosewood that I got for free when a professor I knew was upgrading his system -- has been having intermittent problems. I recently found the manual for it, and the manual said that these problems can come from problems in the speakers or speaker wires, so I decided to test it for a while with the speakers unplugged.

This, of course, raises a small problem. How does one actually test it without speakers? Well, it's got a headphone jack. And I've got a pair of cheap giveaway airline headphones handy.... So I plugged in the headphones, put a CD of Mannheim Steamroller into the changer, and cranked it up a bit. And it's actually about the right volume to listen to.

The right volume to listen to ... in the room.

So I sat the headphones on the desk, and listened to it for a while, until the tinniness started to drive suzimoses batty. Out of curiousity, I went to go look and see where exactly I had the volume set. It was set on 14. On a scale that goes up to 20.

So, yeah, before I plug the speakers in, I think I'll turn it back down. To eleven.

Comments

[brooksmoses]

In this case, the failure is that something is triggering the main protection circuit in the amp -- the power light is red when you turn it on, and then after a few seconds it turns green and the amp starts working. Normally it then stays green, but what's been happening is that sometimes after a half-hour or so it clicks back over to red for a quarter-minute or so and all of the output stops -- which I'm pretty sure includes the headphone jack.

It's a pretty sizable amp, though, yeah -- rated at 110W, but according to the output meter, I'm usually running it well below 10W or so. Nonetheless, the light-bulb trick sounds useful if I can't figure out what's going wrong some other way. Thanks!