What irritated you most on your own hifi system? and how u resolve it!

[jb]

I think most of us here have a hifi set up at home and serious in getting good music sound as we invest a lot of money and time in this hobby. But often we found our system lack of certain performance that put you off , and how you resolve it finally. I think some sharing of this experience will be benefit to forumer.

For me, those bright HF irriated me too much that I cannot even listen a complete song and start flipping track, soft bass is still acceptable to me as still can live with it. Vocal is a must as it is the soul of music and must get it right else everything fail. To tame the HF brightness, I tends to use those cable that are warm in sound by their design like Cardas cable to mellow the HF and extend the mid range. Use a warm CDP like Marantz that enhance the vocal and trim some HF so the final system suit to my liking. Also use some of the acoustic absorber and diffuser to cut down the HF.
 of course , no one is alike in this hobby... care to share your experience?

[watchdog]

For me, the most irritating thing is not really a performance related issue, but the dreaded ground-loop. That annoying 50 Hz mains hum is enough to make you want to throw your set out of the window. And as luck has it, whenever the suspected culprit is back with the technician / dealer, it will behave perfectly.

When I was running audio and video systems together, the culprit was almost always the external antenna, or the SCV cable point. Disconnect it, and the hum disappears. I've since separated the systems, but a brute-force method of resolving this would be to use an antenna isolator.

For audio, this often happened when the components were connected to different wall switches. As far as possible nowadays, I try to make sure that all components are plugged into the same distributor.

[jb]

Yes, when you have many equipment connected together, it is better to have a proper grounding system using good distributor with low impedance back to socket to avoid current flowing in ground loop that cause noise pick up. Ideal grounding system for audio setup:

[jb]

Since we are talking about grounding, actually a lot of high end cable maker make use of this grounding technique to design their high end cable and market it. There is some science behind interconnect and cable design. The cable have to do reduce noise pick up and achieve low impedance. Take a look at a typical interconnect connection on Fig 2-22, because of grunding at A and B, it causes a ground current Ig to flow and from ground loop current. On Fig 2-23, when point A ground is removed, the ground loop current is no more and noise will reduce.

[jb]

This is the actual measurement noise attenuation using different interconnect cable grounding technique to reduce noise pick up. May be you can identified some of this technique on your high end interconnect , speaker cable or power cord. and best noise attenuation design is "G" cable ground connection by isolated the ground loop.