Does hiss, noise, or hum coming from your speakers drive you nuts? #audiophiles

When you're more than a few feet away from your speakers you shouldn't hear any noise, right? Some folks are more demanding than that, if they put their ear up close and hear noise it's game over.

With headphones noise is even a bigger deal.

[billybunter]

Background noise, in my system? My wife!

[sashbar]

Yep, hiss bothers me. A lot. You know why? Because I can clearly hear it from 3 meters away in a quiet room. I can hear it when I listen to the music. Yes, it is complicated, and it took me several weeks of trying different grounding, moving the components around, changing cables etc.) to lower it down to where I could not hear it from more than one meter. Now, two days ago I changed my distribution block ( it is the same make as the old one, just 6 gang instead of 4, no filters no switches, nothing) and a wall socket ( to a simple new non switching one) . And you know what? The hissing sound is back with the vengeance. I just can't listen to the quiet music...Nothing changed in my system apart from the block and the socket. The sound is clearly different and the hissing is as loud as never before.. Go figure... My own experience shows that it can be lowered significantly to a perfectly normal level, if you try, but there is no clear recipe. Why? Is it that complicated? My speakers are 91dB, and there is not a single tube in my system, it is all SS.

[Flatheadmedia]

Drives me INSANE. I've been able to eliminate most hum and hiss from my system, but it took a ton of time and troubleshooting to get it right. I had to rewire the grounding on my turntable and shield the inside of my phono preamp with copper tape, also connected to the ground.

[SteveGuttenbergAudiophiliac]

Analog recordings can have tape hiss, or noise from mike preamps. Digital recordings are never dead quiet, they can have hiss from mike preamps, and the studio can have background noise. Just listen to the quietest parts and pause the music, you will then become aware of how much subtle noise is in analog or digital recordings. Very obvious on headphones BTW.

[vinylEarthlink]

Sometimes I hear some hum, and get up to investigate. It's not coming out of the speakers! It's not coming from the amp. Where is it coming from? Ah, it's the refrigerator, three rooms away.

[geraldchristensen]

With all the noise sources, fluorescent and LED bulbs- motors- wall warts- RF from computers and other sources- the noisy nature of alternating current and voltage on the neutral leg- sun spots- random this and invasive that, I am amazed at how quiet a good system can be. BTW you haven't lived until the HAM operator in your town fires up the "big rig"

[m.]

If I spend several thousand dollars on *high end* equipment that, it's makers claim it's state of the art, I expect nothing less than an absolutely silent background when music is not playing.
And if I was a manufacturer (or a sales person), I would be too embarrassed to demonstrate a system that has any kind of noise, be it 'hum', 'hiss', 'buzz' or whatever.

...and, that was my point a few videos before this one, when I claimed that, high sensitivity speakers are more likely to suffer background noises than low sensitivity ones.

[Tetsujin-]

For whatever it's worth, when you tell these tales I'm "all ears". Fascinating stuff.

[TheWaxChainFanClub]

I need to move my system away from that damn snake pit.

[motorradmike]

I’m with you on this, Steve! A while ago I replaced my Rega turntable with a medium priced but well regarded Music Hall MMF 7.2. Wonderful sound but there was a tiniest amount of hum around 50~60 hz. Drove me nuts. I tried to chase it down, replacing cables, grounding (earth) wire, etc., nothing I tried made a difference. Well, eventually I discovered the hum was only present with the tone arm down on a stationary, non spinning record. Tone arm up; silence. My turntable, DAC and integrated amp shared the same 1” thick marble shelf on the equipment rack. My Florida home is typical cinder block construction and concrete floor. It seems the a/c unit and pool filter motor, refrigerator, etc. were transmitting just enough vibration hum through the house structure to travel through the concrete floor, my equipment rack, marble shelf to the turntable platter! Strange, right? My solution was to have a marble slab made to about the same size of the plinth, placed on the marble equipment shelf on top of the largest Pangean sorbothane pucks I could find. Result; silence. Since then, all of my components are now on either sorbothane or (equally effective) 1/2 round silicone isolation pucks. Big difference.

[ericelliott]

I never hear hiss or hum from my speakers. Hum is a sign of a possible ground issue. Hiss will be heard if you crank the volume high enough without playing music. They generally play music too loud at shows, so you are likely to hear the hiss when nothing is playing.
The only time hiss bothers me is if it is coming from a snake or if there is a gas leak or something like that. That is two more things to avoid hearing hiss!

[EctoTron]

Wow that was the most unhelpful video I’ve ever seen. Thanks 👍

[JohnDoe-npzk]

I used to think the hiss was my speaker capacitors aging, until I switched from a tube preamp to a solid state preamp. Now with the CD player the background noise is virtually nil. It's made me appreciate CD more. I still love that vinyl snap crackle and pop just not as much.

[pedrovasconcelos]

My previous integrated amp was dead quiet; with my current one (Rega Brio-R) and I can hear hiss if I put my ear right up to the speakers. However, I can't hear it around 30 cms away (let alone the sofa) and the sound quality of the Rega is so much better that I couldn't care less.

[robertsparkman]

No noise is part of my definition of a good system. Funny story a Leslie sitting in the break room was picking up a local radio station, I hunted for mysterious voices. I didn't think it was haunted but I couldn't find it for a while. I figured that was a very sensitive speaker.!

[chili]

Is hiss, hum and noise a deal-breaker? Absolutely.

[milkman]

thanks steve.ive tuned into this pirticular vid looking for a reason why i could hear the hiss from my speakers. youve helped to put my hiss irritation to sleep. thanks

[dadofshane]

In the sixties, when transistors replaced tubes in equipment, we all noticed that ss amps, , mostly for our guitars, all hissed noticeably. so I am probably still prejudiced against solid state audio. so we stuck with JBL high efficiency speakers and fender guitar amps, Fisher, Scott and other hifi tube amps. we discovered that our guitar speakers with JBL D130s sounded better than the hifi speakers did, and they still sounds great today. I can't afford to begin to buy high end equipment in the world we now live in, so I recone or replace the surrounds on my JBLs, and try to recap and check tubes on the amps. I do use some ss hifi amps because they are affordable. I don't notice hiss like it used to be in the beginning of the ss era, Hum seemed to mostly go away by reversing the ac plug and grounding the turntable to the amp. I think there were always some noise when you turn the volume way up without a source playing., sometimes the noise seemed like it was from outer space. The last few decades, I've been collecting vintage hifi components. I am probably not much of an audiophile, but I like your show. thanks

[brianw]

Had a low hum while listening to tube amp the other day. It was driving me crazy. After some investigating I found I was hearing the refrigerator in the next Room.

[kesm]

Yes. Buzz/hum, ground loops or mechanical hum…doesn’t matter…any equipment noise is a no go for me. My audio equipment cannot be heard above silent passages in the music/recording is my rule of thumb.