[bsckwan]

Recently notice some distortion especially when listening to some female vocal or piano music. Switched to the RCA output and to my surprise, the distortion was gone.

Anyone experienced this or have any idea on the problem?

 

[mikeymad]

Wow... sorry to hear issues bsckwan... I have had no issues with my SA-7S1... I have run RCA's, XLR's, and Both at the same time, and never have had any real change in the sound.

The output stage is pretty much the same until the plugs.

I would start going through the chain if I had any issues.

Amp (XLR/RCA inputs) - Cables - Connections.

Or check in with Marantz.

Cheers,

 

[ironbut]

Hi, do you clean the contacts on your cables/input jacks? If not, you should get yourself some DeOxit D5 and go through and carefully clean the pins on you XLRs. It's kinda hard to clean the female socket so right after you squirt a tiny bit of D5 in them, do the old "in out-in-out" with the males plug. If this doesn't help, see if you can borrow a different set of balanced cables (pretend that you want to demo them and lots of places will let you try a pair for a couple of days) because it could be a bad solder joint on one of the pins. Sometimes these get worse as the "joint" oxidizes and creates more and more discontinuity. Distortion at high frequencies during loud passages is usually and early sign of a poor connection (transmission losses are more obvious when there's more to loose.
I clean the connections at least twice a year and that usually keeps things good but some sockets/connectors are more prone to oxidation so they're the first thing I check if something sounds wrong.

 

[recstar24]

Could it be possible that the output voltage from the balanced output is too high and overloading your preamp/headphone amp? The balanced outs are usually 2x the voltage of the RCA out, and depending on the input sensitivity of your preamp/headamp and speakers/cans you are driving, the distortion might be an overloading of voltage. Just a thought.

 

[mikeymad]

Quote:

Originally Posted by recstar24 /img/forum/go_quote.gif Could it be possible that the output voltage from the balanced output is too high and overloading your preamp/headphone amp? The balanced outs are usually 2x the voltage of the RCA out, and depending on the input sensitivity of your preamp/headamp and speakers/cans you are driving, the distortion might be an overloading of voltage. Just a thought.

Oh... very good point... The output on the Marantz XLR is 5V. I think that with the RCA it is only 2V....

I remember when I first was playing mine with the SinglePower ES-1 with RCA's and I was running out of Volume control. It was not until I looked at the manual and found that they XLR's had higher output. I hooked up the XLR's and have not looked back....

But for OP (like recstar24 said) it maybe too much output....

Cheers,

 

[bsckwan]

Thanks a lot for your comments.

I had some problem with my speaker which is fixed now.

In addition, I think the XLR output is too high for my Pathos Logos amplifier. They are investigating into this issue.

Cheers!