[edstrelow]

Last night I was running a simple system, a Sherwood Newcastle CD player feeding into a Stax SRM3 amp, driving a Stax Sigma/404 set of phones.

At the end of the evening, after the unit had been running about 2 hours, the volume dropped to the point where I could hardly get a listenable signal, and I began to hear substantial distortion on the loud passages.

The only other thing I noted was that if I touched either the amp or the cd player wirth my hand, the volume dropped a few db more.

This morning when I started the system up everything was fine.

I didn't get a chance to swap things around to see if it was the amp, cd player or even the phones and since the fault is intermittent this is going to be hard to determine.

Anyone have any ideas what the problem could be?

 

[John Buchanan]

Could this be humidity related? I found this happened to my Sigma/404 phones when the evaporative air con was left on overnight. They worked fine when allowed to dry out. Mental note.....must save up for refrigerative aircon in next house.

 

[spritzer]

It's most likely tied to the bias, be it in the phones or the amp. Swap them around and see what happens.

 

[John Buchanan]

Ed, did you ever work out what happened to your phones? My problems with the Stax phones and evaporative air conditioning are well documented and definitely haven't recurred while the a/c unit is not being used.