Crackling sounds while playing DVDs (1 Viewer)

[SteveKNJ]

While playing DVDs especially, I notice sometimes I get crackling sounds from my speakers. I seems to happen more frequently when the sound is louder. What I am asking, is what are the probably causes of this type of thing? I have a Kenwood lower end receiver (about a year old) and a 5.1 set of Onkyo speakers, and a Sony, non progressive scan DVD player about a year old as well.

My thoughts on this are that it could be any one of the following with the first 2 most likely, but I'm not sure if this is where to start:

1) Speaker wire (I wired this awhile back for a different setup, and there may be a splice or two in them)
2) Componant cable (inexpensive cable that I bought from a PC fleamarket, but I figured that for my modest system, it would probably be good enough).
3) Bad reciever
4) Bad DVD player (unlikely since this happened on a different DVD player.
5) Subwoofer setting off (I monkeyed around with this, but it didn't seem to help)

I'm looking to play around with my system over the long weekend, so any help as to where to start would be appreciated.

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Possible, rerouted bass (which is sent to mains with sub off) might tax your drivers on your speakers resulting in distortion.


On thing you didn't mention was distortion on the source. Often dialog levels have slight clipping to them... there are dozens of dvds in my collection where a loud dialog passage causes a slight crackle.

One way to check would be to rduce the volume (or listen on headphones) and see if the distortion is there, and if it is repeatable on the same spot.

-V

 

[SteveKNJ]

Yes, I meant the audio cable, not the componant cables. I believe it is a coax digital cable. Could that be a possible cause?

 

[Vince Maskeeper]

Possible. Step one would be to try to replicate the section that cracks- put it on a-b loop and figure out which channel(s) it comes from (put your ear to speakers)-- and then see if it is affected by volume (does it go away when the volume is reduced).