There are certain things that can cause a hum or buzzing noise in your speakers such as electrical interference, a ground loop, faulty cable connections, and unbalanced cables, etc... Below are a few things that you can try to troubleshoot the issue before having to send them in for service.
- First thing to try when noise occurs, is to lift ground.
- The next thing you can try is disconnect all cables except the mains cable to identify if the noise is coming from any source.
- If the noise didn’t disappear it’s probably induced directly into the loudspeakers. To find this out, you should move the loudspeakers into another room. If noise then disappears, you should find out what devices are close to the monitors where the noise occurs. Probably a large transformer inside a device next to the monitor.
- If the noise then disappears, you should connect devices in the signal chain, one by one to find out what is causing it.
- Noise can also be induced into the cabling to the loudspeakers. You should use balanced and shielded cables, symmetrical cables or ideally a digital connection.
- In general, you should keep the gain settings at the monitor as low as possible ( e.g. Input Gain pot max, Output Gain 94 or 100 dB SPL) and the level of your source as high as possible to get to the best Signal to Noise ratio and keep induced disturbances as low as possible.
- If you believe you have a ground loop, a ground loop isolator may work.
- Make sure the cabling that is used is correct, and pin outs are followed and soldered correctly. Cabling should look like this:
XLR line output
Mini-jack (3.5 mm) or jack (6.3 mm) headphone output from a television or hi-fi system:
RCA line output
Thank you for taking the time with these trouble shooting steps.
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