Re: Audiophoolery. 'Cable Break In' - I never knew that!
The 'poor contact' distortion doesn't just affect low level signals.
A few years back I bought a ‘for repair’ amplifier on ebay for peanuts as I wanted something for the workshop. There was a trivial fix in the preamp and all was good! A while later, listening to the radio, I became aware of some quite slight but noticeable ‘distortion’ coming from one speaker - sounding like a little more sibilance from one side. I swapped speakers etc and pinned it down to the power amplifier. With a watt or two of power, I measure something less than 0.3% distortion on the iffy channel (a noisy looking residual and maybe 100x worse than the other channel). It turned out to be a dry joint on the output inductor and had probably been like that from new!
I was surprised both at the cause and the fact that I could hear it straight away on (mono) speech but I could not, in all honesty, say I could hear the distortion on reproduced music …
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