Productive morning

[drewan]

I just spend the last hour rebuilding our upstairs entertainment setup. This resolves three recent issues.

1. The Slingbox died. After several calls to Slingmedia's tech support, they authorized a RMA and sent me a new Slingbox Pro. This is now installed and working great.

2. Bad location for some components. The receiver and tv control box were to low on the tv stand, so sometimes the remote was unable to get a signal to them. I moved all of the components up to the top two shelves so they are more visible.

3. Audio Hum. For the past few weeks we've been hearing an occasional hum from the speakers. I think this was caused by the speaker wires laying across the power cords, or maybe just a loose connection somewhere. Since I was moving components around, I reseated all of the cables and tried to wrap them up for better management.

I just need to send the old Slingbox back to Slingmedia.

Now I need to get showered and run over to our vet to pick up pills for Gabby.

Comments

[starzinked.livejournal.com]

should I ask waht a Slingbox is?

how is Gabby doing now?

[inqueery.livejournal.com]

Hum: Two very common causes (and I'll start out by saying, speaker wires on powercords are just fine unless they run for miles together!)

1) Bad audio cable - probably detectable on just one input (aka slingbox or CD input or somesuch thing)
2) Ground loop - usually caused by TVs/VCRs/DVDplayers/Slingboxes/etc plugged into a different outlet than the audio gear. If you can - make sure anything electrically connected together via analog video or audio cable - are also plugged into the same outlet. Won't fix all problems but usually really helps.

[erik]

I will have to disagree re: audio and power together. I have seen several cases in my work (phone installation) of power hum bleeding onto audio cables when they run together more than a few feet.

But yes, the more likely cause is ground loops.

[inqueery.livejournal.com]

Well yes, signal cables very true since the impedance is relatively high - takes very little current to affect the signal. Yes even phone wiring once again since the impedance is pretty high but audio *speaker* cables are running at a very low impedance due to the fact they have a 4-8ohm speaker on the other end. For power wiring to induce any audible affect in speaker wire, would require very long distances or extremely high power runs (way past what you'd find in a house!)