[amblin]

Hi
My 14B2 went in for repairs and it'll take a while, so I dug out my old Accuphase P450 so at least there's something decent I can enjoy while my beloved 14B is away.

But today while messing with the wires, I noticed that as soon as I pull the BAL 1 cable from the back of my BP26, a weird interference would begin to occur in my RIGHT speaker channel, It sounded just like a dying tweeter , with all the hiss and cracking sound whenever there's high a frequency signal.  I was confused, and terrified,  double checked all connections but found nothing out of place.  I already tried swapping L/R channels and ruled out faulty cables, and the P450 is fine.

And the most bizarre thing is, everything will return to normal IF I connect the BAL 1 cables back in. I can't see how and why this can affect the balanced out signals because on BAL 1 is my old DAC which is not even plugged in....

The signal path is CD --> DAC --> BP26 (BAL2) ---> P450 (balanced) ---> speakers

EDIT:
I have an old DAC that can be used as a preamp, connecting it directly to the P450 amp eliminates all the hiss and noise so the rest of the system is fine and unfortunately the problem seem to be the bp26 that's faulty. I gave it a fixed frequency signal and checked output with a voltage meter, the right channel output would randomly flicker like there's a bad contact somewhere.

Besides , the background noise is noticeably higher in the right channel and my speakers would hiss whenever I turn the source selection knob.

Anyone know the probable cause and hopefully a quick solution?

And no, my cat didn't pee on it.. I mean.. What just happened... All the new and shiny stuff in my system died one after another on just the 6th year. the things left working perfectly were a 25 years old Philips CD transport and DAC , a 10years old DAC/preamp and a 19 years old accuphase amp...

[amblin]

Never mind, I seem to have found the cause--- the combination of a wadia DAC(with digital preamp) and BP26 in the same circuit created a massive gain specifically in the wadia's balanced out RIGHT channel and only in that channel.. I found this because I noticed there's still sound even with the 26's volume turned all the way down. So at my normal listening volume the right channel became all distorted.

It seems it's all caused by a missing earth line, a friend borrowed the power cable for the wadia, so I'm using another cable I made earlier instead,  but it was for a Japanese esotric cd transport, with earth line NOT connected to the plug because Japanese models use a seperate earth point on the chassis... Using a properly wired cable fixed everything.

Btw, my god the bp26 is good, I never realized there's so much more detail, more bass and the stage is much much wider than the wadia's digital wizardry ... Because I never bothered to use wadia's preamp function and compare the two before....