Back 45 years ago when they wired my room, I didn't live here. There are five outlets in this room, four are miswired. Yes, its pretty common. And Yes, it can wreck havoc with some 3 prong equipments. And its not my job to rewire their mistakes. So, on the one outlet that is properly wired, I have a 1 to 6 outlet box plugged in, and my air conditioner connected, and maybe one Reel to Reel and a little Tripath based Home Theater Amp. From the first outlet box, I have a second 1 to 6 outlet box wired to connect some Reel to Reel decks and CD Players, and from there it goes to a third 1 to 6 outlet box and a surge protector box for the modem, then to a 1200VA UPS for my Pee Cee and Mac computers/modems/scanner, LCD Monitor, and an older 240VA UPS for the Preamp and SET Power Amp; then to a fourth 1 to 6 outlet box which powers my phone machine, phone, laser printer, and a couple of sockets free for me to plug in a soldering iron, shaver, battery charger for my camera... stuff I'm testing, whatever.
The only time I ever had a problem was with the Tube Preamp, the Stereo SET Amp, the AC, the PC, and the Laser printer on all at the same time, that would blow the 15 Amp breaker, but that was only with the old laser printer which drew about 950 Watts. My newer Laser draws at most 550 Watts so this is no longer a problem. My line for the past ten years has been about 122 Volts day, 125 Volts nights. On one of the other (miswired) outlets, I have a single light bulb in the closet, and on another miswired outlet I have the digital clock I built 30 years ago.
Check your AC outlets for improper wiring with one of those little three neon lamp AC outlet checkers; it just might be that they are OK, in which case I don't have any answer for you, except... Your amps may have developed problems, independently of the wiring. Or you may have inadvertantly wired the left channel speaker outputs to the right channel speaker outlets and the Left Speaker to the Right Speaker or something like that
And if the outlets
ARE miswired... well there ya go!
Also many expensive speaker cables, like the thick as your wrist, $100. per foot stuff, especially long runs of it, have way too high a capacitance and cause many amps to go ballistic, especially older transistor stuff, whose power supply capacitors may be failing or falling below spec. In that case, try some cheapie speaker zip-cord cables and then see if those sets suddenly work. Ya gotta love those high-end pricey cables, don't ya ?
Steven L. Bender, Designer of Vintage Audio Equipment.
ok -- so if 125v is normal, does anyone have any idea what could be giving my newer amps a hard time while my NAD 7140 and hey, even my Sonic T work just fine?
It's something to do with overload protection on the outputs.. yet two different sets of speakers and cables yield the same results. That's why this is a mystery!
