System issue solved – Faulty USB Cable

[Douglas]

A couple of months ago at the time when I upgraded my Conditioner, power cables, and not long after I bought my pre and power amps, my system would intermittently lose dynamics, and become very flat. There were no loss of detail, it however sounded like my amp suddenly turned into a 20 watt amp, or my pre was not outputting the required gain. I could visibly see that the speaker cone was not energised as it should be when playing music loudly. This would happen intermittently which made it even more frustrating

Doing a fault finding exercise was very difficult as so many components were changed. I even considered sending my amps to a technician to verify if operating correctly.

Another technician I spoke to suggested it could even be a faulty balanced (XLR) cable. Faulty balanced cables can result in exactly the issue that I was experiencing, loss of punch and low frequency push. This cannot happen with RCA, interesting that!

I decided to start with the cheapest cable in my system which is the USB cable connecting my powered hard drive to the Pioneer network player with a budget cable from the local computer store, and got very lucky indeed. Lo and behold it was the problem and the system was instantly transformed. This is simply the USB cable that connects HD to player, not even a more important interface such a USB cable between a player and DAC.
It’s interesting that a faulty USB cable can still work fine, but have such a major impact on Sound quality.

This should be a warning to those who scoff at quality cables when it comes to computer audio. It might not make a big difference to SQ, but quality cables are constructed and designed too much higher standards.

I plan to change to a NAS and suppose the chances of this happening with a LAN connection is less likely, so glad the issue is resolved.