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Popping and staticy noise when moving the tonearm?


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I have an AT-PL120, and just upgraded the cart to a AT 120E and am using a Schiit Mani preamp instead of the built in one. I notice a lot more surface noise/pops and clicks on records, and when I lift the tonearm with the cue level it pops and produces a lot of staticy sounds. It never did it before this. Any idea what it could be? It almost seems like a grounding issue, but the table does not have an external ground because of the preamp. It's making most records unlistenable. Time to give up on the table and upgrade, or can I fix this?

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I'll have to open it up to see. I think it is grounded to the steel plate in the bottom. I'm beginning to think the tables just going. It was only playing out of the right speaker for a bit, and I had to move the cables around for it to play stereo, and the popping stopped. So it's ground or a table issue- or the Mani's inputs are bad.

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I've been thinking about trying to mod it by removing the preamp and adding rca outputs and ground, but I'm not sure I trust myself. At this point, it might be worth a shot. Thanks!

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I did that to my Dad's one and at the same time rewired the arm with Cardas cable, set the bearings properly and made sure all the motor electronics were good and it's now a nice sounding table.

 

Just removing all the rubbish after the tone arm cable isn't difficult but you need to be able to make nice solder joints.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I seemed to have fixed the noise when moving the tonearm, now I get loud pops on loud parts of records. I wonder if the cart I bought is bad?

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I seemed to have fixed the noise when moving the tonearm, now I get loud pops on loud parts of records. I wonder if the cart I bought is bad?

 

What fixed it?

 

As to the loud pops if it's not static or a bad earth you would need to replace bits with known good ones until you find out what is causing the problem

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I hooked a wire up to the ground of my preamp, and touched all the metal parts of the table. Something is not grounded correctly for sure. I don't know if it's worth the effort to rip it apart and check if the internal ground wire is bad or not. It's probably still a ground issue causing the pops on loud parts, it's just odd. Might be time for a new TT upgrade, it's served me well for 5 or 6 years now.

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I decided to take it into the local vintage audio shop next weekend, so hopefully they can shed some light on the issue and I can learn a thing or two about TT repairs and such.

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  • 2 weeks later...

Took it to the shop today, and we could not reproduce the problem there. Time to go through all my components and see what it could be. Also time to order a spin clean.

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