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Weak Amps or ?

Nufan

Nufan

Active Member
I have posted about my Marantz seeming to not push my klipsch RC-61s that loud.
Now I am creating a stereo set up in the converted garage. I'm using my older HK av230 rated at 65w/ch powering a pair of Elac debut 6s. I was playing music over the WiFi through my phone and turned the HK all the way up and it was not loud.
What the heck is going on with my recievers?!
Oh and my phone volume was turned up
 
Last edited:
Sounds like the signal levels available via WiFi are too low to drive the amplifier. One obvious thing is that you might have the media volume turned down from maximum on your phone. If that is not the problem, and there are no other volume trim controls, there is probably not much you can do as a consumer if the driving component cannot deliver enough output voltage to drive the power amplifier to full output. Most new components assume the analog output voltage from source components conform roughly to the 2 volts available from a CD player at full scale digital. A fully digital signal path is even more limiting as far as what you can do as an end user.

In the end, your particular components may not be compatible with each other in terms of gain structure.

Also, be aware that media files can vary widely in loudness, depending on what level the original engineers called "zero", and how much the files have had their dynamic range compressed.
 
rammisframmis said:
Also, be aware that media files can vary widely in loudness, depending on what level the original engineers called "zero", and how much the files have had their dynamic range compressed.
Click to expand...

That interesting. I would have thought that zero was universal.
 
Pardon my ignorance but when you say you've connected your phone to your receiver via WiFi, how is that done? I don't have any receiver that would allow me to do so, but I have a tabletop radio that we can "pair" to via Bluetooth. Are Bluetooth and WiFi synonymous terms? My Sony Blu-ray players allow me to stream to them from a DNLA server using our wireless router, but they don't have Bluetooth capability (as far as I know.) Are you streaming to your receiver from your phone with some intermediate device?

In the case of the Bluetooth device that we have, there's always been lots of gain available from the source (phones, tablets) and plenty of room on the volume control.

Is there some form of digital gain control with the receiver for such connections? Buried deep in some set-up menu perhaps?

Jeff
 
lakedmb said:
That interesting. I would have thought that zero was universal.
Click to expand...

Not even close. Every decent audio editing software package has some form of "loudness" tool which combines compression and limiting to increase the perceived loudness of a recording by cutting the peaks which gives you headroom to increase the volume level than compressing to increase the average volume level. What we strove for in the 1980s, which was all this extreme dynamic range since most analog recording technologies were somewhat limited in dynamic range has been replaced with trying to make a song sound loud, exciting, and punchy with no real peaks at all. So, a recording with the natural peaks intact will have a much lower average loudness level than the same recording after going through some process of removing the peaks and applying compression and boosting the overall levels.
 
JeffMackwood said:
Pardon my ignorance but when you say you've connected your phone to your receiver via WiFi, how is that done? I don't have any receiver that would allow me to do so, but I have a tabletop radio that we can "pair" to via Bluetooth. Are Bluetooth and WiFi synonymous terms? My Sony Blu-ray players allow me to stream to them from a DNLA server using our wireless router, but they don't have Bluetooth capability (as far as I know.) Are you streaming to your receiver from your phone with some intermediate device?

In the case of the Bluetooth device that we have, there's always been lots of gain available from the source (phones, tablets) and plenty of room on the volume control.

Is there some form of digital gain control with the receiver for such connections? Buried deep in some set-up menu perhaps?

Jeff
Click to expand...

Sorry....I had my phone attached to the receiver via a 3.5mm jack split into RCA wires. The signal was from my google music library over wifi.
 
Nufan said:
Sorry....I had my phone attached to the receiver via a 3.5mm jack split into RCA wires. The signal was from my google music library over wifi.
Click to expand...
No problem - but that does change the whole nature of the question / problem!

As posted elsewhere I was having issues with not getting enough of a line level signal from the RCA outputs on my HD cable box to drive the Zone 2 on my receiver. So I ordered and installed this little beauty between the cable box and receiver: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00I01ZNUS/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1. Solid, rugged, noise-free, and gives plenty of gain. Highly recommended.

Jeff

Line Preamp.jpg
 
Nufan said:
I have posted about my Marantz seeming to not push my klipsch RC-61s that loud.
Now I am creating a stereo set up in the converted garage. I'm using my older HK av230 rated at 65w/ch powering a pair of Elac debut 6s. I was playing music over the WiFi through my phone and turned the HK all the way up and it was not loud.
What the heck is going on with my recievers?!
Oh and my phone volume was turned up
Click to expand...

Yes my phone volume was turned up.

I hooked up a borrowed Ipod (mine was stolen) last night and the signal was much stronger. I did not have to turn up the volume nearly as much!
Now, if I get a dedicated cd player or dvd player for that system it should be even better!

Impressive little speakers, those Elacs are. Good midrange.
 
JeffMackwood said:
Pardon my ignorance but when you say you've connected your phone to your receiver via WiFi, how is that done? I don't have any receiver that would allow me to do so, but I have a tabletop radio that we can "pair" to via Bluetooth. Are Bluetooth and WiFi synonymous terms? My Sony Blu-ray players allow me to stream to them from a DNLA server using our wireless router, but they don't have Bluetooth capability (as far as I know.) Are you streaming to your receiver from your phone with some intermediate device?

In the case of the Bluetooth device that we have, there's always been lots of gain available from the source (phones, tablets) and plenty of room on the volume control.

Is there some form of digital gain control with the receiver for such connections? Buried deep in some set-up menu perhaps?

Jeff
Click to expand...

Jeff,
Not sure if I'm getting you straight here. Are you saying you never heard of "bluetooth" steaming to a receiver? Or just WiFi? Most newer receivers let you stream bluetooth now.
 
Razz said:
Jeff,
Not sure if I'm getting you straight here. Are you saying you never heard of "bluetooth" steaming to a receiver? Or just WiFi? Most newer receivers let you stream bluetooth now.
Click to expand...
WiFi. I could not figure out how a phone could stream to a receiver using WiFi. Bluetooth: yes. WiFi: that was a new one to me but if it's now happening I wanted to know more about it. (I couldn't find anything about it when I looked up Nufan's receiver's owner's manual.) But since Nufan said he'd actually connected his phone to the receiver using the phone's headphone jack and RCA cables...
 
In fairness what nufan said was, "I was playing music over the WiFi through my phone." I took that as he was streaming Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Music, etc or similar. Not that the two components were connected "via" wifi.

That said, one way to connect to a receiver over wifi (which is probably oversimplifying it) is AirPlay if the receiver or audio device is licensed for it. I'm sure there are other similar technologies like Chromecast? I'm just unfamiliar with them.
 
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