Day 2612 Too much information.

9th October 2024

My friend from the studio days was coming over to help me discover why the right hand speaker of the stereo wasn’t working. On the face of it, it should have been a simple job, but nothing is that simple.

When the cottage was renovated, I had my electrician add audio cables from the upstairs small bedroom down to the lounge. My thoughts were my large power mac would reside there, but I wanted the audio output to feed to the amplifier downstairs. Also I wanted to hide the wire to the right hand speaker. That signal would travel upstairs in two cables,and connect with another two cables that came out on the right hand side. It may sound complicated, but in principle pretty simple.

However the electrician should have installed eight cables, because the audio from the required had to be screened. This was because he uses ordinary cables, and should used screened ones.

Anyway, Dave, came over to help me make all the connections, but the audio from upstairs didn’t work.

This is when we discovered that we were two cables short.

The basic problem was we needed to screen the audio.

This is where my brain turned to mush, and I left it to Dave to do his magic.

Anyway, he got things to work with a series of extra wires that picked up on the “earths” on the ring main. Don’t asked me to explain it anymore.

So, moving forward six years, when I arrived back, I put on a CD and that’s when I discovered the issue with the right hand speaker.

So Dave arrived with his tool bag, and we went upstairs to see what was happening to the connections.

At the time of installation there was a row of phono plug modules nice and neat on the wall, like a mini patch board, hidden by a single bed.

But over time the plastic got brittle and maybe the bed got pushed into the patch board, causing the damage.

It looked in a sorry state.

Dave sat there scratching his beard, trying to remember what he had done all those years ago.

He had marked the cables so they could be identified, so we knew where they were downstairs.

Several hours later we were no further forward.

I then made the decision to scrap the audio side and just concentrate on the speaker side, this I thought would make the situation easier.

Several more hours later we were still flummoxed.

It was time for a coffee and several sheets of paper.

Dave kept saying “it should never had worked” there was so much beard scratching I was surprised there was any stubble left.

We did a number of checks to ensure there was no fault with the amplifier and the speakers and they all worked perfectly.

I sketched out, with my simple brain, how it should be wired. We agreed to remove all the earthing wires, because just being speakers we didn’t need them.

Now we were cooking on gas, all the wiring was redone, and now came the moment of truth, would it now work?

Everything was double checked, continuity established, we were ready to go.

Music was playing, the balance swung to the right, and, nothing, still nothing.

More beard scratching.

The only thing left was the cable from the wall to the speaker.

We checked the continuity, and this it where it got really weird.

I had remembered that I had bought a long cable with phono plugs on both ends which I cut in half, and used them as the speaker cables.

The soldering of these plugs were never checked, and in the end this was the problem. 

Not to go into anymore details, the way these plugs were attached, in principle nothing should have worked at all, it only did because of the “earthing” that Dave did all those years ago that anything did.

Once this was re soldered everything worked.

This was hours of intensive brain work, and we missed our lunch, and by the time we got into the town, all the cafe’s and restaurants were closed, all that was left were the famous tea rooms. However, the scones were tasty.