dmrecord wrote:

so I bought my first ever record player, a project elemental, a month ago and I love it. But today it developed a strange hissing sounds when you turn it on (it hisses both when the turntable has a record playing or not.

its hooked up to a single speaker which is fine when linked to anything else.

This is a powered speaker, right? (Has its own amplifier.) The Elemental has its own phono preamplifier, meaning that it will output a signal compatible with powered speakers.

dmrecord wrote:

I'm not technical at all and have fiddled with it and found that it seems to relate to the left hand white bit of the cable that comes from the player (I have a single cable with two connectors at either end, two hook up to the player, red and white, then the other two are in a single adapter that go in the speaker). When I unhook the left part at either end the hissing stops.

I suspect that the hiss results from you connecting the two player outputs in parallel with the adaptor. You should be using two powered speakers: one for the left; one for the right. Does the left part hiss when the right part is disconnected? If so, then you might have damaged the Elemental's left-channel output amplifier.

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

Hi dmrecor,

Are you hooked into a power bar or straight into the wall? I've noticed with some cheap power bars, especially with powered speakers or other components with speakers, like tv's, you'll get some degree of hissing or other distortion in  the sound. If your components don't reach the wall socket, you might consider a better quality power bar or power conditioner.

ChrisS wrote:

If your components don't reach the wall socket, you might consider a better quality power bar or power conditioner.

Unlikely. My concern was that by paralleling the outputs of the Elemental's  integral phono preamplifier, each output has to drive not only the high-impedance input of the powered speaker but also the low-impedance output of the other channel. That might well have damaged the circuitry.

John Atkinson

Editor, Stereophile

I believe a friend of mine blew up his tv trying to hotwire an external speaker into his tv's speaker system....