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In Reply to: Testing stereo balance/image? posted by gdecapua@hotmail.com on February 16, 2007 at 11:13:29:
First, if your room and/or your speaker placement are asymmetrical, there will almost certainly be an imbalance to one side or another. Even in a symmetrical situation, differences in reflectivity for the early reflections on each side of the room can cause a shift.As to the difference being more pronounced with vinyl, it's possible that your cartridge is slightly misaligned or the anti-skate is a little off and the stylus is tracking one side of the groove better than the other. That's not a problem with most other sources except perhaps radio if they're playing a vinyl source and their setup is off.
There are test discs as mentioned. I use 2 of Stereophile's test CDs but I don't bother too much about L-R balance since I have an extremely asymmetrical room. I've got things set up so that music and vocalists sound reasonably centred to me most of the time, but there are some discs where things seem to shift a bit to one side. I also don't have a balance control so I've had to do things the hard way with room treatments.
Follow Ups:
thanks for the suggestions, I actually tried swapping the speaker wires and I noticed that the left speaker is the louder one. This means the problem is definetely not in the speakers. Like I mentioned I hear it much more with when I play lp's. Can anyone suggest a technique or a way of testing this without buying a test disc. Any songs you can think of that would let me determine the stereo balance and to compare the loundness of one speaker to the other? Thanks again.
than mine was when I posted below!If you swap the phono leads from your turntable, and listen, the result will tell you whether your cartridge has a setup or internal problem. If the problem is unchanged by this swap, then the cartride is OK and you can move to the next step in your setup and swap cables again.
Do this until you find the step where swapping cables causes the balance to shift. This is where the problem is. You may need to have a professional test and repair it.
Pink Floyd: Dark Side of the Moon - Track 2, "On the Run".I have to head out of town in a sec, or I would listen and tell you which side most of the sounds start from, and go to, to achieve the "doppler effect". (Alan Parsons is a genius)
I think they mostly go from left to right, but i'm not sure. If I think about it too much, I'll just have to listen to it, and I don't want to be late where I'm going :)
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