ask-avk

Four conditions, all required, and the system will fail silently if any one of them is missing. That silence is why this is one of our most common WhatsApp questions.

Almost always a ground loop: two connected devices sitting at slightly different ground potentials, and the difference riding into the sub through the signal cable as a low hum. The sub is usually the messenger, not the culprit.

What matters, in order: correct gauge for the run length, decent copper, solid terminations, and sensible routing. After those four, audible returns diminish very quickly, and I would rather you spent the difference on the system.

Three causes, and I check them in this order: geometry, focus uniformity, installation drift.

You are missing the phono stage. Faint, thin and bass-less is exactly what an unamplified cartridge sounds like through a line input, so nothing is broken.

Wire it. One ethernet cable ends this permanently, and everything below is what I would do only if a cable is impossible.

Humidity has two victims in an AV room, speaker drivers and projector optics, and prevention for both is cheap. The rule for anything unused is simple: power it on for an hour monthly through the wet season. Electronics prefer being used to being stored.

Usually settings and expectations, not hardware. Movies use every speaker in the room; music is stereo, so it lives or dies on your front pair and how you drive them.

Two different things, and the fix depends on which one you have. Hiss is the electronics' noise floor. Hum is electrical, and it deserves more attention.

Partly normal, partly fixable, and telling the two apart is the whole answer.

You need eARC if your sources or apps run through the TV itself and you want the AVR to receive the best version of the sound. You do not if every source plugs directly into the AVR, which then feeds the TV. Work out which wiring you have and the answer falls out.

REW is measurement software used with a calibrated microphone to see exactly what your room does to the sound, and measurement-based calibration is worth paying for when the system is worth hearing correctly.

They are the room-correction systems built into AVRs, they help, and in most homes they are left half-used. That last part is the problem.

Three suspects, and the fix depends entirely on which one it is: the room, the pairing, or the settings. Do the free ones first.

Normal, not a fault. When audio routes through the TV, each app is on its own, and three things must cooperate per app before surround reaches your AVR.

Lip-sync error is a processing mismatch, not a fault. TVs take longer to process video (scaling, motion smoothing, HDR mapping) than AVRs take to decode audio, so the voice arrives a few tens of milliseconds before the lips move. Once set, it rarely needs touching again.

Nearly always the connections, not the electronics. A momentary dropout every few minutes is a link renegotiating, not an amplifier failing.

Isolate by swapping. No tools, no multimeter, and in three steps you will know whether it is the speaker, the wire or the AVR channel.

Both can be right. The trap is the third option that most people fall into: a pile of individually well-reviewed products that were never designed to work together.

Real discounts cluster around generation changes and around festive offers, and only the first of those is reliable. Waiting for a sale is sensible for some purchases and a slow way to not own a system for others.