Problems with balance on stereo receiver
I've been having problems with the balance on one of my stereo receivers for about a year now, and hopefully someone here has experienced this and knows a simple remedy.
Simply put, the left-channel speaker output is higher in level than the right. If I crank the balance control about 40% towards the right, I get a properly balanced stereo signal. The line outputs on the receiver (such as the tape output) do not exhibit this problem, and the problem happens when the receiver is set to any input, including the internal radio tuner.
None of the controls sound dirty -- the volume control is as smooth and clean as ever, as is the balance and tone controls. The receiver is a little over 12 years old, a Sony STR-D311. It's a pretty plain stereo receiver, but it's treated me well since I got it new. Here's where you can download the user manual for it: http://esupport.sony.com/perl/model-find.pl?mdl=STR-D311
Any ideas?
Are your speaker wires the same length? I seem to recall having this problem once, and IIRC the problem in my case was that due to placement, one speaker had a significantly longer amount of wire (and maybe even a different type; it was a long time ago, it was college, I was cheap, and I wasn't that picky about quality). Might explain why the line outputs are ok.
I've switched the speakers right-for-left, and the problem is still there, in the same channel (so it's not the speakers). I took a listen through headphones and the balance sounds fine. The speaker cables are all the same length (I say "all" because they need to run through my powered subwoofer first. The sub has only one speaker-level input/output block, a barrier strip, so the sub can't be somehow "sucking" down the juice from one channel, because the speaker cables coming from the receiver and the cables going to the satellites are in physical contact), and while the cables aren't Monster cables or anything, they're of decent quality.
I tried hooking the cables up to the "B" set of outputs, and got the same thing.
Check for fauly capacitors - they can cause a partial short across one of the channels and hence reduce the audio output of that channel.
Have you swapped the speakers side-for-side? How about the speaker cables? How's the output through headphones?
dan k
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