Feedback on standalone speakers

harryface · 22 Feb 2016 at 11:58

I've had an issue in the past where you can hear a background buzzing noise on some speaker systems. I had it on my old speaker setup where their was a grounding issue with the amp. This was solved when the 3.5mm jack was plugged into my pc and completed the grounding circuit.

I have another small standalone iPod speaker which is experiencing the background fuzzing noise.

Are there any other solutions to this problem?

lucid · 22 Feb 2016 at 13:57

Better shielded connection cable, and then better quality speaker dock

harryface · 22 Feb 2016 at 22:33

To be fair they are awful speakers. (Gf's). I'll try shielding the cable but I'm sure its a grounding issue.

lucid · 23 Feb 2016 at 00:25

Okay, I'm curious.... How exactly do you plan to shield the cable? Oh, and which cable, because I kind of presumed you were talking about s jack lead from the iPod to the speakers, but you could just as easily be sitting the iPod or phone on to a docking connector.

Any item with either a 2 pin mains plug (a figure of eight) or a wall wart transformer isn't earthed. In the case of the fig-8 the device is double insulated and operating with a floating earth generally running at around 100V AC but extremely low current. i.e. you wouldn't get a serious shock from it. Wall wart transformers are usually double insulated devices too, so the power lead to the device doesn't carry an earth. In both cases the main device isn't designed to be earthed directly. If it is a dock with an iPod/phone sitting in the cradle then there's no earth at all so any buzzing is likely to be down to poor design.

PC speakers get their signal ground from the sound card which is in turn grounded via the chassis of the PC. It's no real surprise that the inputs buzz without any source connection.