Hi Sounders,
I recently had the urge to try some Western Electric 16awg wire (old red/black stuff) which was highly recommended to try with my Quad ESL 57's.
Anyway, I hooked everything up and used just a bare wire to terminal connection for purity of signal as per recommendation.
Pressed play, turned up the volume but only the left channel had sound. Realised the wire was not in good contact with the right channel after a few seconds and all seemed okay.
I swapped back in my old speaker cable with proper connectors straight away but since this misdemeanor there is definitely something missing from the sound.
On tracks I know particularly well the extension of highs and lows is not there and the sound seems compressed and it seems like I have to crank the volume a tad more also.
The amplifier is a low power SET (not absolutely ideal for ESL's I know but the negative feedback from the amp seems to make them sound very nice in my small listening environment).
I'm aware of the dangers of not having speakers hooked up while playing through a tube amp but it was barely 5 seconds maybe 10 . . .
It's not a massive issue if the damage is done as the amplifier is not my most expensive one thank goodness but I just wondered if anyone could suggest what it has done to it. Eg: damaged the output tubes/transformers/caps/rectifier ALL OF THE ABOVE!?!?!
I will have a play about this week when I have some time to see if swapping the output tubes/rectifier makes any difference.
I've had instances of amplifiers "coming back" after voltage surges/sudden disconnections and after a few days they seem alright again, I have also had amplifiers go pop after seemingly having very little wrong with them. This seems somewhere in between.
Seems strange as I would not expect just a small deterioration in sound if there was an issue I would have expected either no sound at all or very bad sound.
All help and advice much appreciated!
Cheers,
Chris