I had the same experience…XLR is the way to go if possible. JamesH is on top of it.
maybe switch the left and right cables OUT from preamp to the power amp…
For sure! Realistically she probably heard my wife bitching about it during the day while I was at work and repeated it to me…kids hear everything man…but still funny 
ya for sure. I normally only use XLR’s but thought I’d try some fancy silver RCA’s for an experiment.
still doesn’t make sense to me for RCA’s to have issues tho…isn’t that a form of interconnect discrimination. haha
If you’re dealing with wife bitch and kid bitch in HiFi stereo, that just screams for drastic action. Good luck in getting that one sorted out.
Hah! I told her just to use the DAC for volume control until it gets sorted out
any other suggestions JamesH?
I have some other ones I can try tonight. I’ll swap for single ended as well to see if that makes a difference (it might even be worse!?) We will see.
SE cables will click for sure.
It wasn’t much different with the SE cables, maybe a bit louder. I tried another set of XLR with no change.
If swapping tubes from side to side and multiple cable changes didn’t do anything positive it appears that you have a hardware problem. The SE cables clicking louder is normal and not surprising but the loud clicking and popping is not with balanced cables especially if is just one side. It appears that you may have an input board issue so I would call PSA and see how they want to proceed.
It is likely tube related. If it becomes too loud reach out to James or our customer service folks and we’ll send you a new set to try.
Excellent. Thanks Paul.
An easy way to test Paul’s theory would be to swap the tubes left to right, right to left, and see if the other channel gets louder.
For my situation, that didn’t change anything. Still left channel only issues in any configuration. Do you have any other troubleshooting advice?
Can you shoot our tech support guys a quick email? They will have some ideas for you to try. marks@psaudio.com
If the tube swap doesn’t change it that means it may need an adjustment of the servo that keeps them quiet, if it’s annoying please give us a call and we’ll get her tuned up for you. Sorry about that.
Will do. Thank you all! Cheers
Hi James,
I recently bought a BHK Pre and it was noisy on one channel when changing the volume from the get go. I assumed this was ‘normal’ given the reviews and other comments. But it was loud and was at every level, with the 9th, 17th (sometimes thought it was 1 through 7 ‘pop’ pop, pop etc then ‘crack’ at 8/9 then pop, pop etc). I also bought a Mcintosh C70 at roughly the same time and swapped them around. I ended up with the PS Audio not being used. ANyway I put it in my second system this evening and it was really prevelent. In fact it tripped the mono block’s protection circuit, so I did some troubleshooting. It was right channel only, on both XLR and unbalanced (switched outputs to eliminate the power amp fault switched too). Long story short - I swapped the valves over and the fault swapped. So it was the tube. The dodgy one is marked No: 9C672, the good one No: 9C968 They are PSVANE. I wanted to find the tube time but I had never used the setup so when I accessed it, it said 0 hrs 0 minutes. Software is version 1.0.6.2 release 19.
I’ll contact the local agent tomorrow, but I wanted to let you know about the timer needing at least one access of setup to work (it appears) , the firmware version and the tube numbers,
Thanks,
Steve
Nice trouble shooting and it definitely sounds like a bad tube. Pretty strange that the tube timer didn’t have anything on it. 1.0.6.2 is the latest so you’re not missing out on anything there.