A1200 Sound Quality Issues

[bubba]

I haven't had my A1200 hooked up to speakers for a while.  My son wanted to play some games so I hooked up  out a really nice set of Monsoon speakers I had in storage from an old PC to the ol' 1200.  I used an RCA-to-mini cable with a gender changer from radio shack to connect the speakers.  We started playing ThemePark AGA and my son quickly commented that the sound was really sloppy  and distorted.   I tried some demos and he said the same thing.

I started to get confused and really couldn't remember what the Amiga was supposed to sound like.  After a while I did start to feel as if the low frequency sounds were distorted and thought perhaps I had a loose wire or bad cable in the speaker setup.  I checked these and even tried a set of stock PC Harmon Kardon Speakers as well as my iPod headphones.  All sounded the same.  

Now I was really bummed, thinking I might have a motherboard problem.  So I dug deep into my closet and pulled out a new, virtually unused A1200 I've had in storage as a back-up.  I hooked it up and the sound output was exactly the same!

So, have I just been spoiled by modern sound cards and, relatively, the Amgia sounds like crap?  Or, am I just using the wrong type of speakers for my Amiga .  Could I possibly have a problem with a component adding noise, such a my power supply, to output signal?  I might also just be playing back some really poor sound samples.  Anyway,I recall things sounding much better on my A3000 which I parted with years ago.  

I'd appreciate any suggest for speakers and cabling that would provide the highest quality signal from the A1200's RCA outs.  Also, does anyone have links to some high quality  sound files I could use to evaluate my speakers.

Thanks!
-bubba and little bubba

[bubba]

Great idea.  I will try WinUAE with the same speakers and sound samples.

-bubba

[bubba]

I fired up UAE on my iMac last night, but version 0.8.28 does not seem to like OS X Tiger (10.4).  I'm going to try it on a PC laptop next.

I also found this great site that talks about the bad capacitor problem and even includes a sound test application:

http://amiga.serveftp.net/audio_repair.html

[bubba]

Problem Solved :-)    Noisy power supply at the root of the problem.

I switched power supplies from an A500 power brick to a bigfoot power supply.  The noise is gone.   This explanis why I heard the distortions on both my A1200's.

Thanks for the suggestions!

-bubba

[bubba]

Both sets of speakers I tested were powered.  The problem was a quality issues with the power source (noise), not a quantity issue (watts).

-bubba