Ok, I try not to flip here but this is the thing;

Yesterday I was experimenting with the headphones. So far as I know I did nothing wrong.
The only thing I did was connecting the two grounds of the LH and RH Ventus EZ together to go to the headphone Jack from the RH Ventus. I also connected two normal wires to the Jack for the LH and RH channel.
Some sound came out with a ground loop noise and some crackling noise too.

I always have this crackling sound when I play over the speakers but this could alway's be eliminated by pressing the pause button on the PC one or more times. But not over the headphones.

I tried to power up the vollume a little and I think I heard some kind of relay clicking.
The power amplifier was off.

When I tried to connect the power amp again and switched it to ON, only sound came out of the RH speaker.
If I dim the RH speaker and set the vollume to 100% on the DAC there is a little bit of sound comming from the LH speaker but it is nearly not amplified.

I checked all the connections, I meassured the voltages, disconnected all the leads running to the LH Ventus all without result.

This is all I did...
Does someone have any suggestions?
I'm afraid I blew something but I don't see how....

Please help!

Jordo

Edit:
When Both the Ventus modules where reconnected with only one ground to the RH ventus sound was comming out of the heaphones. It is some kind of stereo but not devided into two seperate left and right channels.
But it seems the IVY passes trough some signal on the LH side..

Edited by user Saturday, November 3, 2012 4:38:57 PM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Hi Brian,

Thanks for your reply.
No my Jack is not shortening the L+R channels to the ground when the Plug is not connected. So that part is OK.

Now I do use the IVYIII's for the Ventus-EZ Boards but I just discovered (thanks Leon) that I have to give them a balanced input parralel to the XLR output plugs and they will convert to SE out.
This is what I'm going to try next.

There is only one common ground on the headphones Jack. Do I have to run two seperate grounds from the Ventus' to the common ground of the Jack?

I think this will solve my headphone issue but leaves me with the LH channel wich is lost via the speaker amplifier.
But I will post on that later.

What kind of details should I post for you in a photo?

Many thanks!

Jordo

Hm, this next thing is quite strange.

I connected both Ventus-EZ with the balanced outputs on the IVYIII.
The Headphones Jack consists out of 3 connections; LH channel, RH channel and a common GND.
I tightened the ground outputs from the Left and Right Ventus together on the Jack.

Now when I dim the RH channel I only hear sound via the LH channel which is good and as you might expect.
If I dim the LH channel I still hear (a better quality mono) sound trough both speakers!....

How can this be?

For the LH Ventus I use the LH SE output channel of the IVYIII for IN+ and the RH SE output channel of the IVYIII for the IN-
The RH Ventus vice versa. I have a Dual Mono Setup.

Edited by user Tuesday, November 6, 2012 2:15:24 AM(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Ok I just swapped the IVY stages from the DAC's. The sound somewhat improved. At least there is no constand crackling sound anymore.

But the LH /RH channel diversion is not correct.

If I do a stereo soundtest on youtube and the LH channel is tested the LH channel can be heard.

If they swap to the RH channel equally volume level is heard trough both speakers.

When centered there is stereo sound but it just is not correct... Looks like one channel is out of phase.

If I pull the LH or RH TTL level connection from the Toslink module, connected directly to the DAC board, the same symtombs can be noted.

I would figure that they will make a hard LH/RH channel diversion.
I would expect that I only hear a LH channel when the RH dac is not fed by the Toslink connection and vice versa but that seems not the case.

I will post some pictures of the DAC boards later...

I will continue my monologue :)

After thorough testing and experimenting with different setups I noticed that the RH Ventus, although connected as the XLR's and the previous scematic for dual mono setup, was anti-phased.
After switching the IN+ with the IN- on the Ventus sound quality improved dramatically.

Still I'm not able to isolate the RH channel trough the RH speaker but I'm afraid I have to drop that.
With both channels connected I have a stereo sound....

I still hope for some confirmation that it is normal system behaviour the way I hooked up things.