Distortion problem with a B&W Zeppelin

[admin_exported]

Hi Everyone
This is my first post on What Hi-Fi, My name is Andrew and I live and work as a technician in New Zealand.

I use a combination of a 1st generation 16gb iPod touch and a B&W Zeppelin, and I'm having a bit of a problem with them.
At lower volumes (below 1/3 on the volume slider on the iPod) Some tracks are giving me obvious distortion at the lower frequencies. I have tried different combinations of the iPods equalizer and the speakers bass control, and even with the EQ off and the bass level set to -3 I still get plagued by this distortion.

I tested to see wether I had bought it about by changing the setting in the amp to allow streaming music to play, using the information I found at http://whathifi.com/forums/post/189283.aspx and also upgraded to the 1.3 firmware, but again this made no difference to the sound quality. I have tried problem songs on different iPods with little improvement, and I have tried my iPod on another Zeppelin, which also gave me the same distortion.

I listen to most of my music at lower volumes, so this is a problem I get pretty much whenever I use my Zeppelin. It doesn't do it for every song, but it does do it for a lot of them. Not that I have the opportunity to change to a different system but I don't particularly want to get rid of the Zeppelin because without the distortion it performs really well.
If you need to know anything more feel free to ask

Any help would be appreciated, thank you so much.

 

[Anonymous]

Have you tried a different iPod and what bit rate are your songs encoded at? Try plugging your iPod into a big hi-fi or AV set up and see if you get any distortion from playback with that. (You'll have to use a dock to do this or you won't get the "line out" signal from the *** end of the player).

 

[Woodruffe]

I think I had the same problem. I was bought a Zeppelin for Christmas and I carefully set it up and plugged into an 80GB ipod video ready for sonic bliss and to be perfectly honest I thought it was rubbish! I started flicking through tracks and noticed that some sounded brilliant and some were not and then I realised what the problem was, it depended where I had got the music from! My own imported CD's and those purchased through iTunes were really good and those songs from less than reputable sources were not, a little bit of digging through my music folder confirmed it was the bitrate! I think the Zeppelin is particularly sensitive to well encoded music, either that or it's the first time I've had something good enough to listen through that actually shows the difference

Take one of your songs which isn't playing to well and rip it at Apple Lossless and see if that makes a difference! I hope it's something as simple as that for you rather than an issue with the Zeppelin!

Ben.

 

[Anonymous]

Thanks, both of you.

The songs in question are, for the most part 320K mp3 files. I had a look in the iTunes store for one track that was giving me particular headaches and when I previewed their copy I got the same distortion.

I will have a go finding a dock for my full-size Hi-Fi and see how that shapes up

 

[Anonymous]

By distortion are you referring to a lot of background noise in quiet passages?

I've read about that problem elsewhere.

 

[Anonymous]

No, but I have heard that noise too. I thought it was to do with my defeating the amplifiers auto-mute function so I could play streaming tracks.

I just found a work around actually

I took that one really annoying track (if anyone cares it was The Stop by Lusine from the album Serial Hodgepodge) and ran it through the volume leveller in MediaMonkey, which I use for my iPods music library and I'm playing it back on the Zeppelin now without a hint of distortion, and it still sounds good 🙂