Can I fix/improve the sound on my mini hi-fi system?

[pkozul]

Hi there,

Not sure if this is the best place to post this message, but here goes...

We have a cheap GDTEC mini hi-fi system that we were given about a year ago. Just hooked it up the other day and all I can say is that it sounds absolutely aweful. The sound coming out of the speakers sounds extremely muffled, as if the speakers are totally covered by a blanket or something. There is no EQ on this thing, so I can’t even crank up the treble to hear any of the higher frequencies.

I’ve tried with 3 different sets of speakers, all of which work really well when connected to my other amps. BTW, I did find that the polarity of the speaker binding posts was reversed, but at least that problem was easy to work around.

Since this little hi-fi system does have some nice features (iPod/iPhone dock, TV screen, DVD player, etc.), it would be good if we could make use of it.

Any ideas on whether the sound can be improved? I’m not sure whether these things sound this bad “by design”, or whether there is something wrong with my unit. I’m just a newbie when it comes to electronics, but I have modded some T-amps so I guess I’d be able to replace any components inside this system if need be.

What can cause such muffled sound? It’s very frustrating when all you hear is lower mids and low frequencies... nothing whatsoever in the higher part of the scale.

BTW, the manual can be found on the product page:


DGTEC - The Future of Digital Home Entertainment

Any advice gratefully appreciated.
Thanks,
Pete

[dangus]

Weird. Maybe someone installed capacitors with the decimal in the wrong place. If you have a meter with an AC voltage or millivoltage range, it would be interesting to play a test CD with since waves at various frequencies and compare the response. Not that if would fix the problem, but you could harass the manufacturer with some concrete numbers and they might care enough to exchange it so as to find out what went wrong.

It's hard to believe there's no tone controls at all. I wonder if using the reset to factory default thing would help, if there's an undocumented tone control function that has somehow been set with treble all the way down. One of my DVD players turned out to have an undocumented sound effect feature (nightclub, cave, oil tank, that kind of thing) that I discovered by playing with the remote from a different player which used the same style remote.