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Q: I have some cyber-acoustic speakers with a subwoofer, and for some reason they pick up a radio station. Is there any way to stop that?
A: I'm sorry to say that shoddy speaker wires may be the cause of your signal interference. To cut costs, speaker companies often use speaker wire with inadequate shielding and poor filtering, which offer little protection against radio-frequency waves such as those coming from a stereo, ham radio, police scanner, taxi cab, and the like.
Five steps to better sound
1. If you're lucky, your computer speaker wires are acting as an antenna and your confused speakers are amplifying the wrong signal. It's annoying, but relatively easy to fix. First, try shortening your speaker wires as much as possible. Move the speaker wires around; sometimes they'll pick up noise in one place, but not in another. You should also ensure that you've connected your speakers properly, that the cable doesn't have any exposed wire, and that you securely attach any phono or RCA jacks.
2. If your speakers aren't hard-wired, try upgrading the cables that connect to them to a set of well-shielded cable. If they are hard-wired, try picking up some ferrite beads from your local Radio Shack. These beads are designed to filter out radio signals across many frequencies. A pack of ferrite beads costs about five dollars, and we've found many people who have had as much success with these as those who started off with high-quality speaker cables.
3. If your speakers have a three-pronged plug that you stick into a wall outlet, one of those prongs is the ground. Make sure you use it. The ground should help to prevent interference, at least if you have a clean ground line in your building.
4. Finally, if you're into spending money, you can try picking up a power strip that promises to suppress electromagnetic interference (EMI) and radio frequency radiation (RF). These strips aren't cheap and we recommend you try all the other tricks first.
5. If you hear an odd humming noise, chances are you can fix it with time. That humming noise is usually a ground loop. We found an outstanding article that lists sources of lots of unwanted noise in your system and shows you how to root it out of your video and audio systems. Just be prepared to spend some time tracing the source of that noise.
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