Bad Pots on <2 year old gear??

[PickyEars81]

I picked up a tube pre about a year ago. At the time it was about 1-2 years old.

I have been happy with the overall sound, but I am starting to get noise when I turn the volume knob. Not scratchy, as one would expect with bad pots, but a "swish" noise through part of the rotation. It's not very noticeable when an active source is selected, but very noticeable if the selected source is not active.

This is a new problem.

I will probably examine it and clean, but this has never happened to me with such new gear before, and when I have had dirty pots they tended to be "scratchy" and often cause one channel to drop out occasionally, and this is not the case.

Any other ideas besides a bad pot? Any idea (besides getting a lemon) that would cause the pot to fail so soon?

 

[Dan ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

Depends on how the pot is made. Some of the newer ones have a thin plastic film with a carbon tracing on them. Those won't last very long as the action of the wiper will wear them out. The better pots by Alps and CTS will give you reliable service for many years.

 

[vincei]

Sounds like maybe DC is getting to the pot...Perhaps a bad coupling cap or something?

 

[PickyEars81]

This is from a Raysonic C200.

http://www.6moons.com/audioreviews/raysonic3/quartet_2.html

There some are close ups of the pots, but I can't make any markings out on them. I'd be very hopeful that gear at this level would have decent pots, though.