My friends and I decided to do the ol' On Demand thing last weekend, and we chose
Hot Fuzz (HD). Lemme tell you, o man, this movie had some serious bass in its 5.1 presentation. So serious that my subwoofer started making some odd sounds.
With my system volume at a rockin' -22.5 dB, whenever the bass would start to get loud and deep (which was a lot of the time), I'd start to hear a kind of crackling sound from my sub, almost as if someone sitting behind it was scrunching up tin foil. Of course, no one else noticed it, but I was really perturbed!
The next day, I put on the "Darla" scene from
Finding Nemo and played it at a reasonable volume (unlike when we played
Hot Fuzz). Even at a low -40 on the volume, I could still hear that crackling sound. Very worrying.
Now, granted, my sub isn't level matched to the other speakers. I couldn't figure out how to level match it with the analog SPL meter cos the needle would stop at one dB, stay there for a moment or two, rise to another dB, stay there, then drop past the first one, stay there, rise, etc. So I figured I'd just leave it at 2 dB above the point that YPAO recommends it, and leave it at that.
I did send off an e-mail to Athena, expressing my alarm and asking if the sub needed some simple fixing, but all they said was, "The crinkly, scratchy sound is the sound of the voice coil of the sub being destroyed. Try turning the receiver output to your sub channel down a little bit, that might help." Reading that first sentence nearly sent me into a panic-induced coma!
Anyway, it'll be a while before I can afford a replacement on the sub, so for now I've turned it down 2 dB to the YPAO-suggested dB -- although I should probably turn it down even more. I'll try not to turn up the volume to high on the bass-y movies, but it'll hurt.
Sigh. No real point to this post, but I felt I needed a bit of venting regarding this sub. I seem to remember SheepStar was very pleased with his old P400, and so was I. Operative word being "was". Now I get depressed every time I look at the old girl.
cheers,
supervij
