Well, it's a little crazy but I got it working.
The sub is, in fact, a sub. That's not the point I will be trying to make here though lol
Where to start. Before I got my hands on this receiver it was being used by my folks and they had a powerful klipsch 12" sub. the receiver never seemed to be outputting the signal correctly as it was always vibrating badly and never sounded spot on. the bass at that point was very distorted (which is the problem I've been dealing with since the beginning over 2 years ago) but because they had such a powerful system going (identical klipsch floor and satellite speakers) it wasn't too terrible of a deal except for people like me who want the sound to be perfect, not just satisfactory. since than i've taken the receiver from them and bought them a new yamaha whichs works wonders for their set-up. anyway now i've been playing with this old receiver trying to get it to work correctly and today i finally was able to get everything perfect. the problem is, i'm not sure what, when or how i got it to be perfect. so i'll list everything i've done.
before seriously sitting down and tampering with it i had just played with the tone levels and distance.
yesterday i sat down and read the whole manual. i reset the receiver, set all the settings to be perfect for the system i had (distance, db levels and so forth) and in theory everything should be sounding perfect. still having the issue of distorted bass though.
today i was working and a couple guys from radio shack came in and i started talking to them about it and they told me to bring it in (radioshack's right next door). i brought my receiver, sub, rca cable i was using and a zune and some hookups to show them what i had been up to.
after i showed them the distorted sound they grabbed another receiver and tried hooking it up. same deal, distorted sound out of the sub. so next he found a thx sub cable and plugged that in. INSTANT DIFFERENCE! the bass was smooth and silky, like it should be. grabbed my receiver and plugged in the sub with the new cords and it worked the same.
so i bought the thx sub cables (with a inexpensive splitter) and went home and set everything back up again. turned on transformers (my test movie) and it was exactly what i had imagined. the sound is incredible by the way. rich if you will.
so in conclusion i think before when it was hooked up to my folks klipsch (with thx wires btw) the settings must have been off and i wasn't experienced enough to know the difference and when i hooked it up to my system years later, it was the wire that became the problem. in a way i should've recognized this. when it was in my parents it was loud but distorted and crummy, on mine it was quiet distant and distorted. so different scenarios for both receivers, but in the end there was a solution to both.
my advice to anyone that runs into the problem of a feint quiet sub is to get better cables, they really do make the difference. tweaking is definitely important too but the cables man...the cables
