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KLF-30's bass sucks


teaman

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Yes, I plan on heading up there as soon as I can catch a breath. I'll bring an entire setup, Sunfire separates with all the cables needed to run everything. I would like to just hook my system up first thing and hear those things pumping away in his living room, just to rule out any issues with the speakers themselves and go from there.

 

I have your number Corey and will give you a call later this week.

 

Jesse

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And just to confirm, one set of wires going to one set of the terminals after the jumpers are in place.  Anyway, good luck because I can dig the frustration of it not working like you want (or it should).  





Ran the jumpers, ran single wires from the XPA5 to the speakers... Unchanged.

The speakers will put out bass, but you have to have the volume level up nearly all of the way. Which, the volume that high isn't relaxing at all. Not that I mind loud music, it just doesn't sound good. The woofers still aren't even moving an 1/8" and its not earth shaking. You can set your hand on the woofers and feel them vibrating however. I also swapped the +and - to see if that made a difference. Oddly enough, it made zero difference...

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The wires do not look heavy enough to me but some would argue with me. Another thing is maybe the bass settings on the pre is out of whack. With that big of an amp those woofers should be moving big time. I guess the only way to solve this is someone come by and check it out.

   I would get rid of those wires and rewire  with the jumpers in, if it was bi-amped before which,,, what you have is not true bi-amp so its just a waste of effort there and doubles the chance of bad connections. And buy some good banana plugs from parts express that's another area you could eliminate problems.                                                                                                                                                                                                                        I'm not sure what you have tried so far but rest assured when you get it right it will sound awesome. Could be so many things hard to diagnose on forum since we do not know your experience in all of this. I know when I get an AVR I will probably need help since I'm old school stereo guy use to knobs and switches not internal settings. Hell I barely able to use the dang cell phone.

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One set of wires going to the speaker terminals or attaching a pair and bi-wiring it shouldn't make any difference--I know from experience that the Denon AVR-4311ci should drive those speakers just fine....If it was the Denon alone not allowing the LF drivers to respond my thought would be setting related (possibly Dynamic Volume initiated) but given he is having the same problem with the Emotive it's either expectations, something we don't know about at the original audition, and more than likely something wrong with the speakers....

 

Anyway, it seems help is on the way. :) 

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Another thought, as I experienced this recently with a friend's 4x12 guitar cabinet. Check and tighten the push on connectors that go to each speaker, as well as the connectors to each binding post. The guitar cab started sounding thin and lost some thump, seemingly overnight, for no apparent reason. I opened it up and found that one speaker's positive connection was very loose, the rest weren't much better, so I cleaned all speaker tabs with DeOxit, tightened the connectors and all is well. I solder all of my internal speaker connections for this reason.

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if you have a functioning set of KLF30 with good drivers and crossovers and you can outperform them with a set of say KLF20 that sounds to me a lot more like user inexperience than a room issue. Four tens moving way less air and yet making better bass than four twelves? The actual difference in bass response of the KLF20 and the KLF30 is only about 3 Hz. or so and the larger KLF30 make up fore a little bit less extension by moving so much more air than a KLF20 can. There is a reason that some folks will tell you how good these big KLF30 can sound especially if you ply them with current just like Chorus ll when given some real juice they can astound you. Like they say YMMV.

 

PS: I prefer the sound of the KLF20 to a KLF30 because I happen to prefer the sound of a ten inch woofer more than the sound of a twelve inch woofer. If I had the room though I would love to run four tens per channel and move that much more air. There is a reason why the 4x10 bass cabinet is so very popular with bass players. But each to his own that's just me, I also like the sound of fifteen's more than I like twelves but not as much as a ten though the impact of a fifteen or of multiple fifteens is really great. That big three way Cerwin Vega (cls215) with the dual fifteen inch woofers make a very compelling argument for big woofer based speaker systems (so do the Cornwall for that matter).

 

http://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/tested-cerwin-vega-cls-215-loudspeaker/

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I'd say a large portion of the problem was / is generally poor room acoustics from an older house. I'm not an expert in the field so I don't know exactly why some rooms / houses seem to suck the bass out of speakers while others don't, guessing insulation may be a factor? Lots of dead spots and only a couple of spots where bass got through, like standing almost right in between the speakers next to the TV had decent bass, middle of the room dead. 

 

The other issue was with the Emotiva equipment he was using. It's my first experience with any of it and my first impression was it sounded pretty good, just really light in the bass as Corey had described. We fiddled with settings for a bit but nothing really changed.

 

First up I thought I'd just swap in my Sunfire Theater Grand III processor leaving everything else untouched using the Emotiva amp. It was an immediate improvement all around, not just the bass. Then I added the Sunfire Cinema Grand Series II 225x5 and it was night and day. Much better bass response and overall sound quality was greatly improved. The Sunfire gear really shined in comparison the Emotiva stuff. Just to compare I swapped the Emotiva processor in with the Sunfire amp and there was an obvious muddying of sound but the bass was still better than with the Emotiva amp.

 

Through the course of all of this there was plenty of listening time between each set up, about 3 hours total, I checked to make sure all the drivers were working and that all the woofers were moving in the same direction with each other. I replaced the front main speaker cables with single wire 12ga and added banana plugs to the amp side of all the wires. I replaced all the IC's with new too as the old ones had loose connections. We pulled one of the crossovers and they appeared to be stock, no signs of damage or heat stress.

 

 Overall it sounds much much better than it did. I think he may need a nice sub to get the kind of bass he wants but at least he has some bass now!

 

Jesse

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