Need some T-shooting help on a set of RP3's

[ATLDiver]

I'm having a problem with one of the powered subs on a set of RP3's that I believe is *blown.*

First a little setup:

My father-in-law has a full reference line surround setup all tied into a new Sony AVR, (STR-DE995.) I personally have the same setup for the exception of a older Harman/Kardon 520 AVR so for the most part I mimicked my setup for his but I'm not experiencing the problem he's having.

The Problem:

When I hooked up all the speakers to the back of his bran-new Sony I'm not getting anything out of one of the subs. I have the subs hooked up the correct way from what I understand; output from the amp to the LFE in on one tower, then LFE out on that tower to the LFE in on the opposite tower. I get bass response from the *slave* tower but nothing from the tower where I have the output coming from the amp. I next took just the interconnect cable from the amp going into the LFE in on the suspect tower and got nothing from either a sound field test or from music/video.

I suspect a blown sub but the father-in-law doesn't know when this problem occurred. I originally setup his speakers up with, at the time, an older Sony AVR amp which served him for a couple of years until he wanted to upgrade.

Anyone have any ideas or see a potential setup problem? As I said I have the exact setup minus the amp difference but my H/K has a similar sub output as his Sony. I thought it might have to do with the Sony's setup but like I said I ran the sub output directly into the suspect tower with nothing coming out. The other tower behaves normally with the green light engaging when it receives signal when set to automatic. The other towers amp light stays red even when its hooked directly into the AVRs sub output, when I set it from auto to auto the green light lights up but Im still not getting anything from the sub.

Any advice would be helpful....

[JohnA]

Take a walkman or something similar that is "independant" and use patch cords to supply input to each tower. It sounds like one amp is dead to me.

[ATLDiver]

John...Thanks for the information, by patch cords I assume you mean to rig up a connection coming from a walkman into the speaker outputs? How bout patching a DVD player straight into the speaker?

If it is the amp on the speaker I assume that's fairly easy to replace under Klipsch's warrantee?

[T2K]

I don't own RP towers, but I do own KSP powered towers.

The green light indicates that the thing is 'on'. When the speaker receives a signal the indicator light turns red. After a short while with no signal present, the light goes into standby and turns green again.

The speakers have 2 pairs of speaker binding posts. There should be gold plate jumpers connecting the binding posts, one between the black binding posts and one between the red binding posts. When you connect speaker wire to one/either pair, both pair will receive a speaker level signal.

Should you not have the posts in place and have your speaker wire connected to the hi speaker binding posts, the low end of the speaker would receive no signal, unless you supplied that using a sub cable to the 'lo' RCA input.

If you don't have the jumpers connecting the 2 pairs of speaker 5 way binding posts use short pieces of speaker wire to do that. The sub should play.

The fact that the second speaker that is 'daisy-chained' does work is somewhat curious. Can you give more info?

Keith

[T2K]

To clarify. You must send a full range signal to the speakers. Speakers that are bi-wireable and have line level RCA low inputs can be wired different ways.

You could not have the jumpers in place and send the low's to the speaker via low level inputs, should your speakers have those. In this case there would have to be some allowance in the receiver setup to send the low level signal via the receiver sub output.

In my case that could be accomplished with my Denon receiver by using the setting 'LFE + Main'.

Hope this makes sense and helps. I worked all night.

Keith

[ATLDiver]

Kieth,

Just to clarify my above post...I do have the speaker wire connected into the top posts on the back of each tower and the bridge is in place on both tower. However, I must take issue with your info on the indicator light in front of the unit. On my system my towers are lit red when no impute is coming into them, i.e. my system is off. When I feed my system power and send signal to the speakers the green light comes on and I of course do notice the bass response.

His *working* tower does just this when the tower in question stays red unless I flick it from the auto position to permanent on. As for the inter-connects, he's using a decent quality audio cable (Monster) connecting from the back of the Sony, (Subwoofer output) to the LFE-in on the suspect tower. Next he has another audio inter-connect cable from the LFE-out to the LFE-in on the other speaker. Again, I mimicked my setup to the "T" as I thought this was the optimum setup. When I say I mimicked my setup there is one little difference, my setup uses a bi-wire cable for each tower where my father-in-law's does not. From what I've read I highly doubt this would make any difference as I'm using the inter-connect cable to send the low-end signals straight from the receiver to the sub.

I base all this on the fact that the one tower's sub is working fine by being the *slave* sub. I would have tried to setup the working tower as the master but the cables he had were not long enough.

Hope that clears that up, have any other ideas?

[DrWho]

does the powered sub section work when in the on position (and not the auto position)? If so, then the amp itself isn't bad, but just the trigger sensor dohickey that tells the amp to turn on when it detects a signal.

Have you tried switching which tower is the "master" and the "slave" ?

[ATLDiver]

DrWho,

To answer, no it does not work when switched from auto to on hence why I still feel it's the amp inside. I did not try to switch out master/slave setup due to a few things but mainly I felt it wasn't necessary after testing input directly from the Sony into the LFE-In on the suspect tower. I took the second tower out of the equation all together so I didn't see a need to take the time and effort to physically move speakers due to the length of his cables, i.e. one's shorter than the other.

Oh and another poster asked about the AVR setup, that I played with too and surprise the Sony didn't really allow to much control over the LFE channel. Even still no matter what setting I tried I couldn't get anything to come out of that sub

[T2K]

Unplug speaker and allow to stand overnight. Remove screws from amp and woofer (lay speaker on side). Check conections to amp and woofer. If you find no problems, swap amps from one speaker to the other and retest. Otherwise, send the amp/woofer to Klipsch along with a check for $250-$350.

Good luck.

Keith

[ATLDiver]

Ouch....$250-$350 for a replacement amp? I better guard mine with an iron fist......

In a related subject why wouldn't the built-in fuse catch a voltage spike that would damage the speaker? Is it possible the wiring used could be a problem? He's using cheap lamp-cord wire with soldered ends where I'm using high-quality 12ga wire with crimped Banana plugs.