Anemic sounding subwoofer

[pvescuso]

For Christmas, I got a Klipsch Quintet speaker system with a KSW-10 powered subwoofer and a Yamaha 5740 receiver. The subwoofer is connected to the receiver with a single cable and a Y adapter into the subwoofer's L/R cable connections.

The subwoofer works but sounds anemic -- very little booming bass veen when I turn up the level on the back. I made sure the receiver options include the subwoofer being selected. The self-test on the receiver seems to show the subwoofer is OK.

If anyone has any suggestions on what might be wrong I'd appreciate the advice.

[DrWho]

Placement of the subwoofer in the room is a very important factor in the way the speaker sounds. I would try various locations until the sub doesn't sound anemic anymore. Also, to confirm that it's a room issue you might want to walk around and see if it sound anemic everywhere in the room (especially in the corners). You might also want to make sure that everything is in phase.

[CECAA850]

Welcome to the forum! Is it a large room you have it in? Is it possible you have the gain up too high? Have you tried to calibrate the system? Carl

[pvescuso]

I'm confident it's not a matter of room placement. I will have music playing out the other 5 speakers fairly loud, and with my ear to the subwoofer I can barely detect any bass/sound.

[TheEAR]

Your problem may be the PHASE,adjust the phase.Your mains may be working against your sub eright now.This is if placement and levels are set properly.

[pvescuso]

Thanks for the reply.

I'm not sure of the gain is too high or not. Is the gain controlled by the knob in the back of the subwoofer that ranges from 0-10? I have that knob set at about 5 and have tried turning it all the way up to 10. At "10" it increases the amount of bass coming out. But it is not very strong. I would expect a 10 inch subwoofer with a 100 watt receiver to be making the room shake.

I'm also not sure about calibrating the subwoofer. How do I do that? With the receiver I've gone through the settings for each speaker and left them at the default.

Since the subwoofer works -- it's not like it's completely dead, and seems to only work well with DVDs -- I wonder if there is some setting I'm missing.

I've also wondered why the volume on the receiver starts in the negative db range, i.e., when I adjust the volume the sound level indicated is usually something like "-25db" and will increase to maybe "-10 db" at a sound level that is very high. Turning it into the positive range is really blasting it -- I'm sure you could hear the stereo quite well outside the house at that level. I'm offering up this info in the hope that this may somehow be related to the lack of oomph in the subwoofer.

[pvescuso]

I've switched the phase on the back fo the subwoofer -- the two options are "0" and "180". It has no noticeable effect.

[DrWho]

I would think it was a reciever setup issue. But to confirm that it's not the subwoofer, plug your CD player directly into the subwoofer and see how much bass you get. If you don't get much at all, then your subwoofer is probably faulty. If you do, then we need to figure out how to setup your reciever to output the bass to the subwoofer.