Help in Orlando w/my SVS!

[Spkrdctr]

Bob, I'm glad your all set. I do feel sorry for the cat though... Oh and remember, if you break any windows with the sub, I'm not liable!

I was happy to help out a fellow Klipsch enthusiast. Happy listening!

[RichardP]

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On 5/17/2005 6:41:00 PM vanderrg wrote:

Okay, good news. My home is rumbling appropriately; no cats to assess for terror but my 14-month-old periodically flees the room during explosions. My new sub is fine, and I feel very very much better. I have the sub that I was hoping for and the sense of relief is huge.

First off thanks to everyone who posted for me here...this forum is a great resource.

Basically I had a good telephone conversation with the Speaker Doctor and now I understand what was going on...it truly is a problem that was corrected with "calibration" (even a loose one without AVIA, which I ordered but hasn't arrived yet)...thanks to the doc for helping me to understand why it made sense for me to have to crank the gain on the sub up to 70% AND crank up the level in my receiver's level settings, and why my older sub sounded similar before I did.

I feel like an idiot, but in my defense there are concepts in play here that aren't necessarily intuitive and I can't help but wonder how many people out there are living with suboptimal sound because they don't have access (or don't realize they have access) to this kind of info on forums like this.

Anwyay thanks again!

Bob

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Could/would you describe those non-intuitive concepts that you and Spkrdctr resolved? That info may be quite useful to many forum readers.

Thanks.

[vanderrg]

Could/would you describe those non-intuitive concepts that you and Spkrdctr resolved? That info may be quite useful to many forum readers.

Thanks.

Happy to oblige-

Imagine you're a newbie (like me) who doesn't REALLY understand concepts such as what a low-level input on a sub is, what the gain on a sub does, and what sensitivity really means in a speaker. For a while you've had a mediocre sub/sat speaker system....

It doesn't intuitively make sense that two people could buy the same sub, both having good receviers to power their systems...and one guy just has to plug the sub in and he's done...the walls shake, the earth moves...30% on the sub's gain is more than enough...but when the other guy (let's say he has the same recevier but different HT speakers) plugs that same sub into the same receiver and turns the receiver's volume up to normal listening levels he gets very little bass from the sub...perhaps the same or even less than he got from his previous (inferior) sub!

Then someone tells him that he just needs to crank the gain on the sub almost all the way up... and the gain doesn't matter anyway...now he's really confused...if the gain doesn't matter then why is it on the sub to begin with? And why doesn't the other guy have to crank HIS gain up to hear good bass?

So our flustered hero turns up the gain on his sub but it still isn't really contributing to the overall sound in his room much...so he goes into the level settings on his recevier and cranks the sub level by a few notches...the bass gets a little better but to our newbie it feels like he's having to have his recevier COMPENSATE for his lousy half-broken subwoofer...after all he didn't have to crank up the level with his old sub...the fact that he has to crank up the level in the receiver and the sub gain much more than his friend with the same sub and same receiver is tantamount to PROOF that something is wrong with his new sub...

Someone else tells him that if he calibrates his system everything will be fine...but our newbie's previous experience with sound level calibration was when he got his original speakers and he just did some fine-tuning by ear to make sure each of his five satellite speakers were playing at the relative volume they should... he remembers that changing the speaker levels did affect the volume of sound coming out of the speakers a little as he tweaked them...but not THAT much...it isn't like his center channel was silent as a church until he increased the speaker level by +4 and suddenly the room came alive with deafening sound!...So why would he believe that it would make a huge difference in his sub's performance? And even if it would...remember his buddy didn't have to jump through ANY of those hoops to get his new sub shaking things.

See what I mean? What I was experiencing and what others were saying simply didn't make sense to me.

For me the solution to those frustrating puzzles came mostly through the conversation I had with the speaker doctor, where I came to a much fuller understanding of some of those terms and concepts that I thought I knew before... to summarrize:

1. If the newbie is using HT speakers with a very high sensitivity rating, then he will hear louder sound at a given setting of his receiver's volume knob than his fellow new-sub owner...thus unless he does some serious upward-adjusting of his sub level in the receiver's settings, the sub will lag far behind the rest of his speakers in terms of sound output...seen in this light, having to crank the sub level up in the recevier's settings is rightfully attributed to the high sensitivity of the other speakers in the system, not a deficiencey in the sub or the receiver. I had no idea how much a speaker's sensitivity rating affects how loud it plays. I have the RF-7's and originally when I was playing them loudly, the receiver's volume knob was still set at a low enough setting that it wasn't telling the sub to play very loud...once I compensated for this by cranking up the sub output in the receiver's settings the sub went bananas.

2. Regarding why the old sub sounded similar to the new one at first, this was a concept that I had been totally unfamiliar with until Speaker Doctor told me about it, and I may get it wrong but here's how I have it in my mind...for a high-powered sub such as the SVS, when the signal from the receiver is coming in at a very low level, the signal may simply be too weak to really get the sub going at all...and if you incrementally increase the gain or the level setting in the receiver or both...you'll eventually hit a threshhold where the sub's output will suddenly increase dramatically...

the idea being my old inferior sub was playing merrily along with a weaker signal from the receiver because that's all it needed, but that same weak signal wasn't enough to really tell the SVS to do much at all...once I took steps to send the SVS enough of a signal to "wake it up" if I can use that term...its performance left the older sub far behind. Who would have thunk?

I would imagine that plenty of people out there are like me, who, having upgraded their HT speakers to a level far above where their previous ones were, feel like somehting has to be wrong somewhere to have to make such dramatic changes in the receiver's level controls...and really I was convinced of that until others told me that the exact same thing happened to them...and that it was perfectly normal to have to do this if you have realy sensitive speakers...Speaker Doctor told me that in some cases people have had to dial their sub level all the way up in the receiver's settings, and also to then turn DOWN all of the other speaker levels in the receiver setup...just to get enough of a signal to go to the sub to make it play in a manner commensurate with the other speakers...

Anyway feel free to correct anything I've gotten wrong- all I know for sure is I feel like a new person this morning after getting this system sounding sweet. Now I can go watch Episode III tonight without having this hanging over my head!!!

[CECAA850]

Awesome Bob, glad it worked out. Admit it, you got this huge s***eating grin the first time the sub came alive. I'll bet some of the previous posts make sense now. You'll find the same level of improvement once you set the mains, center and surrounds appropriately. The front sound stage will open up and the surrounds will become more enveloping. You're just about there.........

[Spkrdctr]

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On 5/18/2005 1:27:29 PM vanderrg wrote:

Could/would you describe those non-intuitive concepts that you and Spkrdctr resolved? That info may be quite useful to many forum readers.

Thanks.

Happy to oblige-

See what I mean? What I was experiencing and what others were saying simply didn't make sense to me.

For me the solution to those frustrating puzzles came mostly through the conversation I had with the speaker doctor, where I came to a much fuller understanding of some of those terms and concepts that I thought I knew before... to summarize:

1. is rightfully attributed to the high sensitivity of the other speakers in the system, not a deficiencey in the sub or the receiver. I had no idea how much a speaker's sensitivity rating affects how loud it plays. I have the RF-7's and originally when I was playing them loudly, the receiver's volume knob was still set at a low enough setting that it wasn't telling the sub to play very loud...once I compensated for this by cranking up the sub output in the receiver's settings the sub went bananas.

2. when the signal from the receiver is coming in at a very low level, the signal may simply be too weak to really get the sub going at all...and if you incrementally increase the gain or the level setting in the receiver or both...you'll eventually hit a threshhold where the sub's output will suddenly increase dramatically...

Speaker Doctor told me that in some cases people have had to dial their sub level all the way up in the receiver's settings, and also to then turn DOWN all of the other speaker levels in the receiver setup...just to get enough of a signal to go to the sub to make it play in a manner commensurate with the other speakers...

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I cut this down to the most important points. The sensitivity of the RF-7s creates the problem, but, it is easily fixed. ALL Klipsch owners need to be aware of this. The entire Klipsch line can cause this to happen due to their extreme efficiency. Bob, now understands efficiency! I understand his cat does too............