My brother-in-law's home theater room is at the "drywalled, waiting for taping and mudding" stage. Before everything was covered over, I figured we should do a quick check for rattles and buzzes while we could still rip off drywall panels without too much effort.
Rob picked up a VTF-3 at a good price a couple of days ago, so we went down to the basement today with my HK630, his $49 DVD player and the VTF3. Played a variety of DVDs (WOTW, Blade, Finding Nemo etc..) but couldn't get into the Avia disk because we couldn't navigate the disk properly. WIth a house full of kids we were unable to pry loose a TV to see the menus, and his DVD player didn't have any kind of display. Oh well, at least we could press "Enter" to play the movie then step through the scenes, although I never did find Darla Tap.
Bottom line was that I was not impressed with the bass output, although I expect subwoofer placement was part of the problem. Without all the other speakers (this was a time limited test because family didn't go out for the day as planned
) it was hard to tell whether the sub was starting to complain at lower SPLs than it should, or whether this was just an artifact of listening to the sub without the rest of the speakers. In fairness, even with my SVS 20-39PC+ I have been surprised how quickly you can suck up 525 watts and either start clipping the sub amp or hitting the limits of the driver.
WOTW was obviously the most abusive (have you seen the waterfall plots on AVS ? Solid red down to about 5 Hz !!) but we started getting flapping noises on pretty much all of the bass-heavy tracks. The woofer was definitely moving at least an inch peak-to-peak and I could feel the air from the port from 4-5 feet away so there was lots of work happening; I just didn't get a strong sense of bass at all.
I suspect a lot of the energy in "the bass noises" is actually coming from the mains but never really paid attention before. Has anyone done this kind of testing before, and if so could you offer comments ?
The room is a 13x30 area within a roughly 30x30 basement, but without a wall to define the 13' dimension. There are other walls in the basement dividing the remaining area into a number of small rooms, but roughly 1/2 the basement (HT area plus pool table plus bar area) is one open space of perhaps 4000 cubic feet. I know a single sub is marginal for fully pressurizing that space but I did expect better from a single VTF-3.
Thanks,
JB
