Hi Micah,

I'm sorry to hear that you are having another problem with the new EP800 we sent you. I will tell you that I personally tested this new sub with a couple of my colleagues with the cave exit scene from Iron Man as well as the creaking pipes sequence from "The Haunting."

We did these tests at absurdly loud levels. The EP800 was turned to maximum volume and the Sherwood Newcastle AV preamp LFE output was set to +12 dB, its maximum. Only the subwoofer was operating, so we could zero in on any problems. During the first test, we heard on the Iron Man scene a slight clicking from the right-hand driver. By the way, I constantly repeated the same test sequence on the Vassallo demo EP800 in our listening room and also an EP500 we have in the room and both of those played the Iron Man sequence perfectly without distortion at maximum volume.

The woofer that occasionally made a clicking sound on the Iron Man sequence (I couldn't get it to make that sound on the creaking pipes sequence from The Haunting, which according to a reviewer friend of mine in New York, is a "subwoofer destroyer") was removed and a new one built by Mike Rogers. The new woofer was installed and that EP800 passed the tests perfectly. We sent it out to you, so any problems you experience are not the fault of the new Ep800, but somewhere upstream in your system.

Early on in this saga, I thought you might be running the sub output on the Denon into distortion. Some sub outputs will go into distortion if you run them too high, a variable that Sound&Vision used to test for but no longer does. I'd suggest you not run the Denon sub output level at more than +3 dB.

We also thought that if you were running the sub output too high, it might be overloading the DSP board on the EP800's input circuit, however we were not able to reproduce that scenario in our listening room (we don't have a Denon AV receiver here and use the Sherwood Newcastle unit).

All that said, early on in one of the threads I discovered that your listening room is more than 11,000 cubic feet. With a room that size, you should be using at least two large subs and preferably four. That room volume is more than five times the volume of a standard listening room (about 2,200 cu. ft) and no single subwoofer can possibly fill a space that size. The car analogy doesn't hold. The interior space of a car is tiny, only a few cubic feet, so it's easy to design a subwoofer to fill a car with bass below 20 Hz, using a fairly powerful amplifier. The interior space of my Honda uses a sealed 1.5 cu. ft sub enclosure, a 12-inch driver and a 180-watt power amp for the sub, and generates spectacular low bass to below 20 Hz.

There is something very wrong in your system and at this point I'm at a loss to suggest what it might be. But it isn't the fault of the new EP800.

Regards,
Alan

Alan Lofft,
Axiom Resident Expert (Retired)