It's fitting that my research wasn't wasted. The plate amplifier on my 29 year old Mirage PS12/90 finally up and died. The pots began going berserk again, but this time it didn't survive my contact cleaner bath. It powers on, but neither my low nor high pass inputs work.
It looks like I need to spend a minimum of $800 Cdn to reach parity with what I've had for 3 decades. I haven't fully vetted all my options yet. I could just buy a new subwoofer. Or I could replace the plate amp with a cheap $100 home subwoofer amplifier from Nob Sound or Fosi Audio; whether it works depends on whether Mirage/API applied a custom equalization to the plate amp (and they probably do, it's 28-150 Hz +/- 1.5 dB). Or I can be on the lookout for a used sub in my market. The final option is to just fix it; I have a copy of the schematics for just this purpose.
Meanwhile, I'm listening to music at home with hardly any output below 50 Hz. I don't know how people do it when so much of the music is missing.
