Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Embarrasing EP500 trouble.

Two weeks ago I was communicating with JC over a trouble I had with my EP500. Strange airy, flapping noises during intense scenes and I was convinced that the port was maybe loose or something as I could recreate a snapping noise by gently pressing up and down on the port with my hand inside it. JC had even given me an RMA number to ship the sub back to Axiom for inspection and repair.

Thanks Axiom.

It sat around all last week turned off while I was away. On Saturday my wife discovered the not-so-technical cause of all our troubles. Rather than retype I'll just copy in my long winded email to JC explaining what we found.

I hate to even post this but since I like to have fun with other people, only fair I give you some ammo to use on me....


Long post but if you skip to the pictures you can quickly see the culprit.

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Hi JC,

First of all, I want to thank you for all your patience. Especially after I tell you that I found the problem, very much by accident and it’s so UN-Technical, I’m pretty embarrassed to tell you what it is.

I returned home Friday from my travels and found the perfect box and foam corner pieces at work. We get dirt cheap shipping rates because we are always moving large electronic equipment around.

On Saturday, my wife and I attempted to get it settled into the box. I decided to remove the grill cover so I wouldn’t crush it when I lifted it. As I was explaining to my wife why it had to be returned, she actually took the time to put her head down to the floor and look inside the port. I had my hand in there but never actually looked directly in. That proved to be pretty dumb in hindsight.

This is a recreation of what she saw, since she removed it as soon as she saw it.



Here is the culprit, rescued.


Sharon tells me it was much further back than I placed it to take the ‘crime scene recreation’ picture. It must have been as I had my hand in there several times trying to figure out the clicking noise. At first, I still didn’t think it could have explained the louder clicking noises that occurred when things got loud or when you put pressure on the port, but the bear is a cat toy and it has very stiff Velcro pads on it’s back where you insert pouches of catnip into it. When you play around with it in your hands, you can get a fairly audible snap from the Velcro. It certainly doesn’t seem as loud as what I heard from the sub but I can’t recreate the noise in the sub anymore. I can only assume that the port shape made it louder or perhaps my paranoia has just finally subsided.

In any case, the sub is sounding great again. I have no idea how it got in there as I don’t run the sub with the grill off. I’m certain that I have never had the rill off for more than a few moments because although I have no kids, we have two active cats and a dog whose tail can be like Indiana Jones’s whip. I wouldn’t dare run any of my speakers on the floor without the grills for fear of the driver becoming a scratch pad or the center cone being smashed in from the dog’s tail.

It is the older cats favorite toy to throw around so maybe it flew in there sometime I had the grill open for something but I don’t remember having it open since last year sometime and I’m fairly sure I have seen the bear around the house since then. I have no kids and my nephews and niece are old enough they don’t play with toys like that anymore (I think). Niece is the youngest but she is more into trendy clothes and anything Hanna Montanna right now. Maybe it was a joke by one of my buddies but it seems an odd one.


Anyway, sorry for the long explanation but I’m very embarrassed that I couldn’t troubleshoot such a simple issue. I always tend to overcomplicate things. I think, perhaps, because simple solutions are rarely part of my job. I am glad that Sharon spotted it before I shipped it off to you. I can only imagine the talk around your work had one of your techs opened up the sub only to discover a tiny stuffed bear lodged in the port.

Thanks again for your patience. I’m off to buy some bear traps, the heck with bass traps.


Andrew
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Don't appologize for the long explanation, it was as entertaining as you thought it would be! It happens to all of us at one point: thinking something is broken when the batteries where inserted wrong (not me), changing the connectors at one end of a cable you did not build yourself and discovering that the "off" in the resulting sound is that the original builder did not have the same reference as you for red and black (me, wasting a good 4-5 hours of troubleshooting).

They're all pretty after the fact!

Little stuffed toys like that exist for the purpose of finding their way into a speaker port.

I've been thinking...
Are you training your cats to be bear-killers?

GREAT! One of the best "guess what got stuffed into my subwoofer port" stories yet.

Great story thanks for taking the time to tell it. BTW ever see a cat come flying out when you fired it up?

Great story, Murph! Finding the problem to be insignificant is always a joyful relief.

Andrew, thanks for sharing your story, and don't worry that this was a unique occurrence. For example, board veterans may recall vividly Jim's adventure a few years ago.

In the end that is hilarious, and I am glad that the problem was easily remedied.

True story: When I was about 18 I purchased a pair of KLH (yikes!) floorstanding speakers that had twin 6" ports at the rear base of the cabinet. Like a lot of people, I don't mind unwinding after a hard day at work with a cold beer and some loud music. So one day after work I came home and I recall turning on Cherub Rock by The Smashing Pumpkins. Now, at a stretch, Billy Corgan's whiny voice sounds not dissimilar to a cat. Right after the song kicks in, I hear what is clearly some whiny sounds I've never heard in the recording before, so I rewind and try again, only to hear yet more odd whining but at different times in the recording. So I turned off the music to check out the connections and at that point clearly heard the sound of one of my cats emanating from my left speaker. I felt so terrible. It took about two hours to coax her out of the speaker, and as anyone knows, once a cat is tucked away in a small area they don't want to come out from, well good f'in luck. I cannot believe how loud that had to have been inside that speaker chamber! Needless to say, I immediately covered up those ports. I took the cat to the vet and he couldn't believe the story, but he checked her out and gave her a clean bill of health. My cat never ever went near those speakers again, which was fine with me because I was fearful that she'd claw them up in retaliation! Things definitely could've been a lot worse!

I'm seeing my future in this story, with the EP350v3 and the 1 year old...
Glad to hear your cat made it out ok, Haylo.