Captain, your problem is a very common one and replacing your subwoofer won’t help. I have the same issue but mostly with movies.
Both Peener and Mark’s suggestions will work but unfortunately neither is perfect and I don’t know of a perfect solution yet.
Converting your standard CDs to MP3 allows you to use the “Volume Leveling” feature but now your making your lossless CD into a “lossy” MP3 plus volume leveling imposes another quality hit. Both of which you may or may not be able to notice.
Converting your CDs to FLAC a lossless format allows some players to use “Replay Gain” to normalize the volume for playback. But again replay gain imposes a quality hit.
Unfortunately just because you normalize the volume doesn’t mean you won’t still have varying bass relative to the other frequencies if the CDs have their bass frequencies mastered differently. Also this technique won’t help at all with multi-channel SACD or DVD-A tracks.
IMO if you really want to maintain quality then using the remote to change the level of the subwoofer is the way to go. Like Mark’s my Denon remote will allow changing the volume of any channel by pressing the “Channel Select (CH SEL)/Enter” button. That brings up a menu of the speaker channels. Using the up and down arrow lets you move through the channels and the left and right button decrease and increase the volume of the selected channel.
This problem is so annoying for me with movies, that once I watch a movie, I write down all the speaker level settings on s 3x5 card and keep it in the DVD case. That way when I watch it again I don’t have to play around finding the best speaker settings. The subwoofer channel isn’t the only one that has this issue the center and surrounds do also assuming you’re using the mains as a baseline.
However, calibrating your system as Randy described above is a must. That way you can be sure you are hearing the recording the way it was intended and can then tweak from there. Remember in audio “I tweak therefore I am.”
As to your speaker wire question…I’m in the camp that says speaker wire is speaker wire and as long as the gauge is thick enough to carry the signal the distance you need that’s as good as it’s gonna get. And as for interconnects as long as they aren’t corroded they're fine. If you do a lot of component swapping terminating your wire with plugs is nice but if your like me and just set it up and leave it then bare wire works fine.
There are others who totally disagree with my view and they may be right but I can’t tell the difference. I would say that if you have extra money to spend then other things like room treatments would likely make more difference than wire. Again just my opinion.
Cheers,
Dean
