Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater very little sound coming from subwoofer

Do you have the receiver dB levels for the sub channel turned up?

No, they are at default. Front speakers set to large, rest to small. LFE is on.

The problem for the lack of bass could be from my receiver. I had this receiver few years back and connected to a 10" passive subwoofer, and no bass was coming from it. I am having the same problem with the EP500. I also believe their was that same kind of humming noise with my previous sub as well.

I could be wrong, but with your fronts to large and LFE ON, the only thing coming from the sub will be the .1 LFE from movies and everything else (music) will be played by the mains.

I would recommend trying "small" for all speakers and 80hz crossover on the receiver.

When I say dB levels, I'm referring to what you have the sub set to on the receiver, I'm not talking about "small", "large", etc...

When I calibrate everything to 75dB using the spl meter, or use my receivers built in pink noise to calibrate, my sub levels on the receiver are around -6dB and on the sub the puts it at about 7 o'clock (very low).

There is no way I could turn it to max on the sub it would knock down my house, and my room is very large 30ft x 31ft x 9ft ceilings.

Paul, as Randy just pointed out, if you have the speakers set "large" and the sub set to play "LFE"(low frequency effects only occasionally present during 5.1 movies on DVD), there's no bass being sent to the sub(if you're using the line level rather than speaker level connection, that is). Follow Randy's suggestion of a "small" setting, etc.

If this doesn't seem to be the problem, you can take your receiver out of the loop(since you suspect it)by directly connecting your player with a coaxial cable to the line in on the EP500(start with the sub volume control near minimum)and playing a disc that has significant low bass(the EP500 cuts off everything above 100Hz).

Is your DVD player connected with a digital connection to your receiver? Just make sure the dolby/dts signal is being passed from your DVD player to your receiver on a connection that is preserving the LFE channel. I've also seen settings in a DVD player (Bitstream ouput vs. PCM) that break the multichannel signal from being properly handled by the receiver. Your reciever should have some indicators to verify it is seein the 5.1 or 7.1 channels from your DVD source. This may not be your issue, but thought it was worth mentioning.

I have talked to one of the experts at Axiom audio and we ruled out that their is something wrong with the receiver (hardware issue?) and not the subwoofer.

We connected the coxial to one of the analog outputs of the DVD to the subwoofer line in, and that was plenty of bass. But the quality of the bass was poor [rumbling (but this is because I connect the coxial to the analog, and not the sub pre out of the receiver)].

The humming only comes when I connect the sub with high level input and not the coxial which I intend to use.

Only problem is it testing my speakers and sub with a new receiver.

Thanks guys for the useful info!

Paul, looks like you're getting straightened out on the setup. Just an observation on your comment that "the quality of the bass was poor". Actually no, this is the way that real bass without the upper harmonics(played by the speakers)sounds; it isn't "tight", "fast", etc. , it's slow and plodding.