An Alternative to a Subwoofer Amplifier
Every so often I like to mix things up with my audio system and try out new things to see how I can improve the sound quality by being clever (or at least trying to be) and avoiding spending too much money. Recently my subwoofer amplifier broke and I tried to come up with an affordable alternative that would hopefully get the job done just as well. Here’s what I came up with.
Although I didn’t have a suitable amplifier to connect to my subwoofer I do own a fairly expensive 18” speaker complete with an enclosed Cabinet which was manufactured specifically to produce large bass levels. So I thought it would be fun to try out and see exactly what would happen if I set my system to multi channel mode and used the surround back as a makeshift amp for my subwoofer.
I must hold my hands up and say that this was an epic failure, what I got was some very worrying low frequency buzzing being emitted from my front speakers which my tech savvy friend told me was probably due to the receiver, in absence of a subwoofer amp, sending the low frequencies to any other speakers it could find. If I turned the volume up really loud I definitely did get a shoddy bass effect, but it was nowhere near the quality I was hoping for.
In risk of ruling the experiment a complete failure I actually asked my engineer friend (I use the term loosely) and asked him if he could offer me another make shift solution to my problem. He did and I must admit that it worked, not only that but it did so far better than I had anticipated. I was told that if I could get my hands on an ordinary amp and connected it to my existing receiver’s LFE output, my bass speaker could be powered by this.
At this point I must state that this method may not work on all systems and it’s probably quite relative to the manufacturer of the model in question. I used Elite Pioneer system in my experiment. If you feel uncomfortable carrying out such a haphazard experiment on your system you might prefer to at products which are specially designed to perform this in practice. The SA100 100 subwoofer amp from Dayton should do the job quite nicely.
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