Well,the new subwoofer arrived this past Thursday on its own designer pallet:
I was a little worried about the "crush" damage on the front side (the only side without much internal padding), but I opened the box, checked it out and it seemed OK.
Unable to convince my 100lb wife to help me carry it down into my basement, I had to wait to Saturday until I could bribe a friend with food & beer to help me move it into my HT. Believe me, I was a b!tch to move. We eventually got it into place . . .
The placement and initial set-up was extremely easy - I just plugged it in, set the basic sub settings (minimal gain) and re-ran my Pioneer Elite room/speaker calibration programs. Everything seemed to be OK, but I had some trouble getting the receiver to pick-up and recognize the correct audio channel inputs (incl. .1) from both my PS3 & PS4 (which I use for Blu-Ray). Some tweaking with the audio formats got the receiver to recognize the correct signals, although I was not entirely happy with the process and will definitely spend more time going back through the audio settings of both the receiver and the PS3/4. It is possible that neither is sending the proper audio format to the receiver.
Anyway, once I got the receiver to recognize/decode the proper signals, I demo'd a bunch of Blu-Rays with my friend: Metallica in Concert, Cloverfield, Blue Man Group, Nightwish. Even the sub is extremely powerful (especially when I turn up the gain a bit :music-rockout: ) it does mesh nicely with my Bowers & Wilkens speakers. Set at higher levels, it provides a serious amount of force and power without sounding over "boomy" (if that makes sense), like my Velodyne used to at higher levels.
The "wholly crap" moment came some time later, when I had issues getting my receiver to recognize my AT&T Uverse audio signal. I put on Apollo 13 on Hi-def, but was not getting any .1 info. So I kept turning up the gain during the movie and walking over to the sub to see if I could notice any output. Every time = nothing . . . until I noticed there was no surround information or output either. So I went into the Uverse settings and found out that the audio output had been reset to stereo only, possibly due to several power outages over the last couple of weeks. I changed the setting to surround and un-paused Apollo 13, forgetting that I had incrementally upped the gain numerous times in the last few minutes. The scene was towards the end with mostly dialogue (i.e. little .1 info), so I again walked over to the subwoofer to see if I could hear difference, and as soon as I stepped right in front of the cabinet, the scene immediately changed to this . . .
It was all LFE and I felt like I had suddenly been hit straight in the chest with a sledgehammer! My wife, watching from the couch (cheap seats), thought it was hilarious and said it looked like I had jumped about four feet in the air!
So yeah, I think I am going to be happy with this upgrade.
