2. speakers
  3. 193323-96791

Help trouble shooting sub hum

I have my subs run off my speakers using a banana to rca cable off the bi wire posts on the speaker. Funny thing is that if I turn my amp off the subs hum and it gets increasingly louder until I turn them off. in a quest to better dial in the sub volume I added a passive preamp in between the speaker and sub so the sub’s volume can be set at 12 o’clock instead of 4 clicks above zero. Then I want to use the attenuator to fine dial the sub in.

it works as expected except that wnow with the sub coming up much higher there a constant hum barely audible from the listening position.  Since it existed before the passive went in it’s obviously something else. But what?

gochurchgo
immatthewj
2,428 posts
 

using a banana to rca cable off the bi wire posts on the speaker

. . . and I am certainly no expert, and I may be mistaken, but I don’t think that connecting a signal (either from a speaker OR an amp) from the speaker wire binding posts to an RCA 'in' jack via speaker wire will work the way it is supposed to, will it? I mean, generally when you run speaker wire from amp to sub you don’t connect to the sub’s RCA jacks; I am thinking that to run speaker wire to a sub, the sub has to have speaker wire ’in’ connections?

corelli
1,023 posts
 

You really need to read your owners manual.  You have this hooked up incorrectly.  You can tap into the speaker terminal but you need to run that into the HI level input of your sub, not the low level via an RCA input.

jastralfu's avatar
jastralfu
452 posts
 

Your system profile says you have L12 subs.  From what I can tell from the Rhythmik website, they do not have high level inputs, which is how you’ve tried to connect them.  You need a low level output from your amplifier/integrated into the low level input of your subs. As others have stated review your owners manual for correct connection.

erik_squires
16,410 posts
 

This is a hot mess.  You want to use a converter like this one.

gochurchgo OP
924 posts
 

As proof I’m not as smart as I look, the hum had nothing to do with my sub wiring but a phono cable gone bad.

@erik_squires  early this morning I ordered one from SVS made for just this sort of thing.

More to discover