Why aren't my subs turning on?

You probably have to leave the power off/on switch in the ON position at all times in order for that feature to work.

They will turn off 15 minutes or so after you stop playing music. Once you start playing music again (as long as the switch is ON) they should turn on and begin playing. That's how most subs with auto-off/on usually work.

Plato- I am leaving the in the auto-on mode all the time, but they don't turn on when I start playing.

Jameswei- The SMS-1 does "work"; at least it goes through auto-eq or manual eq, emitting frequency sweep tones and teh eq can be adjusted.

All- the subs show a red light when plugged in, in the auto-on mode and in "stand-by" They are supposed to switch to green when activiated by a signal. That does not happen unless I manually turn them off and then turn them back on, while music is playing.

The LFE channel is not the same as bass. The LFE channel is used by DVDs for low frequency effects such as explosions, earthquakes, and airplane flyovers. Some preamps allow you to direct bass output to the LFE channel, so that all bass is redirected to it. If you could do this, then you would get a response when playing musical material out of your subs. Otherwise, you should send the right and left channels to the subs if the subs have a high-pass filter in them that you can use to roll off the high frequencies that are being fed them. Another alternative is to feed the left and right channels to an outboard crossover, that would allow you to feed only the low frequencies to the subs. Since frequencies below 100 Hz are non-directional, your subs' performance would improve if you fed both left and right channels to each sub and used a crossover frequency of 80 Hz for the subs.

Swampwalker: Sounds like SMS-1 isn't providing enough signal to trigger the subs at initial turn-on (lower)volume settings. Do they trigger when the volume is raised much higher? I've had this issue with several subs, but deal with it with more "initial" volume.

Frank

SW,

Pz may be onto something. By nature, LFE is "low frequency effects" for discrete multi-channel encoded material. Until you actually play some material that has discretely encoded LFE information, your subwoofers may not turn on. This would seem to make sense considering you know they work when you auto-Eq, which you know needs to send a signal to the subwoofer.

An easy way to test this theory would be to put in a DVD and play a scene that has explosions or something like that. You could use the "lobby" scene from The Matrix or the "airplane crash" scene at the beginning of Mission Impossible-2 for instance.

If they still don't work, I would check all of your configurations and maybe contact the manufacturer of the SMS-1. If you find that the subs do work when LFE output is know to be present (explosions when playing DD 5.1 or DTS content), but they don't work for music, check your configuration and make sure the processor is supposed to output through the LFE port. It may be that your processor doesn't work that way and you may need to change your setup to power the subs off of the L&R pre-outs.

TIC