The other night I thought I was going deaf!

TheForce

SatelliteGuys Master
Original poster
Supporting Founder
Pub Member / Supporter
Oct 13, 2003
38,973
15,016
Jacksonville, FL, Earth
I settled in for an eveniong of movie watching in my HT. Been having some problems lately with the Dwin TV3 and another blown bulb, so I was watching on my backup projector which is pretty good now that it is properly calibrated. It's an LCD Panasonic at about 1/5 the price of the Dwin and serves well as a backup.

Ok back to my scare. I'm watching the movie and my wife walks in and says why do you have the sound so loud? OK, she is no engineer and I am so we sometimes don't communicate. It's loud to her because It's. well really really loud. But to me, it seemed just difficult to understand what the people were saying over all the sound effects, music and other sounds from the DD5.1 tracks.

I'll digress here a bit because I'm sure none of you know what my HT is equipped with.
2- JBL L200's 15" woofer horn lens midrange and a 3" ring radiator HF tweeter. Total magnet weight 46 pounds each driven by a Denon 5700
Center channel is a Klipsch KLF-C6 3 way with a 7"x10" horn lens HF and 2 - 8" woofers
The rears are a pair of Triax Klipsch with similar to center for speakers each.

The subwoofer is a hom made cabinet fitted with two 10" Sony Xplodes at 4 ohms driven by a 2000watt Carver amp.

Then there is the Butt Kicker also driven by a 1.5Kw Butt Kicker amp.

So back to my hearing problem.
My wife is complaining that I have it louder than usual and she thinks something is wrong. I should have listened to her but you know, I am the engineer and a volume control is all I need to fix the problem of not understanding but every 5 words they are saying. So, I finish up one DVD and jump to another. It, too is bad. I have to crank up the volume sooooo loud, my wife leaves the HT and goes to bed. When that movie was over I decided to watch some HBO. Now the volume was too loud. So I cranked it way down and now my wife thinks I just did that to get rid of her. But this is really bothering me as by the time I finished the second DVD I really thought I was going deaf.

The HBO program was in DD2.0. The DVD was in DD5.1. The DD5.1 had the dialog mostly coming from my center channel speaker. The DD2.0 puts the dialog across all three fronts. I went up to the center channel speaker and gave a listen with dialog and DD5.1 cranked up. The center channel speaker sounded like a subwoofer on all the speech! Only the two 8" woofers in the center channel speaker were working. The HF horn had no output. OK, I'm a veteran audio buff so I have lots of spare stuff in the shop. I pulled a small corner speraker 6"x9" in a small corner cabinet and wired it to the Klipsch C6 in place of the horn and voila! my centerchannel speaker is now back to normal. No more blasting my wife out of the HT.

Today, I called Klipsch and told them what I needed, What a wonderful company! They put me right through the parts dept and sold me a new voice coil for the horn. My expensive center channel speaker will be repaird for only $61.00 not bad! It pays to buy good solid American made speakers. BTW- My JBL's were made in year 1975! They were guaranteed for life against blown voice coils as they are commercial grade components. The Klipsch C6 is only 7 years old.

But the best news is, I'm not going deaf!
 
Lol.. the other night I sat down to watch some downrezzed HD archived and streamed from a replay in another room, no right channel, swapped wires etc.. no luck finally thought to check the Replay in the livingroom only had 1 cable hooked up. Left. (optical out ava on Replay but not in)
 
"the other night I sat down to watch some downrezzed HD"

Here I thought you were about to tell a story of how you thought you were going blind.
 
Nice but why would,'t you go for the HC1000? 1080P and then you'd be set for Blue Ray or HDDVD. It may be worth the extra bucks on a low interest charge card to get something that will do full HD DVD as long as you are upgrading. The 720 PJ's have about bottomed out but the 1080P stuff is still coming down so it probably is a good decision to hold for awhile on 1080P.

My plan is to wait for about another year and then put more money into upgrading my receiver that is HDMI switching and 7.1 sound and less into the projector but still 1080P. Hopefully things will settle a bit more by then.
 
I'm paying cash, right now not interested in either HDDVD format until Dish either allows the archiving to an External HDD or hollers calf rope to the MPAA, NAB and whoever else they might be scared of and admits they chicken out ;) I have a C-band HD set up, just need to hook it up for Higher bitrate Premium movie channels....HDDvd is the format I am more interested in as it is possible to burn discs from other sources that will play on it...