Bass crackle on Creative Inspire 5200

[Althea]

Hello Friends, I am having creative inspire 5200 that is connected to Philips DVD Player. The combination works fine with less bass level. When I increase the bass level, I am experiencing crackle in subwoofer where as satellite speaker works fine (no distortion in sound). The distortion is not continuous; it comes and goes of f once in awhile. Please let me know the solution for this.

[samar69]

I suspect you're just overdriving the subwoofer input, and when you have an LFE signal, you're experiencing digital clipping. CL speakers are designed to accept an LFE-level signal which is 10 dB softer than standard line-level. The DVD player is putting out line-level, and then the speakers are amplifying it +10db further, which puts it out of balance with the others. To test this, disconnect the subwoofer cable and see if the crackle goes away. I expect you will still have bass coming from the subwoofer, because the normal bass is in the non-LFE channels, and the speaker crossover will redirect that to the subwoofer, but I don't know what kind of bass management the DVD player might also do. If you think that's the problem, the next thing to do is to lower the subwoofer output 10dB before it reaches the speaker input. If you can't do that with the DVD player's controls, we can go into how to add a simple volume control to the subwoofer cable connection.

[Althea]

Thanks for such a quick reply but I have already tried this before but that was not useful to me. As per your suggestion, I tried decreasing the signal level for BASS to 0 dB and also again to -6dB but the problem still persists. I have also tried decrease all the 6 channel output to -6 dB, still there is crackle in BASS. Please suggest me any other workaround for this.

[Howitzer]

If it still does it with the subwoofer cable disconnected, my hypothesis is toast. You might still be overdriving something by increasing the bass level, but the subwoofer input is the only one where there is a potential mismatch between a DVD player and the speakers. Alternatively, there could be a hardware problem with either unit, or just with the cables and connections. When you talk about increasing/decreasing bass level, exactly how (where) are you making the adjustment?

[pddaugusto]

Do you have something else you could connect to the speakers as a test? A stereo output is fine, because you just want to see if the same thing happens with some other device feeding the speakers, to rule out the Philips as a contributing factor. Ideally, it would be wonderful if you had another Inspire 5200 system available to try with your DVD player, but since it's a discontinued product, I it seems unlikely you could find a way to try that. Some place that does speaker repair might be able to check the subwoofer out, or maybe they could be sent to Creative for "repair," but I'd worry about what you'd get charged for such. It's not clear that there's really anything wrong. Are there any bass/treble controls in the setup? If so, does cranking the bass have a similar effect?

[MACuser]

I am having a option of setting the speaker volume for individual speakers (subwoofer and satellite channels). All the 6 channel volume, i have set to -6dB for testing. Everything works fine, if the bass level in my creative speaker is less, if i increase the bass level to higher the problem starts. The issue is only with subwoofer whereas the satellite channel works absolutely fine. Please suggest me something on this.