Do many of you turn up your subs too loud?

What sub / set up? I assume you are calibrating by using a room correction like Audyssey/MCACC/YPAO?

I have the opposite tendency. When I adjust the sub volume directly at the sub and just listen for when it sounds best, I've found several times that I've turned the sub down completely. Can't have that. So now, as I adjust the sub's volume knob while listening to music with some bass, I rest the tips of my fingers on the grill to feel the vibration, and if I can't feel anything, I advance the volume until the vibes return.

I know this is not standard practice, but when the volume seems as good as I can get it, but I still don't like the amount of bass I hear, I turn the sub's crossover control down, until I still feel some bass but it no longer sounds excessive.

I like this answer. People who do not have a general understanding of sub woofer function, I my experience, tend to simply turn up the gain too much. Then during the next heavy bass scene in a movie I hear overkill and distortion. If setting manually, put on a scene that you know has the heaviest bass and set the sub accordingly.

You may try the distance setting, which in essence is the time/signal alignment between your mains an sub.

It may be a destructive phase relationship issue ... when you measured, did you have a smooth transition to your mains?

Some of you guys need to go here and read on how to setup your subwoofer(s), http://www.avsforum.com/t/824554/setting-up-your-home-theater-101

I followed your link and got to this interesting article, http://www.audioholics.com/tweaks/get-good-bass/an-easy-solution-to-subwoofer-calibration, where it is recommended to turn up the sub's volume until Garrison Keillor's voice loses its nasality. I never heard that one.

For my most recent calibration, I left the volume setting of two of my subs up to MCACC, the Pioneer calibration program, and I think it did fine. However, my third sub is slightly broken -- its line level input doesn't work, and I have to connect it by the receiver's front high-level speaker terminals, so I have to set the volume manually.

I suppose we all know that there is a subwoofer forum here.

OP, I think you're simply dealing with the limitations of the Bic F12. I had the F12 for over a year and found the same problem you did. That while the bass was good at low to medium volumes, the louder more desired volumes produced boomy bass. It did well with movies as it's sometimes hard to distinguish the lower bass notes in LFE. But music could only be listened to at somewhat low/medium volume levels. Really cranking the sub up with bass heavy music resulted in the typical "one-note" bassline.

3 words - Power Sound Audio.







That is all.

Does this mean you calibrated the rest of the speakers to 75 dB?

I think this may lead to too much sound from the sub. The 10 dB correction is part of the AVR. Does the calibration disk already compensate for this 10 dB?

This is a common problem IMO.

What I did is to install a VCA box in the sub woofer line input that is controllable from my IPAD running Irule. There is a calibrated default but I can also tweak it as needed based on the program mix.

You could make such a system yourself with an old AV receiver by feeding the sub signal through the unit and using the headphone output* to feed the powered subs. Ideally if the AV receiver has a post volume control preamp output, that would be ideal.

*Or the speaker terminals but with a 100ohm load and 10K series resistor to make it line level. Also some powered subs will take speaker level inputs directly. Just make sure you put at least a 100ohm 1/2watt load resistor on the amp feeding the sub.

How about one word, Submersive!