Cerwin Vega AT-15 Low bass?

[Chris Brown]

The room is a massive variable in terms of bass. Size is a big consideration. A small fully closed room will be the easiest to pressurize with bass. On the other hand, a very large room, or even a smaller "room" with open walls on one or more sides will be much more difficult simply due to the increased volume. Adding subs can definitely help in this case. The shape of the room is also a very big deal. A fully square or rectangular room without many obstacles can be difficult because you will get so much cancellation from reflections. Odd-shaped rooms, and furniture/objects that break up large flat areas of the walls help with this.

Play some bass test tones at moderate volume, and walk around the room. There will probably be areas where the bass seems very absent and other areas where the bass is extra loud, depending on if the reflections are cancelling out the original sound waves or combining with them at that specific location. You might be able to adjust the position of the speakers to make sure that your listening position isn't in a bass dead-zone (lots of cancellation). Adding subs also tends to help even-out peaks and dead-zones in the room. Basically, the more sources of bass, the more even the bass will generally be, see "distributed bass".

I had a pair of D-9's for a while. I also upgraded the fuses to 3A because the 2.5A fuses were blowing. I ended up getting a 2nd pair and running them stacked, and at that point in my life I was running that whole setup in a medium-small bedroom. Suffice it to say there was plenty of bass.

 

[twiiii]

I use the line input on my spectrum analyzer. I feed the pink noise in to the amp and look at the voltage and the response curve of the crossover out puts to the different drivers. Then I plug in the calibrated mic and look at the acoustic out put of each driver to see if they are interfacing correctly with the crossover section for that particular driver. I also have a Syn aud com designed impedance box that lets me see the if the impedance of the driver is causing complications for the crossover. Some ported, reflex and labyrinth enclosures can give drivers and crossover hell. Also giving amplifiers heart attacks from 2 ohm load impedances when the speakers system is supposed to be 8 or 4 ohms.

 

[VintageCerwi]

Hi thank you for all the help In this thread. After playing various different type of music I can say the bass is good. Reason why I was blowing so many fuses i bought 2.25A instead of 2.5A after buying the correct ones seems to be good. however can’t blast them at the moment. Still begs the question why I blown the original fuses that came with them possibly they were old?

 

[Chris Brown]

Hi thank you for all the help In this thread. After playing various different type of music I can say the bass is good. Reason why I was blowing so many fuses i bought 2.25A instead of 2.5A after buying the correct ones seems to be good. however can’t blast them at the moment. Still begs the question why I blown the original fuses that came with them possibly they were old?

The AT-15 should have come stock with 2.5A Slow-blow fuses just like the D-9 did. Cerwin-Vega gave their blessing to upgrade that to 3A when I contacted them.

If your speakers had something smaller than 2.5A in there, it was probably the previous owner messing around not knowing what they were doing. That would also explain why you were blowing the fuses easily. It also keeps the door open for you to go up further to 3A if you still have issues.

 

[whoaru99]

Still begs the question why I blown the original fuses that came with them possibly they were old?

There is no question in it.

The fuses blow because you're exceeding the current the fuses can handle.

 

[tarior]

I owned a pair of AT-15s many moons ago. I remember them being punchy and efficient, and sounding good, but they didn't really dig very deep. A JBL 4645B (movie theater sub) took care of that.