Help! Subwoofer is Popping

[FreddieFerric]

Last Sunday I was watching Taken for the first time. About halfway through the film I began to notice a faint popping coming from the midrange cone's on my Polk RM50T's. (These are the main fronts.) At first I thought that maybe there was some strange issue with the soundtrack.

Later in the week when watching King Kong for the first time (on Blu at least) I noticed the same exact popping on that film also. I decided to test whether this was just bad disks, or a problem with my system. I put on LOTR Twin Towers and opted for the 6.1 DTS track. (I chose this film because I have watched it many many times and am intimately familiar with everything in that soundtrack). Well sadly, the popping occured with this movie too. Now I know, it's not the film.

I started to put my ear up close to the speakers trying to identify exactly which cones where suffering from the popping. I also put my ear to the subwoofer and it was popping too. When I unplugged the LFE connection at the sub input, the popping immediately stopped on ALL speakers and the movie played flawlessly, although with no low freq. extension.

I will tell you that I have the system setup via the Audessey and I seem to remember the sub is crossed over at 80hz. I routinely keep the gain on the sub to around half or just below, so I am not really driving the sub. BTW, it is an Infinity PS 12. Also, the volume level during these sessions was actually turned down pretty much - as in not really loud.

My fear is that the sub is telling my its onboard amp is failing. I really would welcome suggestions as to what the problem might be. The popping is relatively constant even in mild dialogue based scenes. In other words it's doing it in places that you wouldn't expect popping.

[StimpsonJCat]

What are your crossovers? NM - I see it now...

I've looked around and it seems that sub has a history of doing this about a year in. Others have reported the same thing. Looks like a sub issue without an easy fix.