The Official AV123 Subwoofer Owners Thread

[centauro74]

Thanks to big daddy and red, I finally have my amp working again with no hmmm noise, I use one channel of the emo and power up the driver, I'm back on business. I gonna keep like that until I get enogh money to buy a external amp.

[red_5ive]

Originally Posted by Big Daddy

Another victim of the bad economy and/or bad business practices. Should I close the thread?

Big Daddy, I vote to keep the thread open. Somehow closing it feels like when a company discontinues product and stops providing support for it. Anyone that might have a question or issue could be helped by others who have experience/ideas on the product, and having a dedicated thread might prevent separate threads from being opened. Just a thought.

An example below as follows.

Originally Posted by centauro74

Thanks to big daddy and red, I finally have my amp working again with no hmmm noise, I use one channel of the emo and power up the driver, I'm back on business. I gonna keep like that until I get enogh money to buy a external amp.

No prob centauro, glad you got it working. Let me know when you get a replacement amp, I'd be interested to read your input.

[gonk]

Originally Posted by Big Daddy

Another victim of the bad economy and/or bad business practices. Should I close the thread?

Less economy and more business practices, with a dose of law-breaking tossed in for good (bad) measure. Mark Schifter plead guilty to two felonies the Friday before they closed, after all.

I agree with red_5ive that the thread probably deserves to stay open. There are a lot of MFW15's out in the wild now, and it is significantly more prone to needing service than most subs. The community of owners probably can do a lot working together to support the sub in AV123's absence. There are also options being explored by Motor City Custom Audio (with input from Mark Seaton, the original designer of the sub) for drop-in replacement amps as well as their "turbo" mod that upgrades the sub quite a bit. There are also folks trying to keep UFW/ULW10's and UFW12's running, and some off-the-shelf PartsExpress amps being used for that. If anything, the demise of AV123's forum probably makes this thread more useful to existing owners.

[Fors*]

Do you think the recent legal issues against the owner (I believe he was charged with embezzling money thru many personal charities?) contribute to this as well?

[Jwilly019]

Originally Posted by Fors*

Do you think the recent legal issues against the owner (I believe he was charged with embezzling money thru many personal charities?) contribute to this as well?

I'm sure it didn't help.

I agree with Red_5ive and Gonk, keep the thread open for those who have question/trouble with their subs.

[gonk]

He plead guilty to two of the five charges on 8/13 and will be sentenced in October. That was related to the series of raffles that he ran on AV123's forum between late 2004 and late 2008. During that time, he received $180,000 in donations and (according to February's indictment) kept roughly $150,000 of that. Some prizes were also never delivered (such as the set of LS-4's that were raffled off - the speaker was never put into production, and reports are that the design was never finished). That certainly didn't do the company any favors, nor did their handling of the raffles and various unpaid refunds on their forum. The details of the raffle thefts didn't become public until around the spring of 2009, though, by which time they were already in serious trouble. For that matter, the full scope of the raffle thefts wasn't known until the indictment in February 2010.

The financial burdens are more extensive than "just" repayment of that $150,000.

• Their trademark product was the Rocket speakers, but some time around 2007 they lost access to the factory that originally built the Rocket line (Sound Art China, or SAC) because the company owed SAC roughly $1 million for speakers that were delivered to AV123 and sold to customers. This also caused discontinuation of the Strata Mini. For many, many years, Mark Schifter claimed to have a fairly significant ownership share in SAC, which was never the case. These facts were not publicized on their forum. Instead, production of a few Rocket models quietly moved to a different Chinese manufacturer and most of the forum's attention was diverted to the X-series and LS speakers.
• Early X-series speakers were built in China, but they later moved to a new factory in Colombia. That factory had no experience with any sort of wood work. The founder's family had been running foundries for generations, so he knew how to run a factory but had no background building speaker cabinets, veneering, or doing speaker QA. The factory start-up was slow and rough, with significant "b-stock" output. There's no word on what debts AV123 may have run up with them, but odds are that UniAudio is owed something. Reports earlier in this thread by someone in Colombia indicated that the factory had suffered significant layoffs starting back in at least 2009.
• Likely for budget reasons, all of their electronics from at least 2007 onward were sourced from a Chinese distributor with an emphasis on hitting aggressive price points. "Value-engineered" designs for amps (sub amps, the X-Amp monoblock amp, and the X-Head headphone amp) suffered abnormally high failure rates and other defects due to substituted parts. MFW15 owners are painfully familiar with this, and both the X-Head and X-Amp launches were faced with initial batches that reached customers with hardware problems.
• It appears that the company's habit of not paying factories (as with SAC) extended to their outside design consultants. Reports indicate that both Mark Seaton and Danny Richie were owed significant sums of money, which was likely instrumental in the demise of the Seaton-designed BMF and X-Plosive subs.
• Many LS speakers were pre-ordered and paid for in advance, but they were delayed by years for reasons that are still unclear. (The LS-6 and LS-9 designs were taken directly from GR Research kits that were available and being built by hobbyists years ago.)
• Schifter announced a separate project (through a new company "Act3 Audio") around April 2007 that was called the RSL-II. This speaker would have retailed for around $13,000. He offered to let a small group of buyers purchase "beta" speaker pairs for $6,000. Eventually he had a dozen testers, all of whom paid up-front for speakers that were said to be 90 days away. The RSL-II never materialized. A few people got refunds (all individuals who pushed for refunds starting in 2008 or earlier and got bad checks at least once, only to get good checks this spring - likely to avoid further legal trouble for writing bad checks) and at least one person switched to LS-9's (which were themselves delayed until around the fall of 2009).

In the end, there were a lot of financial problems rattling around - that's not even a complete list. The problems date back to at least 2004, when the first raffle was run (and stolen from), so the economy alone wouldn't seem to be responsible.

[Fors*]

, I mean .....talk about running a company into the ground....thanks Gonk.

[Steve]

Thanks for that write-up Gonk. I have one of the MFW-15s (B-stock) that was built in the time of all the amp failures. Thankfully mine is still kicking along and sounding great, but I decided a while back that if it ever fails I probably won't even mess with AV123 (not that that's an option any more) and will just go ahead and order an Epik Empire to replace it.

Big Daddy I also vote to leave the thread open as there are still quite a few people here who own their products. Now more than ever we may need each other's help keeping our pieces going and this thread would be an invaluable asset in that regard.

[gonk]

Any AV123 owners who find themselves looking for help might be interested in this site: AV123info.us. The site has contact information for several companies offering support to AV123 owners (including repair or replacement of MFW15 amps). I've also got an archive of user manuals, which may be added to the AV123info site at some point.

[Steve]

It's been a year (and three days to be exact) since this thread was last touched and I'm curious to see how people's MFW-15s are holding up. Mine is still going strong, but as we all know the amps had a significant failure rate. So are there any other MFW-15 owners still here? How are things going for you? Any problems to report?

I'm also curious to know of anyone who owned an MFW-15 when this thread was still active but has since moved on to something else? Was the change a necessity, and what did you choose as a replacement?

[red_5ive]

I've had mine just over 2 years with the V2 amp and still running strong.

Out of that time I did have the internal amp bypassed for maybe 6 months as I had a couple of channels free on an amp, but I ended up going back to the internal amp about a year ago after adding height channels (Audyssey DSX). When I reconnected the MFW amp I noticed a hum, but its been running fine for the past year (a cheater plug also helped). Nevertheless, if I do lose the amp, I'll grab one of those Behringer EPXXXX stereo amps that BigDaddy is always raving about . I have a 2nd sub (not an MFW) with a dead amp that I could put to use, anyway.

[centauro74]

I have mine for almost 2 years, last year I bought a used one very cheap with 2 extra amps and a extra woofer. The first one got the umm noise last year but I did the cap fix and has been working fine since then even runs a little cooler. They are kicking butt with the recent movies like x-men and thor, I watch the hubble last night and i felt like I was 200ft from the space shuttle, crazy LFE on that movie.

[Steve]

Thanks for the responses. I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who still has one going.

[prerich]

Glad the thread is still open because some one on eBay is selling the R-DES peq for 89.00 or best offer,!!! They have 9 left - you can print graphs and do a lot of things that the velodyne SMS - 1 does (but the SMS is easier to use. BD - we do have a sub eq thread right?

[Fors*]

Originally Posted by prerich

Glad the thread is still open because some one on eBay is selling the R-DES peq for 89.00 or best offer,!!! They have 9 left - you can print graphs and do a lot of things that the velodyne SMS - 1 does (but the SMS is easier to use. BD - we do have a sub eq thread right?

Prerich....do you have a link? That sounds like a great price.

[prerich]

Originally Posted by Fors*

Prerich....do you have a link? That sounds like a great price.

Yes here it is http://www.ebay.com:80/itm/ws/eBayIS...:B:BOC:US:1123

I made an offer of 76.00 and it's one mine

[bajor27]

Bought mine last May i think and the hmm just hit and is too loud for use. Guessing its a v2 but havent opened it up yet. Anyone in vancouver area successfully perform the fix that murrel post on av forums? Id be willing to pay you to try mine if you have

[ChopsRR]

Originally Posted by Steve

It's been a year (and three days to be exact) since this thread was last touched and I'm curious to see how people's MFW-15s are holding up. Mine is still going strong, but as we all know the amps had a significant failure rate. So are there any other MFW-15 owners still here? How are things going for you? Any problems to report?

The drivers are lasting due to the fact that they are nothing more than standard, unmodified Dayton Audio DVC drivers which are very good, rugged drivers. I know, I have two of them sitting at my father's house in my old bedroom. I used them for years in several different DIY push-pull designs, to great success I might add.

It looks like AV123 did a decent job on the enclosure and I guess decent tuning (though I never heard one). That was about the extent of their "design". Obviously, the amps were junk.


It's a shame Mark had to be stupid and do shady things to ruin the entire company. Take their speakers for instance. I have their X-Statik and X-Voce and they are great sounding speakers. However, if I knew then what I know now about Mark, I would have spent my money elsewhere. But since I didn't, and I have these speakers, I might as well enjoy them because they really are good.

Anywho...

[Steve]

Originally Posted by ChopsRR

The drivers are lasting due to the fact that they are nothing more than standard, unmodified Dayton Audio DVC drivers which are very good, rugged drivers. I know, I have two of them sitting at my father's house in my old bedroom. I used them for years in several different DIY push-pull designs, to great success I might add.

It looks like AV123 did a decent job on the enclosure and I guess decent tuning (though I never heard one). That was about the extent of their "design". Obviously, the amps were junk.


It's a shame Mark had to be stupid and do shady things to ruin the entire company. Take their speakers for instance. I have their X-Statik and X-Voce and they are great sounding speakers. However, if I knew then what I know now about Mark, I would have spent my money elsewhere. But since I didn't, and I have these speakers, I might as well enjoy them because they really are good.

Anywho...

Mark Seaton actually designed the MFW-15, so you can't even credit AV123 with that. It really is a shame how the owner ran that company though. They made some great speakers based on everything I've read about them. It's too bad they're gone.

[ChopsRR]

Originally Posted by Steve

Mark Seaton actually designed the MFW-15, so you can't even credit AV123 with that. It really is a shame how the owner ran that company though. They made some great speakers based on everything I've read about them. It's too bad they're gone.

Oh, I didn't know that. Then again, I never read up too much on their subs. I was running a massive SVS PB12-Plus/2, so I had no reason to look at the AV123 offerings.