My subwoofers keep dying...could be be the receiver?

Question

Can anyone help me out here? Here's the situation:

I have a Yamaha RX-V595 receiver that had been powering a Yamaha YST-SW60 sub for as long as I'd owned the two - probably about 18 months. Then one day, I suddenly noticed the subwoofer wasn't working anymore. Figured it was probably blown, so I started looking for a new one.

Found a nice little Sony sub on Craigslist yesterday. Tested it at the guy's apartment, and it worked great. Brought it home, hooked it up with the cable he supplied me, and I seemed to think then that it worked fine. Hooked it up later with my old cable (longer) to put it in a new place, and now suddenly it's not working. Fine, I think, it's a dead cable. Hook it back up to the old cable - the one that it worked with - nothing. It powers on, but there is NOTHING coming through it at all - just like the old sub.

Is it possible that somehow my receiver is actually killing these subs? I'm not abusing them...this last one hardly got used at all before dying.

Answer 1

Could be that you're buying cheaper, powered subs that shake themselves to a broken state. You should look for a passive sub and get an external amp, like the Crown K2, to power it.

Answer 2

I don't think your receiver is killing the subs, I think you have a bad subwoofer output on your receiver.  You can test this by trying to drive the subwoofer(s) with another device.  If you don't have another receiver,  try testing at a friend's house perhaps, or better yet...a pawn shop (they test to make sure the sub is working).  They don't know that you don't plan on pawning it, but you will know in seconds if it's your sub or not.

Before disconnecting everything and hauling it out of the house, take the top off and clean it with a can of compressed air.  This has worked for me before, as I had a surround sound channel that wasn't working on my Onkyo receiver.

I'm sure this isn't the case, but your sub levels and settings could be different for each a/v source, (video 1/aux/cd/dvd/tuner etc)