Are my BHK 300s too powerful for my speakers?

It’s nice to have headroom, but no one talks about what additional gain and/or power does to the practical application of your volume control. Suddenly small changes make much larger differences, which can have the effect of making it harder to do fine volume adjustments, especially if the volume control has detents, like my old Adcom.

How’s that for a first-world problem?

The manual of the Ayre AX-7e say gain is 35 dB. ML does not seem to state it. It only says Amplifier Woofer: 2 x 275 watts/channel (4 ohms), 2 x 550 watts peak

Yes, MLS like a lot of current.

The Ayre’s higher gain compared to the 300s implies you would need to turn the bass up, not down, to achieve the same balance when substituting in the 300s.

I am mystified.

My experience with the 300s new is they initially were bass heavy. This settled down quickly. Perhaps what you are hearing is too much mid-bass which is above the frequency the subwoofers handle.

I suggest letting the 300s settle. Leave them on, not standby but rather fully on, for a good 36 hours. They do not need music playing for this to help them settle in.

Did you reset everything to 0 and turn off room correction? Any component change you have to start from scratch and work back up again. No component is “flat” so any change will invalidate and screw-up the correction you had previously. Surprising to me… I ended up repositioning my speakers after the last component change I did. This was because the imaging was so precise with the change I could tell things were not allowed correctly. Previously it wasn’t so critical.

Basically… start over from 0 and start tweaking again.

@Elk So the 300s are not new, only the BHK pre is new. I got the 300s used, and the person said they were bought June 2018. Serials are PWM-A8-8C0576 and PWM-A8-8C0576 in case they are some beta units. I also did not change the tubes they came with, so maybe that may play a role.

Then it is definitely not an issue of breaking in the amps. :slight_smile:

hmm… you mean definitely NOT an issue of breaking in the amps?

Argh. Sorry. I fixed it.

I believe this also played a big part in my initial confusion as to what was causing this.

Happy to report that I’ve made great progress. I started from scratch as suggested by a few folks here. Turned off ARC room correction and reset everything to 0. I pulled the speakers out about 1/3 length from the front wall. I then used pink noise with the RTA in REW and experimented with seat positioning as suggested in the “Get Better Sound” book. I was looking for as flat as possible response in the 25-300Hz range, but also for balance of the bass relative to the highs at full range. I still had to set the ML deep bass gain knob to -3db, but I also had to increase the mid bass by +2db (the MLs have -2, 0, +2 toggle). I am far from over with tweaking, but on initial listening it sounds great. Clean bass and great tonal balance.

I think the original speaker placement, close to the walls to compensate for the lack of base of the old system, was the main culprit. It was creating unbearable peaks all over the room.

On to further tweaking… Thank you!

5 Likes

It appears you climbed the learning curve successfully. Enjoy!

Great news!

1 Like