The care and handling and feeding of Subwoofers

[rwnano]

I have a newly purchased 10 year old golden ear forcefield 5 subwoofer.

GoldenEar ForceField 5 Subwoofer Review - HomeTheaterHifi.com

GoldenEar ForceField 5 Subwoofer Review

hometheaterhifi.com

It's got a passive radiator at the bottom and a front firing and down firing drivers.

Recently I saw that it's green blinking light at the back was not turning on. So I unplugged it from mains.

Thinking that it was kaput, I unplugged it and kept it aside for repairs to the dealership.

Now today I plugged it back in, and the flashing light started by itself ! Wonder of wonders!

I wonder how to use this subwoofer?
Someone from this forum told me to keep the subwoofer unplugged when not in use and also to use a voltage stabilizer.

This is a 1500 watts RMS watts subwoofer.

Any best practices for using subwoofers in India? I live in a DLF society in Gurgaon.

 

[mbhangui]

The voltage standards for India was diluted silently and implemented during the covid. It was 230 +- 5%. Now it is 240 +- 10%. So the max voltage can go up as high as 264 volts. In Pune I have seen upto 255 volts. I have voltmeters connected in all my rooms. Only two countries have this attrocious voltage standards (India and Afghanistan). I guess it is a coincidence where an important businessman from India has setup power distribution.

Now in all countries on this planet called earth all equipments are designed to work upto 120 v for US and 110-240 volts. Check your subwoofer manual or the label near the power inlet. The max voltage will be either 230v or 240v. Almost all subwoofers using SMPS and these SMPS first convert AC into DC. The DC voltage that is supplied is AC voltage multiplied by square root of 2. These SMPS mostly use flyback converter chips like TOP254 are designed for 85 VAC to 265 VAC. India's max voltage is just a volt short of the max voltage of these chips. It is quite possible that the voltage are exceeded due to transients generated (like someone switching on an induction motor in the building). I have analyzed at least 4 equipments that went burst after covid. In all these cases it was the flyback converter chip used by SMPS that went burst. Since then I have installed ordinary voltage stablizer to bring the voltage back to 240v. Not lost a single equipment after 2020 now. See this thread where I repaired my AVR. Marantz and Denon also use the same TOP 25x flyback convertors in the AVR's power supply

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• mbhangui
• Replies: 85
• Forum: Surround Amplifiers/Receivers

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So any stablizer that brings back the voltage down to 230 to 240v will go a long way in keeping your equipments live and kicking for many years to come. Surge protectors are useless in such cases as they protect only when there is a surge that goes up to around 300v or so. None of these surge protectors work when voltage goes to let us say 265 volts.

Recently (few months back) I repaired Sabaj Dac for one of our FM. Same issue. The SMPS is designed for 90-240 VAC. It went burst and was made operational by using a SMPS from meanwell with the same output voltages.