So, it turns out I definitely was not imagining the greatly diminished bass extension of my solo X5, nor misremembering the quality of the bass with a full complement of subwoofers. Apparently, not only had the amp of one speaker failed, but, incredibly, the voice coil on the remaining subwoofer had frozen or fused, so there was in fact, from that woofer, exactly zero bass. Ryan from Spatial was good enough to come over to replace my failed plate amp and, when I mentioned the strangely drastically, or so it seemed to me, reduced bass, even with a lone woofer, he had a listen and with great professional aplomb pronounced “This is weird.” Between my failed amp and fused voice coil, I seem to have hit the “weird” repair jackpot. Who doesn’t like being unique. It was actually something of a relief to know it wasn’t me or my room or some crop-circle-esque physics aberration but just a run of the mill, albeit weird, malfunction.
Fortunately, for some reason, Ryan had a spare woofer in his car, so he promptly swapped out my amp and woofer and restored my system to its former townhome-shaking glory. While having the speakers go awry on me was an annoyance, it was an education and comforting to see that replacing both the amp and the woofer are comparatively simple operations. Not that I’m in any hurry to test my newfound knowledge. Anyway, there you have it, the case of the diminished bass solved, if not the mystery of why they failed, each in its own way. As the professionals like to say, weird.
