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Trip to Comp USA
I went to Comp USA in Austin today to check out the HSU sud that they sell. This will probably sound very familiar to anyine that has shoppe for this sub at this chain.
When I found the area that had the subs, I was first impressed with the look of the HSU sub. They had it hooked up to one of those switching boxes liek they have at Circuit City. I tried to turn on the sub with a set of JBL bookshelves. Surprise! No sound. The sales guy cmae over and took over, I must have looked like I had no idea what I was doing. After a minute the feeling was mutual. He tried three different recievers, checked all of the hookups, nothing. I was about tready to leave when he did something and got it to work. I would have been more grateful but it seemed that all he did was punch buttons on the reciever until he got sound. If I sound a little irritated, I was. The whole time he was messing with the controls, he was telling me how dissapointed everyone is with that sub and how the 10 inch infinity blows it out of the water. I am new to HT, but I do know that the HSU should out-perform the Infinity. Once he got it going, he turned on the Infinity. It actually sounded OK. But for $350, I think that you can do better. Then he swithced to the 12 inch JBL. Yuck, very muddy sounding to me. I fianally got him to turn on the HSU, and wow!. He turned it up and then said " See what I mean, it just rattles too much and sounds bad." Switching between the Infinty and th HSU, he kept saying, "for the money, you have to buy the Infinty, it is way better." I pulled out the sub to check the connections, I was really just trying to get hands on with this sub as I have never seen one, much less heard one. I found the gain turned all the way up and the crossover all the way down. I turned the crossover up to about 70 and the gain back down to about 1/3. This made a huge difference, though he pointed out that it still rattled. After a little more investigation, I found that it was not the sub that was rattling, it was the whole shelf!! I put the sub on the floor and put some pressure on it to keep it from moving. Even at the mild volume that the sub sounded much better than either of the other two that were hooked up. Two other guys came over to see which sub wasplaying and said that they never heard it sound that good before. I am not even beginning to say that I am a audio brain, far from it. But if I could mess with it few seconds and get it sounding better, why can't they? The sales guy said that they have people come in all the time wanting to check out the HSU, but almmost always leave dissapointed, and I can see why.
All this to say that I will go back in a couple of weeks to pick up my new HSU. I can't wait.
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