The sound system I have in the Man Cave is perfectly adequate but it has always lacked a little presence on the bottom end. There’s only so much oomph you can get out of bookshelf speakers. So I’ve had a Polk subwoofer sitting in my Amazon wish list for quite a while. I checked on it last week and discovered that the price had dropped about ten bucks. It was time to pull the trigger.

I got it in the mail yesterday, wired it up (the manual was clueless in telling you how to wire it to a 2.1 system), and put on some Zeppelin to break it in. And got nothing. If I asked the receiver to play all the speakers I would get only the sub. If I set it to play only the bookshelf speakers, then I wouldn’t hear the sub. So I figured the problem was the receiver’s speaker outputs were shot and I was going to have to buy a new receiver.

I tried to find a solution online but all the answers were about surround systems and not very specific to my problem. So in desperation I turned to the hive mind of Progressive Ears and posted a thread detailing my crisis. In 5 minutes one of our more reliable members told me how to wire my bookshelves through the subwoofer’s outputs. I reworked the wires and put on “Good Times Bad Times” from Led Zeppelin’s Celebration Day CD. Oh jebus.

The bookshelf speakers were back to pristine form and the bass and drums shook the flooring. This was something I could live with. Of course, it wasn’t equal to the wall of sound I could get from the stereo in the living room but it was still pretty sweet. So I’m rocking hard and about to return to writing hard. Go me.