Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Help Trouble Shooting new Amp

Hello I have a NAD T748 avr receiver powering Axiom M80's (fronts), VP150 (center) and QS8's for surrounds. No Subwoofer. Today I added a brand new Outlaw 5000x amplifier. I am powering the Outlaw with the preouts on the NAD for the front speakers and the center. The NAD receiver powers only the surrounds.

The M80's are 4 ohms impedance. The VP 150 is 8 ohm.

The Outlaw power rating is 180 watts into 4 ohms all channels driven @0.05% distortion.

The sound with this setup is bad. Static and bad LFE distortion/vibration(?) in the woofers.

What are the steps to troubleshoot this issue?

Presumably you are using RCA cables for interconnection. Make sure the RCA-XLR switch on each channel is set to RCA.

Looking at the manuals nothing obvious pops out. Have you tried using a different channel on the Outlaw? And I'd try a different RCA cable, and maybe try a digital RCA (orange) for the higher bandwidth. Oh, and try and place the cables at right angles if they cross.

Yes I am using RCA cables (Amazon Essentials) for the preamp/amp connection. The RCA switches on the amp all are set to RCA.

Hmmm, I just remembered, this is a B-Stock amp (refurbished) from the Outlaw website. Maybe its the amp? They said it was bench tested for full operations.

Try another source if you have one … or another amp if you have one. Also you could try a single channel at a time … say the left channel out of your receiver and see if it plays cleanly though any of the outlaw amp channels.

Well here is an update. It looks like it was just a certain CD that I was playing. Hopefully that is all it was. Seems to be working well now.

How the hell can that be? What kind of voodoo shit do you listen to?

Ya I was wrong about the CD. Wishful thinking I guess. The Cd I was playing was Shelby Lynne Just a Little Loving and then Robert Plant and Alison Krause Raising Sand. Both have some really deep bass . Anyway I isolated all of my components one at a time, unhooked the new amp, switched out the receiver, used a DVD player instead of my CD player, all with no improvements. Then I swapped out the M80's with my Paradigm Reference Studio 100's and they were able to handle the CDs with the NAD receiver and the new amp.

Why would the M80's (v2) just not be able to produce those LFE's without rattling etc? Are the M80's damaged? Both of them? They sounded great other than those really low notes that they clearly couldn't handle.

Well, no voodoo shit there. Good artists!

The only thing I can think of is that the Outlaw is running out of current and the output is distorting. The M80v2 is a 4 Ohm load down low with half of those Ohms being inductive.

One thing you can try is to use your bass adjustment to cut the bass. If there's no distortion with the bass attenuated, that validates my theory.