This guide will take you through the steps required to connect a subwoofer to your Vitus Audio system.
Can I connect a subwoofer to my Vitus Audio system?
In most cases you can indeed connect a subwoofer to your Vitus Audio system.
However there are some guidelines that you should follow, as wrong handling of connecting a subwoofer can lead to damage of different components in your system.
We recommend not to connect a subwoofer directly to the speaker outputs.
Since all Vitus Audio power amplifiers and integrated amplifiers are made with a pure balanced output, connecting a subwoofer directly to the speaker terminals of the VA unit may damage the output stage of the amplifier or, potentially, your subwoofer.
The reason for this is that none of the speaker terminals used for the normal speaker output are connected to GND.
This means that we recommend not to connect subwoofers to a pure power amplifier, whether it is a mono power amplifier or stereo power amplifier.
How do I connect a subwoofer then?
Instead of connecting your subwoofer to the speaker outputs, you should instead use the “Preout” on your integrated amplifier or one of the outputs on your pre-amplifier to drive the subwoofer with a line level signal.
Beware that on some Vitus Audio line stages, one of the outputs is a “tape out”, which means the volume control is bypassed and the signal will therefore always be the same level as on the input of the line stage.
If you accidentally connect this “tape out” to your subwoofer, it may damage the subwoofer as the signal is essentially at near maximum volume.
My amplifier only has XLR outputs but my subwoofer only has RCA inputs, what do I do?
In this case, you will need to find a suitable adapter cable going from XLR connectors to RCA connectors.
Beware when buying these adapters, as some can directly short the inverting signal to GND, which could damage the output stage of the pre-amplifier or pre-out of the integrated amplifier.
Instead, the connection on the XLR connector – following the EU standards – should be;
- PIN1 = GND
- PIN2 = SIGNAL
- PIN3 = 10Kohm resistor to GND
On the RCA connector, the outer ring should be GND and the centre pin should connect to PIN2 = signal from the XLR connector.
Neutrik XLR-RCA adapters are not recommended, as they directly short PIN3 in the XLR connector to PIN1 which is GND.
