Subwoofer issue on new Surround Receiver

Feb 19, 2018
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Hi everyone. I recently bought a new Yamaha RX-V383BL 5.1 Surround receiver to replace my old Kenwood that I've had forever. I decided to keep the old Kenwood speakers and subwoofer as they seemed compatible as the impedance of the speakers is correct and the subwoofer is self powered with a built in Amp.

My problem though is the subwoofer doesn't seem to work most of the time..

It's weird, when I first turn the unit on, the subwoofer doesn't emit any sound, but seems to start working randomly a few hours after I have the receiver on, and will continue to work until I turn the receiver back off. I have them connected with an RCA cable to the pre-out. I just replaced that thinking it may be the issue.

I'm not sure if my problem is the subwoofer or the new receiver. I can't really tell if I'm getting much base from the regular speakers as well. Any thoughts?

Thanks!

Sorry, I was trying to be brief, but I'll add more details.

I did try setting the front speakers to small, to no avail. The subwoofer also has an auto-on/off but since hooking to the new receiver, has yet to go into standby. I also tried adjusting the crossover. The subwoofer doesn't activate during the test tone on my new receiver, but hooked it back up to my old one and it worked on the test tone, albeit sounding fairly weak compared to when I first set the old system up.

When it does start working on the new unit though, it does work really well..

Update: I picked up a new subwoofer to try out, this one has an LFE in and 2 RCA in. Now like my last one, this one has an auto on/off feature, but I can also manually turn this one on. I'm noticing that for some reason, the signal to the woofer doesn't seem to be turning it on like it should be, I have to manually turn it to on to get the signal, and even then I have to turn the gain to max or near to it to hear anything. Does that mean my receiver isn't putting out a strong enough signal?