Subwoofer no longer adds bass line/poor quality

[Vash01]

Jl 12w1v3-4 is a sub I used to run, then I gifted it to a friend and purchased a SA 12 Sundown on the cheap. Thing is, the Jl Audio sub would pick up the beat and rhythm of all songs and ADD a bass line to them while of course favoring the heavy bass notes, in a way it just added musical volum, but the sundown is silent unless drum beats or very specific notes are played, it otherwise just drones on or even makes port noise. Could it be getting the wrong signal or is a signal blocker ruining what should be an ok performing subwoofer? In between these, I ran a 8 inch Hippo xlr 8 inch sub woofer by Massive audio and it also performed reasonably well but the Sundown is disappointing.

The JL Audio and Massive would add bass to songs and bands that had very little natural bass to them, such as old Slayer and Pantera songs, while playing song with Bass guitars very well and of course hitting phonk or techno extremely well.. The Sundown....doesn't know what the hell to do, even after break in, it remains completely silent while occasionally hitting a drumbeat. Sometimes. The 3 subs were all installed by different places. The bass knob I used to use was uninstalled and will be reinstalled eventually. With both the JL audio and Massive I messed around with the head unit EQ and my phone eq and got where I needed to be but nothing helps the SA12. Any ideas on what may have went differently with the different installs?

The Massive 8 inch possibly benefitted from have a 5 channel audio control lc7 controlling output. The JL Audio did not.

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[Vash01]

If you used the hi level inputs it's possible your getting noise from it somewhere. Do you have the crossover on your amp tuned on to eliminate high freq response from the subs?

Heres a clue, in the setup this was in, it was a previous car. And on the drivers side some of the newly installed wiring "caused" a bulge which bumped the top trim near the window. I thought it was due to the side mirror joystick being in the way, but turns out that was entirely unnecessary. Its possible the first guys just ran out of wire and cobbled something together. Or something else happened.

Strangely, on the second install which is where everything went wrong and I was half robbed, the installers used a audio control lci7 to go from stock head unit to amplifiers....and they heard something off THEN, and disconnected the subs from the LCi7 and the subs still moved. A fraction of amount but it happened. It didn't exactly play higher frequencies it it played to the rhythm of them.

Having discussions with others irl, I think what happened is that the first installers didn't use a power filter? if I am using that term right when they ran the wire to the amplifier from tapping into either the head unit or door speakers for the signal. So the amp and thus sub may have been drawing a small amount of power from the speaker signal.

Then a deinstall happened. Thats when I believe when things were reconnected to the headunit something got switched. Then a 3rd install happened(And my dumbass thought the bass knob had been left in because I took it for granted....) and thats when I noticed the difference in my own car. I thought it was just a head unit difference but there was a clear other issue at play and it was silent like the guys who were demoing their builds for me....well honestly they were just testing their stuff to show off at their shop and I was a willing audience.

I suspect this is the case because the first install looked like just three wires going in, L/R and power and I never saw a filter type thing which fits in the palm of your hand. I suspect that blocks some of the signal as well.

But I actually liked that effect(because it added bass all over the place with metal and other music I listened to) and was ignorant of port noise until the final install. I also fucked around messing with the Headunit EQ and PowerAmp's( a phone app) eq to fine tune things. The original car had a Ford sync type head unit, 2016 year.