Colton Swiertz Penny Pincher - Blown SDDNs
Mr Colton Swerta Penny Pincher has publicly accused the WVC wireless volume knob of causing a voltage surge resulting in 12 blown Sundown Audio SDDN subwoofers after months of running his build with zero issues.
Statement 1 - "build was playing like a champ for a few months" "issues I was experiencing after installing the knob after months of playing with a normal knob"
FALSE
On April 10th, when he reached out to buy the WVC, Colton stated he just blew 2 subs due to bad RCA's. Not only is he omitting this from his public posts, he is consciously being dishonest with clear maliciously intent to build a case that his build was running without issue.
It is very likely he damaged the other subs and during that incident, pre WVC purchase, and they were ready to go at any moment.
Statement 2 - "caused a surge and locked up all 12 of my SDDNS simultaneously" "when it reconnected it blew all 12 of my subs today at a show"
FALSE
This is the video of the demo where the failure occured. You can see the subs were playing fine and a cascade failure occurred at the end.
In the video you can hear colton stating "this is a new song so I don't know how much..."
In a large overpowered build running 10 ruthless 10k amplifiers at 0.33 ohms (1 10k at 0.33 per sub) at low frequency, one failure can cause cascading unloading stressing already aged subs. Compound that by playing a new song you haven't played before at these extreme power levels.
Additional Evidence
Colton provided photos of some of the removed soft parts. We can see some subs show evidence of bottoming out, some show evidence of over-excursion and leaving the gap scraping the pole piece and former, others are fried thermally.
This evidence suggests the damage was not a by-product of a one time voltage surge as Colton stated (the video proves no such surge occurred), this was the result of long term abuse, overextension, thermal overload, etc...
Thoughts
Ultimately, zero evidence has been provided which indicates that the WVC failed in any manner which caused damage to the subwoofers. The video shows the unit turned off for a second and then came back on.
The WVC is designed to fail "off", meaning that it simply turns off and disconnects the RCA's in the event of failure (bad power, bad remote, overheating, other failures). It has a built in mechanical relay to ensure that if power is lost, the RCA's get disconnected. The unit has no internal signal generator, so it can not create random signals, it simply passes input signal to the output side of the unit.
In Conclusion
- Colton blew 2 subs right before getting the WVC (which he chose to lie about)
- He played a new song he never played before (you can hear him state that in the video where the subs failed)
- He used a 10k wired to 0.33 ohms per sub significantly pushing the subs beyond rated power
- Subs show long term abuse (thermal, bottoming out, leaving the gap - I confirmed this with the engineer behind the subs, Jacob Fuller, from Sundown Audio)
- The WVC fails "off" and has no signal generator capable of creating a voltage surge
- No voltage surge was seen in the video
These thoughts are all captured in this video:
![]()
Findings
It looks like he was running a 200% gain on the subwoofer channel. Given his head unit is a 2-volt pre-out, this means he was sending 4 volts to his amplifiers instead of two.
My assumption at this point is that he was accidentally sending twice the power to his amplifiers then he had before installing the wvc leading to significantly overpowering his subwoofers.