About a month later I was cleaning the machines, something ops never do well. When I was cleaning the mechanical parts of a seat adjuster I found a subwoofer. The sub was mounted up in the seat, it was attached, but the sound was just barely audible. I contacted the op and told him the technician was wrong and the subs were indeed in the machines but weren’t working properly. They agreed to try and fix them. They removed the low pass amplifiers from the machines and decided to replace the main amplifier chips on the boards. Same result, no audible sound. At this point the technician wanted to leave the boards in the machine. I asked him to do further troubleshooting because I had talked to people who owned Daytona 2 machines and they all said the subs were cool.

I contacted Ken Westerfield at Advanced Repair Center (www.irepairsega.com) Ken worked for Sega and will do board level work on the advance Sega systems. He gave me some troubleshooting tips and also said there was a flaw, of sorts, with those systems. It seems Sega decided not to provide a volume control for the sub woofers in the seat and instead shared the rear speaker volume control. The problem is that when you turn the volume up high enough to hear the sub the rear speakers are hurting your ears. I thought we had tested for this before but couldn't verify since the amps weren't in the machines.

The technician came back out and re-installed the low pass amplifiers and the subs worked. We had to turn the rear volume way up like Ken suggested but IT WORKED! I would still swear I tried this, but I've been wrong before =D My next step will be to install a volume control specifically for the subs. Ken gave me this tip and it should do the trick.