well i knew something wasn't right after noticing my cultures weren't getting darker..
so i went through filtering and splitting as normal but still nothing, then i split and used new containers and everything. still same problem.
this time when doing my split i thought about the culture medium and testing the
SG of what i had left, and it was about 1.024-1.025, so lowered it to 1.019 and setup one test culture with what was left.. within 2 days it was back to a nice dark color...
and has been fine since