My new HT Setup and some suggestions for setting up your sub

Amarendra

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Oct 25, 2010
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Dear all,

I recently built my 5.1 set up with the following:

1. Marantz SR 5007
2. Monitor Audio M4 floor standing speakers
3. Monitor Audio M center
4. Monitor Audio M2 book shelves
5. Astonia Df10 sub woofer.

These along with my Epson 6100 Pj ensure that i dont have to go to a movie theater for some time :).

However more than showcasing my set up here I just want to share my experience and some suggestions on setting up your speakers along with the sub.

While setting up speakers normally isnt so difficult, things get complicated the moment you add a sub. Finally after a lot of searching on the net and some first hand experimentation I managed to set things up well.

Here are a few suggestions which I hope will be useful:

1. The AVR uses a very different language from what we understand- the point here being the size of your speakers. When the AVR suggests that your speakers are "Large" it means that all frequencies will be directed towards your speakers. That means most of the times your expensive sub is going to sit in the corner and do nothing. It will just handle the 0.1 in the 5.1 set up.

2. To remedy this please go to manual settings (after running Audyssey or any other room correction software) and change your speakers to "Small"

3. Your speakers may be the size of a washing machine but still set them up as " Small".

4. When setting up your sub woofer (before running Audyssey) please set the volume knob of the sub to 12 o'clock position, set the phase to zero and keep the frequency knob to the max frequency (generally 120). eg if your sub can handle frequncies from 40 -120, please set this to 120. This ensures that during the set up, the room correction software and the AVR can do the optimum setup.

5. Now run Audyessey and see the specifications. You can now go to manual settings and change the cross overs. Usually if your speakers are floor standers, this could have been set to as low as 40 hz. Please change this from the manual settings. I set mine to 120. Yours could be 80 or 100 depending on the speaker. When you increase cross overs it doesnt impact Audyssey measurements.

6. The LPF of LFE is not the cross over setting of your sub woofer- its just a filter. Setting this to 80 or 100 or 120 is not going to affect life much as much as the cross over knob on your sub and the individual cross over settings for your speakers.

7. Changing the above after running Audyssey is not going to impact the Audyssey settings done earlier (it seems).

8. Also never set your subwoofer to LPF+ Main since this will just ensure overlapping of the same frequencies creating distortions.

9. Publications such as AV Max also advise that there should be some overlapping of frequencies but that is when you set your subwoofer knob to 120 and the crossover for your speakers to 100. This it seems makes the system gel together. Please try this and see if it helps

The above settings will also ensure that the sub woofer is utilized fully in stereo reproduction unless you choose "source direct" which will just use the 2 fronts.

I hope you find the above useful and will help you in your own setup. There is also an Ausyssey set up guide available on the AVS forum which helped me immensely.

Good Luck !
 
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