I am doing some upgrading of my system and have been reading up on speaker placement and bass management.
I Read this article here:
The Marriage Between the Subwoofer and Tower Speakers
Lots of good info. It says to set all of your speakers to small, and then set an appropriate crossover. (the mains FR is (+/- 3dB) 45-20,000 Hz -- (+/- 6dB) 35-22,000 Hz) ). So for sake of argument, let's set all speaker to small, set the crossover on the receiver at 60 Hz, and defeat the subwoofer's crossover. My system supports this and by my reading, this would be the correct setting or at least a good starting point to tune from.
That is until I get to this nugget regarding my receiver:
RX-V659 System Setup & Configuration
"In the great tradition of excellent bass management, Yamaha offers a variable crossover point from 40Hz to 200 Hz and also allows subwoofer output in 2CH mode if the speakers are set to LARGE via the LFE/Bass Out set to "Both"."
If I adopt this setting and if I am understanding correctly, I am now using the receivers filter to not send anything below 60Hz to any speaker listed as small, and am outputting all LFE info to both the mains+the sub.
So to prevent overemphasis of bass and to properly mate the sub with the mains I would need to engage the subs Crossover to handle signals below a certain point. This would put the bass signal through two filters, one at the receiver level and one at the Sub. According to the article on bass management this is a real no-no. It says this can result in:
- Too much transition band attenuation, excessively attenuated signal.
- Added group delay of two filters cascaded causing phasing problems between subwoofer and main speakers. The result is unwanted canceling of certain bass frequencies.
- Null or resonance caused by impedance change resulting in accentuation or attenuation of particular frequencies within the passband of the subwoofer
This feels like a real catch-22. So the first question is am I understanding/approaching this correctly overall. Second, am I stuck with not having sub output in 2 channel listening without putting the signal through two filters and is the two filter issue that big a deal (I can see why it would be)? Is there an alternative I am missing?
Thanks for your input.
Mike