Should I set my fronts to large?

[yepimonfire]

Thanks to decent room gain, my front l/r manage to hit 32hz -3dB and 26hz -6dB. Using sine waves, I’m able to achieve 107dB @32hz at the mlp with 3.6% THD, 109dB from 40hz-60hz, and 113dB from 60hz-100hz. Above 60hz, THD is 1.3%. My sub is capable of 108dB from 23hz-25hz, 105dB from 28hz-35hz, and 108dB from 40hz-120hz. The main channels generally do not contain content much below 35hz, and the absolute max is is 105dB at reference volume, so I have more than enough headroom.

Considering there is no difference in both frequency response, distortion, and output, is there any reason to set them to small? Seems all that would be doing is adding an additional 6dB of of strain to the sub. Has anybody tested running their mains on large? What were the results?

 

[ski2xblack]

Using single tone sine waves or sweeps won't reveal the increased modulation distortion that inevitably results when playing music that has both bass and mid-range reproduced simultaneously by the same driver. Don't forget about IM distortion. You'll be experiencing more of it with your small-ish speakers running full range.

 

[Steve81]

The main channels generally do not contain content much below 35hz...Considering there is no difference in both frequency response, distortion, and output, is there any reason to set them to small?

Keep in mind, what "generally" happens and what actually happens with a specific track at a particular moment can be two very different things. Setting your mains to large means your speakers can potentially be fed large amounts of content well below what they're designed to reproduce. That's problematic because it takes relatively little power to bottom out a woofer in a vented system below tune:

That's an excursion chart of a 7" Seas woofer in a vented alignment tuned in the 40s being fed 20W of power. In this case, Xmax is 6mm, and Xmech is 11mm. Given that, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well do ya, punk???

 

[KEW]

The comments you've already received pretty will cover it. My statement was going to be you do your mains more favors by relieving them of the bass then you do relieving your subwoofers!

(edited to correct speech-to-text glitches)

 

[Pyrrho]

I will only add, what should be superfluous for you (given the responses you have gotten thus far), but might be relevant to someone else with a similar question, you should only set your main speakers to "large" when they are as capable as your subwoofer for dealing with deep bass. Whenever you have a subwoofer that is more capable of dealing with deep bass than your main speakers, you should set your main speakers to "small" and let the subwoofer deal with the deep bass that it is better suited to deal with than your main speakers.