Bridging

OHMisback · Aug 10, 2022

A tape measure, painters tape, and a laser pointer are pretty good tools. You can set the Camber, Caster, Toe, base and top cabinet distances right on the money.
You can change the distance somewhat for hearing loss left to right without loosing the imaging.

When you turn the amps up does it increase the floor noise? If not leave them up, if they are noisy, route the cables first and then turn them down
to decrease floor noise. It's usually routing. I clean the pots by rolling them about a 100 times up and down, THEN up until the floor noise increases.
Sometimes pots are noisy. The cool thing 20.00 USD to check or make the improvement. 1/4" at a time. Then decouple ALL the speakers.
NO SPIKES! unless they are on pods, springs or air-ride. Turn it up, enjoy the music. The neighbors won't feel a thing.

William Lemmerhirt · Aug 10, 2022

HackMan55 said:
No, thank you. I'm starting to pay closer attention to positioning now. Try to get it set good rather than good enough. I really am going to have to invest in at least a couple speaker stands. I've tried a couple different places here and there but mounted on the wall. My fiancee is a good sport but I figure it's only a matter of time until she's had enough of me drilling. My room is really tough; corner-mounted tv,, 12' ceilings and three 30"×96" windows. I think I can get things to where they need to be, but I'll have to put careful study into it.

Was adding the amp any kind of benefit over using the avr's amps? Sounds fine so far, but I haven't really pushed it much at all and haven't noticed any difference either way. I figured at the least, maybe it would help the Integra run cooler? Also, it has gain knobs for each channel. Should these be turned wide open? I guess it's just some old pa amp and I didn't find much info about it. I'm thinking maybe attention should be given to the avr's preamp voltages and the amps specs but that's just a guess.

You can definitely put the gain knobs all the way up if you want, and if you don’t get extra noise. But you just have to reset the level in the AVR so you stay level matched.

witchdoctor · Aug 10, 2022

Hackman, this is a THX Ultra Level 2 certified amp, that is why it must have gain knobs. There is something called THX reference level and the amps must push speakers to that level to be certified. Some speakers have high sensitivity so the knobs let you dial back a bit, some have low sensitivity and you need to crank it up. So if for example you had a high sensitivity center channel and everything else was low sensitivity you could use that knob to get everything perfectly set at THX reference volume level.