<font color='#0000FF'>I am going to raise this scepter again, recently was going through the back issues of Stereo Review magazine and in November 1992 issue, in the letters to the editor section, Peter W. Mitchell of Oceanside, C.A. also raised the same issue.
His curiosity came from an excerpt he read in leading Film Journal from engineers from Kintek, a theater sound manufacturing company. The engineers admitted that there are movies with significant amount of rear channel bass defying the Dolby labs recommended setting of 12-dB roll off. Evidently, sound track producers have been applying equalization and phase shift techniques to overcome the encoder?s roll off, providing strong low frequency to the rear channels making the need for a large rear speaker or rear sub a necessity. Of course one can divert all that to the sub and claim it is inconsequential as low frequency is non directional. However one wonders why the track producers who can do that in the studio end decide to send low frequency component to the rear channels. The engineers claimed feeding rear channels with low frequency gave the more involving ?you are there? feeling.
My experimentations have proven this pretty conclusively for myself and now I set my rears to LARGE and use a small rear sub. It is way better than routing the rear bass to the front subs. Movies like Backdraft and Top Gun as well as Hunt for Red October and Gangs of New York have significant bass signals in the rear. Gangs of NY running DTS gives fantastic Canon renditions in the rear. Putting the bass of the rear to front totally defeats the ambience. I also set my center speakers to LARGE and get way better results that way. My suspicion is that setting the Center to SMALL cancels out the low bass from human voice as well as the ambience. If the center low bass signals are routed to the sub, the human low frequency signal is cut out or there is a greater signal imbalance with the sub exaggerating the center?s low signal.
I got flamed and mauled for posting this same subject at another forum. It became a free for all bash the guy?s equipment. I am not looking for theories here, just practical experience from someone who has tried it out. I know a certain someone at this forum would love to start the theory and book quotations war again but it is futile. Unless you have tried it out yourself, please don?t quote me theories of physics or sound from relics whose association with music and sound is strictly bookish. If you have aural experiences with this setup please feel free to give inputs or totally disagree. If the track producers wanted to divert rear bass to LFE, they have the power to do so but they chose otherwise, there has to be a reason behind this.</font>
