Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Advice on Family room setting

BTW, in the last post I’m using LFE wrong mainly because I’ve gotten so used to using the term that way ….
LFE should correctly be used to refer to the low frequency effects channel coming off the sound track.

I've been toying with those setting lately. Right now I have surround setting set to LFE and the 2 channel playback to LFE+mains. I currently have the crossover on both at 80hz but I'm experimenting higher and lower crossover points to see which sounds better to me. A great song to test the sub out with between LFE and LFE+main is Eminem's killshot. May not be everyone's taste in music but it is a good soundtrack to experiment on your sub channel.

This is always an interesting experiment with speakers in 2 channel: (Note: there is nothing coming in on the LFE channel so it's out of the picture)

Most are reluctant to set their highly praised full-range speakers to "small" but it could be a good way to go.
My understanding is that if the Mains are set to small that the LFE/LFE+Main switch does not matter
The mains at the x-over will shift their LF to the sub in both cases (i.e. only the sub plays the LF)

If the Mains are Large (which I assume is your case) then in:
LFE case: the sub is not used
LFE+Main case: Both the sub and the Mains play the LF below the x-over point

So you have 3 cases to try for 2 channel.
-- sub not used (LFE, Large)
-- Mains crossed with sub @ x-over ( -- , Small)
-- Main & sub playing at same time below x-over (LFE+Main, Large)

And only you can tell me which is the best for your setup.

All of my speakers are "small" so what I'm trying to do is take some of the low end burden from the mains and divert to the sub. On 2 channel I'll have to look at the speaker setting but I think it's on "small" LFE+main. If I remember correctly 2 channel doesn't have an LFE track so I need to have LFE+main to divert anything below a certain frequency to the sub. Please correct me if I'm not thinking about that the right way.

The problem lies in how the receiver or AV equipment has been designed and implemented. This tends to be a larger problem than many would like to believe as we are stuck on the misguided thought that every company builds to a common standard and what applies to model A should also apply to B-Z. We all know that is not the case.

I can talk for the Pioneer VSX receiver that I had inside my family room. The unit has all the menus and cross over settings that everyone is use to, but when you get down to the brass tacks, comparing it to the Anthem that I have in my Media Room shows how they can be night and day different.

As you have put the LFE channel that comes with most movies on DVD, BluRay etc as part of the DD and DTS standards gives the sound producers of movies a dedicated channel to move the lower frequency sounds off from the main mix track for each of the individual speakers. From what I am let to understand the industry standard for that is the 120hz. It might be true that some or even most can't tell direction source for low frequency sounds, but how did the number get set? George Lucas came up with the 80hz point with his THX certification but I would say that there are few home theatre units that have that certification or if it really means anything now.

But getting back to my point. On the Pioneer, there is only a single setting for crossover that controls all the channels for where the sound is set for a sub woofer. So where do you set that? What is left unanswered is what happens to the data on the recorded .1 LFE channel if that crossover point is set lower than the frequency range that this channel carries? Does it get automatically sent to all the other speakers in the system, just to those on the front? Does it send it to those listed as LARGE? or simply lost?

I asked about it with Anthem as they are local to where I live and sometimes have a reasonable and knowledgeable person for the phone. Their design gives you multiple speaker configuration sets so if you were playing music, that doesn't have any LFE channel anyways, you might want to set your subwoofer to a different crossover point or turn it off all together. I can see that in the case of my old Pioneer, as it doesn't give you that sort of control, perhaps they designed for the most people and give options that might not work for HT so that people who just wanted to listen to music can have a setup that works for them too.

I had read a lot of similar things which is why I want to tinker with the crossover point. I would assume setting the crossover higher wouldn't have a negative effect for movies especially if like you said the LFE is set at 120. If I set the crossover higher the LFE is at 80 I'm not losing anything but in reverse maybe some frequencies are lost in the mix if the AVR can't reroute certain frequencies to the mains from the LFE channel.

Probably not from a movie perspective as most of the LFE sound is likely to be intense.

where you might see it is when listening to for example classical music where you might loose some of the localization on your sound stage as you are now trying to mix frequencies together from multiple different speaker sources that might have different interactions with your room and how they reproduce the sounds.

In the perfect world we would all own an acoustically perfect treated room with active speakers that can reproduce sound to perfection. but we live in the real (and totally unperfect) world where we must decide on what compromises we are willing to accept and what ones we want to take on.

Leave LFE alone at 120 or 150hz. This is a low pass filter setting to the subs that handles only the LFE track. It does not apply to other channels.

The speaker crossover setting is something different.

LFE is set to 120hz. I set 2 channel at 120hz also

Each channel in my system has a sub. Actually, my LFE channel has three subs - an 800 and two 600s. The other four channels have 500s. So all my channels are playing full content with none of this sissy-ass steering channel content to the LFE channel stuff.