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

Looking for advise on a ON Wall setting. Family room is 16X12 feet. Room is used for watching sports, movies and various shows, so pretty much everything. Would M2 and M100 be sufficient or should I move up ? Sports viewing 35%, movies 45%, balance various shows.

Looking to play my movies louder, without having to rewind because I couldn’t clearly understand what actors were saying lol. But I also don’t want to bother the rest of family in their rooms .

Regards

M2OWv4, EP125v4 and VP100OW for you. Love my M2OWv4 with EP125 in my 22x12x8 living room!

I also have an 800, 2x600, 4x500, another EP125, M50, M3, M5, M2 bookshelves, VP160, QS10, active LFR1100 with 20,000 giga Watts of amplification. But those M2s...OMG! They are THE BEST!

P.S. I also have audiobytes in burled walnut, an Air Freedom and an Air Force.

The M2 are great speakers. What you haven't said is what is powering them. I have personally gone away from having a center channel. I started by removing it from the downstairs media room, but ended up disconnecting them from the family TV too. I found that the mix sound now from any of the streaming services either are butchering the mix or my hearing just doesn't get the dialog from the center channel anymore.

I would personally put more money into a decent sub than spend it on a center speaker. I would spend the extra to get the EP175 as it will give you a better movie experience. 28-150 +/-3db will give you a smile over what the EP125 can kick out. I just don't think the EP125 gets low enough to give as Mojo would say, your nads any joy.

But this relies on you having a decent enough receiver that offers phantom center and does it well enough to give you a large enough center channel without it sounding overpowering. It sure will help out an awful lot with the dialog.

Thank you gents, M2 with VP100 will be choice . I will also consider the EP175, is it that better then the EP125 for that size room of mine? Y the way, I haven’t set on a AV receiver yet either, do you have a cheap recommendation to power this combo?

You can order this Onkyo from Amazon for $Can429 delivered. The M2 and VP100 are really easy to power so this receiver will do the job. It will also power the sub.

Onkyo TX-SR393 5.2 Channel A/V Receiver https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07T3PRK4L/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_B7WJ0X7CZ3ETGG9ZN30E

The 125v4 is all you need for that size room.

With the money you save by not buying a bigger sub and more expensive receiver, consider picking up another pair of M2OW for surrounds.

Check these centers out in Deals. And remember you can save some bucks by clicking on "I can wait" if you decide to not go with deals.

https://www.axiomaudio.com/bst-99

https://www.axiomaudio.com/bst-32

You could also get these surrounds instead of M2:

https://www.axiomaudio.com/bst-47

I recently did a den with a vp100 and M2s as surrounds. Den measured 10x13x9.

Homeowner was on a tight budget so M2s got the nod. They also went with a $500 receiver.

She is happy. He is dissapointed. Even with dual subs.

I would go with M3s and vp100 with a denon x2700H. I have installed this package as well and that homeowner enjoyed a much fuller sound. The M3s and x2700 are a great match.

Here is the room that worked great! No sub in this room either. They didnt want one in this space.

https://www.axiomaudio.com/boards/u.../family-den-and-deck-with-axiom-on-board

After that post I reached out to that room owner and reset crossover to 120hz for all channels. Much better outcome. I would recommend M2s in this configuration.

I’ll have to look where I set mine (M2s/EP500 in family room) … think it was around 80 but might have been higher

It is one of those things that i don't understand the manufacturers of receivers as they allow you to set them up into a configuration that reduces their performance. I was told by Anthem that if you have a sub setup on a receiver that you the lowest you should ever go for the crossover is 120hz or else the receiver will just disregard some of the LFE channel information. WTF?? So if I have in my case a large floor stand speakers that is fully capable of getting down to 50hz, and I set the crossover point to 80hz, that the sound on the LFE track won't be sent to the front two speakers, it will just *POOF* vanish. YEP. good PSA.

I think there is confusion out there (at least in my mind) as the term "LFE" seems to be used two ways ... there is the LFE channel, coming in from the source, which is what I think Anthem was referring to and then there is the x-over from the LRC and surrounds which routes the low-end from each of those to the sub channel (which some including me, perhaps wrongly, often call the LFE) ... when I say LFE I mean the latter ...
Ok ... that said ...


How you blend your subs (cross-over and LFE v.s. LFE+Mains), IMO, is dependent on your speakers, amp, sub(s), and the amount of time you’re willing to spend exprerimenting. The reason 80Hz is often picked as an x-over point is that below that frequency localization of the source becomes difficult (if not impossible). Above that some people might be able to place it at the sub ...


Reasons that you might want to set the LFE x-over higher:
-- 1) The speaker response is down more than 3db at 80Hz
-- 2) You need to off load power from your amp. Most receivers will benefit by not driving a full range speaker. Especially if you play it loud and are driving the center plus all the surrounds. Only so much juice to go around.
-- 3) 1 & 2 are assuming you sub can reach up to and beyond what ever x-over point your going for.

Reasons that you might want to set it lower:
-- 1) your speakers can go lower (the designer spent a lot of time getting that range to play well ... you should use it)
— 2) your amp is a beast
-- 3) or perhaps your sub is sub-par (so to speak) just for train rumble, crashes, and explosions.

Reasons for going LFE vs. LFE+Mains:
Going LFE your receiver will handle the x-over smoothly you just need to get the levels set right. Going LFE+Mains might be good if your trying to smooth out the bass at the low-end. Think the sub level should be set as high as you can get it without knowing it’s there (i.e. sounds the same turned on/off)

Anyway … just my thoughts …

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.