Large or small?
http://www.audyssey.com/blog/2009/05/small-vs-large/Interesting read regardless of how you feel about the subject.
Other interesting articles are here:
http://www.audyssey.com/blog/
I didn't think there was much debate on this. If your sub reaches lower than a speaker; set that speaker to small. If your sub doesn't reach lower, get a new sub, and set the speaker to small.
There may not be much debate, but there is questioning. Earl Geddes approach is to have multiple bass sources to excite room modes equally to give the smoothest bass response.
I think that how you set your mains is very much dependant on your room. Whatever gives the best bass response from 50-200Hz is what is 'correct' for you.
In my HT large sounds better than small. My Denon rolls off at 80 for small, and that is just too high and puts too much emphasis on the sub. So I can either pony up an buy a top end sub, or let the towers I already have make a seamless transition to the sub at about 40hz.
In general I agree with the premise in the article but as Fred said it’s very room dependent.
In my apartment (20 x 20) after much testing I settled on mains set to large and used LFE+Mains because it gave the best overall sound quality by having multiple bass sources and full range mains in proximity to my listening position.
In my house (21 x 13 + attached rooms) I’m using mains set to small with a crossover of 60Hz because room modes are not as much an issue with bass and the receiver is more taxed powering the mains farther away from my listening position.
The feature I like the most is having separate bass management settings for 2 channel vs multi-channel since I don’t use a sub for most music listening.
I can see this theory being valid while using an AVR receiver. But while my Emotiva is pushing the M80's, headroom is of no concequence what-so-ever. Furthermore, the M80's handle 80 hz down to 36 hz (according to them, I would guess more like 28 - 30 hz by my ear) with astonishing detail... far more detail than the huge 12 inch woofers in the EP800 can handle them. This isn't to say the EP800 is a sloppy subwoofer by any stretch of the imagination, but the 6 1/2 inch woofers in the M80's are just way tighter, and accurate sounding in that frequency range.
I say let the EP800 handle everything from 13 hz to 40 hz, and let the M80's, powered by the Emotiva, handle everything else.