This is a personal pet peeve of mine in the world of HT setups... Calibrating a sub to work for music and for movies. It's my experience that the two are mastered quite differently on top of the fact that they utilize LFE quite differently as well.

What is annoying to me is you spend a bunch of time tweaking the HT for movies. I mean, you want the depth charges in U-571 to be really loud, right? Then wanting to do some critical listening of music (2 channel or surround) only to have way too loud bass. I guess it's even an issue sometimes between types of music. Listening to something like Pink Floyd then switching over to Crystal Method I want much different bass responses. Watching something like U-571 you want those depth charges to bounce you out of your seat but you don't expect that from Comfortably Numb.

I'm pretty sure there is no smoking gun method to achieve this so I ask, what does everyone else do to compensate for this? To me it's really annoying to get up to adjust the gain on the sub itself, even going into the AVR's config to change it is more than I prefer to do. Perhaps the problem is I want to have my cake and eat it too!

Ben,

You need an AVR that has presets. On my Pioneer, I use preset 1 for Movies and Preset 2 for Music, Each preset saves all eq, channels levels, loudness, speakers distances, etc., the whole nine yards.

What's really cool is I can assign each preset to whatever input I want. So when I select input for my Blue ray, it automactically comes up with preset 1. Nothing more to do but enjoy the movie. Same with Music...One button, that's all...

What Reciever do you have?

My ancient Sony even let me set the LFE channel boost separately from the sub-woofer level which received the cross-over bass. So you sent the LFE boost to 0, and dial in the sub-woofer channel to be a flat extension of the other speakers, and then boost the LFE to taste.

Now I don't care about the extra bass, I just want my system flat for both movies and music. My current Pioneer works perfectly at doing just that.

I must admit I really have never had an issue trying to come up with different sub settings between music and movies primarily because I think the key is having more than one sub in the mix which contributes to helping smooth out room responses. I generally key off certain music to adjust my bass levels for all, however, there is still the issue of considerable difference in response between Cds, SACD and DVD Audio discs, which I also listen to, so getting it perfect for all formats is pretty difficult just because of the quality of the mix on the disc itself.

The LFE levels you refer to, from my knowledge, only applies to DD and DTS and not the lossless audio formats on Blu-Ray which makes up the bulk of what I watch and listen to anyway.

That's probably true, but when the receiver I was talking about was built, DVD players were just showing up. So there was no such thing as Blu-ray, or lossless HD audio; only DD and DTS.

Denon allows you to change speaker/subwoofer settings on the fly. I can adjust my sub at anytime by pressing the center button on the remote and it brings up the speaker settings, I adjust the sub or any speaker as I see fit whenever I want.

My AVR is HK630. It has settings for the sub but no one touch buttons or presents. I know the new HT I'm putting together will get a new AVR so I'll have to keep an eye out for those presets. That sounds like a good plan. After I posted I started to wonder if they had put those features into newer AVRs.

AFAIK, Denon is the only one with this feature.

I like the idea of a receiver that connects to the network and can store unlimited settings profiles to a computer, and then you can also edit the profiles from the computer and switch profiles on-the-fly to get instant gratification. It would be especially convenient now that I have my computer hooked up to my main system. But yeah, if you could load different profiles like that without having to navigate the receiver's setup every time, it would be a lot easier to compare the differences. Someone make that receiver.