Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Crossover freq. for M80, VP150, and QS8

Paul I think you could get as many possible answers to this as there are speaker/room/seating distance/ear combinations. IMO starting out with all speakers crossed at 80Hz gives a good baseline. For the average person who doesn’t frequent places like this that’s probably a good compromise. For those who have caught the disease like us then I think experimenting is the only way to know what works best for a given set of variables.

To actually answer your question I’ve been all over the map depending on the situation but can share some generalizations that apply to me.

In my apartment I sat 6-7 feet from my 3 M80s and found I preferred a 40Hz crossover so I could feel all of the mid bass hitting me right in the chest and face. Made explosions feel much more realistic and music much more involving. I even had my EP500 front and center for a while but the air blowing on my feet was distracting. I also use LFE+MAINS because I found that in that room having multiple bass sources sounded/felt better.

At first in my house I used an 80Hz crossover because my Denon 2807 was straining to much with a lower crossover on some scenes. When I got my Onkyo (I know the power difference isn’t that much but I can hear a difference in the SQ at slightly higher SPLs) I found once again I could go down to 40Hz and used that. However, sitting 12 feet away now the benefit isn’t that I can feel the midbass punch (at least not at SPLs my neighbors would tolerate but rather the bass response sounds flatter coming out of the M80s than the EP500. I have a huge SPL peaks around 20Hz and 90Hz and a large dip around 50Hz so if the EP500 plays all the bass the 20Hz rumble was just overpowering and the decay was so bad things got blurred together. This still happens with the bass from the LFE channel but at least what’s coming from the M80s sounded “tighter” and less “boomy.”

Now since I got the SVS EQ-1 from Charles I can EQ the bass from my EP500 to less than +/- 2 dB from 20-100Hz plus it corrects for timing so now the bass from the EP500 sounds beautiful at least in the sweet spot. Because of this I’ve now switched back to an 80Hz crossover for my M80s which is also where I have all my other speakers set.

So IMO there’s no single best solution for everyone, to get the best possible sound for you just have to play it by ear.

One note if you do use Audyssey the filters for the Subwoofer are much finer that for the other speakers so they recommend always using a 80Hz crossover to get the best out of what Audyssey EQ can do. IMO the two versions of Audyessy I’ve used on my receiver haven’t helped enough to make it worth running the setup. OTOH the SVS EQ-1 which uses Audyssey but only for the subwoofer channels works great for one seat and ok over multiple seats.