It sounds like your are happy with the lower crossover now the Audyssey EQ is in place but I’m curious if you have the chance if you would try two experiments.
First deselect the center channel in your receiver so that the center is played through your M80s, turn Audyssey off and set the crossover back down to 40Hz. Then sitting in the sweet spot see how the dialogue sounds just coming from the M80s.
Another thing to try is to turn Audyssey off and set the VP180 to 40Hz and place it vertically on the ground rather than horizontally on the stand. See how you think that compares to when it’s placed horizontally both in the sweet spot and off axis.
Not that any of this will really help you but I’ve been curious for some time how a VP180 would stack up to an M80 center like I’m using. No worries if this is to much trouble.
Like Tom said sometimes having multiple bass sources helps even things out. I ran all my front 3 M80s at 40Hz until I picked up a SVS AS-EQ1 to equalize my subwoofer correcting for room modes. Before the EQ multiple bass sourced sounded better plus I could get more midbass punch out of my M80s than my EP500 because I have a huge midbass dip and a huge very low bass peak which meant that trying to get good midbass out of my EP500 created way to much low bass. The EQ system took care of that (at least for the sweet spot) so now I mostly run them with an 80Hz crossover.
Cheers,
Dean
