casey01, you can play both music & movies plenty loud without coming close to overdriving the speakers, but you mentioned a 60 Hz crossover and so presumably you are running the center channel as "small".
Do you think that would still be the case if you set the center channel to "large" as Brendan wants to do ? If not, then at first glance his idea of upgrading to an HP version of the VP180 seems to make sense, although I think everyone here has an uneasy feeling that amplifier power is going to be a factor real soon if it is not already.
A separate question is whether upgrading the center channel in order to be able to run it "large" is worth it. Here I have mixed feelings -- I'm a huge fan (no fat jokes please) of running music speakers full range rather than depending on a sub, but on the other hand I'm not totally sold on multichannel music systems yet and tend to prefer 2.0 playback rather than using a DSP to synthesize additional channels from a 2.0 source.
That said, I admit to being woefully out of touch w.r.t. availability of good multichannel music recordings. IIRC I have two SACDs -- one Joni Mitchell which I can't find (and don't remember enjoying as much as a stereo recording when I played it) and one PF DSOTM which has 2.0 tracks and lives in the CD carousel.
Actually, I did at one time have all three fronts set to Large(my M80s still are set that way). Frankly, as we all do, in my ongoing experimentation, the only reason I changed the crossover setting on the VP180 to 60HZ was to funnel off some of the deeper bass to my two front subs(I have FOUR in total). It seemed to give a little better balanced sound up front for movies, otherwise, I found no difference in overall performance. As we all know, these crossover settings are a gradual roll off below the setting, not fixed, so at 60HZ and given the VP180 is spec'd down to 35-40HZ, there really isn't any noticeable audible difference. Incidentally I have a few SACD and DVD Audio discs and one SEAL DVD audio album in particular,I have has an extremely strong bass presence that I have played plenty loud without any speaker strain whatsoever.
In Brendan's case, I still find it unusual that the woofers do bottom out which would indicate to me anyway, that the music is being played at abnormally loud levels perhaps with some sort of bass boost involved here or going back to my original idea of an under powered amp. I also find the 100HZ crossover setting unusually high for speakers of this size and capability. Bass in most music normally doesn't go down much below 50-60hz anyway and certainly not to the deeper levels of some action movies, hence, my curiosity as to the overall set-up and why things are happening the way they are.
