Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Advice on Family room setting

The problem lies in how the receiver or AV equipment has been designed and implemented. This tends to be a larger problem than many would like to believe as we are stuck on the misguided thought that every company builds to a common standard and what applies to model A should also apply to B-Z. We all know that is not the case.

I can talk for the Pioneer VSX receiver that I had inside my family room. The unit has all the menus and cross over settings that everyone is use to, but when you get down to the brass tacks, comparing it to the Anthem that I have in my Media Room shows how they can be night and day different.

As you have put the LFE channel that comes with most movies on DVD, BluRay etc as part of the DD and DTS standards gives the sound producers of movies a dedicated channel to move the lower frequency sounds off from the main mix track for each of the individual speakers. From what I am let to understand the industry standard for that is the 120hz. It might be true that some or even most can't tell direction source for low frequency sounds, but how did the number get set? George Lucas came up with the 80hz point with his THX certification but I would say that there are few home theatre units that have that certification or if it really means anything now.

But getting back to my point. On the Pioneer, there is only a single setting for crossover that controls all the channels for where the sound is set for a sub woofer. So where do you set that? What is left unanswered is what happens to the data on the recorded .1 LFE channel if that crossover point is set lower than the frequency range that this channel carries? Does it get automatically sent to all the other speakers in the system, just to those on the front? Does it send it to those listed as LARGE? or simply lost?

I asked about it with Anthem as they are local to where I live and sometimes have a reasonable and knowledgeable person for the phone. Their design gives you multiple speaker configuration sets so if you were playing music, that doesn't have any LFE channel anyways, you might want to set your subwoofer to a different crossover point or turn it off all together. I can see that in the case of my old Pioneer, as it doesn't give you that sort of control, perhaps they designed for the most people and give options that might not work for HT so that people who just wanted to listen to music can have a setup that works for them too.