Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions 6.1 whats the deal?

Often when iam looking up 6.1 or looking at my recievers manual i get confused. This is due to the fact in my manual for my reciever there is a picture of a sbl and sbr, and when i searched this out i have read that my thx certified reciever and other thx cert'ed recievers can have two surrounds connected to the same terminal and that the systems were made to handle this. Iam not sure about this and always thought 6.1 was 6 channels with three surrounds. Not 4 like with 7.1? i feel a little dumb but with all these sites showing diffrent pictures and discussing eatch diffrently iam lost. does anyone know about this?

you have the right idea. Two speakers connected to one terminal is still one channel. It's just being played on two speakers. This helps to spread out the sound behind you if you have a large room. 7.1 is capable of playing different souds from each of the rear speakers, but there's really nothing available that takes advantage of it.

Michael, as Peter indicated, 6.1 does have just one back surround channel(and two side surround channels), but Dolby, THX and others suggest that two separated back surround speakers nevertheless be used. The main reason is to avoid a psychoacoustic effect which can occur with just one speaker directly behind the listener in which sounds supposed to be imaged behind "reverse" and appear to come from the front. Another reason for a 7.1 speaker setup, although there's no 7.1 format, is that the use of processing such as DPLIIx or Logic 7 on two or five channel material can steer sounds to the back which differ between the 6th and 7th speakers.

So the same amount of power is outputted to both speakers connected to the same terminal?

Michael_13,

Well, yes, but because you have two speakers connected to the same terminal, the impedance will be lower so more current will flow to the two speakers. The actual volume increase of running a second speaker from the same terminal will be 3 dB. So, in effect, the surround amp driving those two speakers will be called upon to deliver more "power" to a lowered impedance.

If your manual recommends doing it, then presumably the amp will handle the lowered impedance in the surround channels.

Regards

Thank you for your help guys