Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Basic Denon Setup Question.

They do use the same drivers, but remember that placement in the room affects how a speaker sounds. If you had a system with five M60s (3 front and center, 2 surrounds), they'd sound different when you used pink noise test tones, too.

Funny, when I run the test tones, the VP100 is pretty similar to the M50s. It's the QS4s that sound completely and uttelry different. I'm not stressing on it, though...

Is there a problem if you set the center a couple of dB louder than the rest? If that fixes your problem, that's what I'd do.

Or, does that mess up things for other listening?

One other thing to consider is changing your listening mode of your receiver. I had a similar problem with my old Kenwood. The center just did not seem loud enough even though I set it up "correctly" with my SPL meter. Changing the listening mode on the old Kenwood did not seem to help the problem.

However, I don't have that problem with the Onkyo set to THX Cinema mode. Everything sounds just fine. Just something that you may want to consider.

Jay, as other replies have indicated, there's no problem with the "power" of the VP150. If what appears to be a balanced calibration doesn't give you enough dialog intelligibility, then the 2dB bump you mention is in order and unless it causes some other problem should be kept that way, as Bernard implied.

Also keep in mind that one of the equalization features that you paid for with the 886 is the manual equalization option. Although the fundamental frequency of human voices is in the area of 100-200Hz, it's the higher frequency overtones called "formants", lying in the upper mid-range from roughly 1-3KHz that contribute the most to speech intelligibility. In addition to, or instead of, simply increasing the overall volume of the center speaker, you might go to your manual equalization menu. Experiment with equalizing the center speaker, most likely at the 500, 1,000 and 2,000 Hz settings, up by 2-3dB.

I do the exact same thing with my Pioneer VSX74. If I have all the speakers at the same level at say -35, the center channel is hard to hear. I believe mine is currently bumped 3dBi.

Thanks JohnK, I forgot about playing around with the manual EQ on the VP150 versus adjusting the overall dB level on the receiver. I might try recalibrating everything, and then play with the 500-3khz settings to see if that helps with the voices/dialog....

Randy

johnk, i will give that a try today.

thanks!

Ok, I turned up the following frequency's.

125hz by 3db
500hz by 3db
1000hz by 3 db
2000hz by 3db

I turned up the 125hz frequency because you said the human voice frequency is between 100-200htz. I figured this would help also. Is this the wrong thing to do? Thanks

I also turned down the overall volume of the center to match the to M60's DB level.

I will let you know how it works out tonight while Im watching TV.

You probably don't want the center to be exactly what the mains are set at, you really need to run the auto setup on the receiver, if you have that option, or calibrate everything with an SPL meter first. Then once that is done, I would say play with the manual settings like you did. It is possible the center won't be the same SPL setting when using the meter, say 75dB or whatever you use...

When I ran the auto setup it set my Center at -1.5db and the mains at +2

This is not right though because If I keep it at that setting I cant here voice dialog very well and the mains overpower it a great deal.