Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Subwoofer setting, at receiver or at the sub

I bought and have subsequently returned an Onkyo 604 receiver as I thought the LFE was lousy. Everyone at AVS is insisting the user is lousy and not the sub. Okay . . .

I have never had this much trouble getting a sub to put out proper LFE whether I use my radio shack meter or just use my ears. I may buy teh receiver back and give it another shot and my question is how to adjust the SW's level. DO I first start with the receivers adjusment and if that isn't enough increase the SW's input level or vice versa?

With my two HK receivers I got very close with the receiver not increased or decreased at all and the subwoofer input level at 11:00. The Onkyo 604 was nowhere near this.

Greg

Start with the receiver at 0 dB, and then adjust the sub gain knob for the rough adjustment. From there, you should just fine tune the level adjustment with the receiver.

It is optimum to use both so that the two points of controll aren't fighting each other. You don't want to be too high or low on the reciever adjustment, hence why to start with it at zero and get the sub "close" with it's own gain control first.

Every situation is different, but this should work in most cases.

After reading the additional info at AVS I see that this is a weird problem- if you didn't have the HK to compare to I would also wonder about placement, but sounds like it isn't that.

I was thinking that if your bass sounded more muddy, that maybe the crossover was too high- but your settings at 80Hz should be just fine.

Good luck and let us know how the 804 works out.

Greg, it isn't crucial as to which control you adjust to reach a proper calibration; the point is to get there regardless of how you do it. Dave's suggested procedure is as good as any. You should be reasonably certain that unless the particular 604 you had was defective that it'll do the job very well if you do your part. No modern HT receiver is designed with an inherently weak sub output.

May or May not be of any help, but I have an Onkyo SR804 reciever with a sunfire subwoofer and have found that I have to really turn up the Onkyos subwoofer output to get anything out of the sunfire. My procedure was to set the recievers subwoofer output to 0Db and set the sunfire subwoofer to 0Db for calibration. I found that I barley got any output with this configuration and turning up the subwoofer to full output (+15Db) would produce very little bass, however I found that if I turned up the recievers sub-woofer output to +10db and left the sunfire at 0db I would get a pretty decent output and setting the sunfire up by 6db it would rattle the rafters and shake the walls just fine. I beleive the onkyo recivers has a lower output than a lot of recievers. The bass from my subwoofer is clean with no signs of distortion so I just didnt worry about it, however playing around with the Onkyo I found out that if you go back to the factory defaults on the 804 it will default the sub-woofer output to +12db and the other speakers are defaulted to +10db.