Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Rewiring a Home Theatre in a Box?

Other than one small detail, I suspect that receiver would be great for your system. That detail is that your speakers appear to all be 4-ohm speakers. Most (definitely not all) speakers are 8-ohm speakers. This receiver is only rated to drive speakers of 6 ohms or greater. It would probably work, but it might get hot and/or have other sound quality problems trying to drive those speakers. This could be part of the reason it sounded like garbage on your old receiver. I can't say for sure.

The 120hz that people are talking about refers to the "crossover" frequency of your speakers. Most humans can hear from 20hz to 20,000 hz. Everything we hear falls somewhere in that range. For instance, the lowest key on a piano is 27.5 hz, and the highest is 4,186 hz (yeah, I looked it up). Mechanically, small speakers can't reproduce bass. If you send a full range signal (20hz-20khz) to an small speaker, it'll sound bad and might possibly damage the speaker. Lower frequency sound needs to be sent to your subwoofer. That point is called the 'crossover', where your signal 'crosses over' between main speakers and subwoofer.

So with HTIB systems, or really most speakers in general, you need to set a crossover frequency somewhere in your *receiver* that tells it to send everything below X crossover frequency to your subwoofer. Your HTIB's receiver is doing this automatically because it was designed to work with the speakers that it came with. A stand-alone receiver obviously is designed to work with any speakers, so you have to tell it a little bit about the speakers its working with. The above post says that your current HTIB speakers need a crossover of 120hz, which is little bit on the higher side, but not to of any real consequence. All of the receivers I've ever used can do this. My Pioneer Elite's crossover network can go as high as 200hz, that is, everything below 200hz would be sent to the sub. I looked at the manual for that receiver, and the default crossover setting is 100hz, so I bet it will have no problem doing 120hz. 100hz is close enough to 120hz anyway that it might work just fine with that, even if it doesn't do 120hz exactly.

That said, the receiver you mention has lots of inputs and also has fully automatic speaker setup. That means that, theoretically, you can push one button (or two) and the receiver will automatically figure out where to set the crossovers and other settings for your system. This will probably be very useful for you, since you're just stepping into the game of higher-end components.

What you really need to do is pick up that Pioneer Elite receiver and then mosey on over to the Axiom store and pick up an Epic Midi or Master system . No problems with crossovers or speaker ratings there!

EDIT: OK while I was typing all this crap, Peter already did a good job of explaining what I was about to. I'll leave my post anyways in case the diagram is useful....

OK I got what he is trying to do. What was confusing me is that his combo player/receiver didn't list any digital outputs in his spec so I was wondering how he got the old receiver to accept the signal and provide surround sound. I guess there must be one or he wired each channel individually, analog. Anyways, no diff.

But, since I sidetracked people, let me try to be a little helpful and answer his question on how crossovers work.

With any luck there is an image below that I did one day I was bored to try and explain the same thing to my brother who asked about it.

Hopefully it demonstrates that since sound is a frequency, it is measured in Hertz. The higher the number the higher pitched the sound is. 20Hz is about as low as people with a good ear can hear. 20Khz (20,000Hz) is about as high as most people can hear. Anything above that and only your dog knows it's there.

A crossover for a subwoofer is the frequency where the equipment decides that it should split the higher sounds away from the deeper bass sounds. If your receiver has a crossover setting of 80Hz then all the really deep bass below 80Hz will go only to the subwoofer and anything higher will go to the rest of the speakers. This number is adjustable on some receivers and/or subs.

A speaker can have it's own built in crossovers if it has more than one driver in it. A driver is the actual round speaker pod and some speakers have many.

In the diagram below, all the extremely deep bass below 80Hz is split away to the subwoofer. Above that, the sound is split three ways (for a three way speaker.) from 81 to 200Hz the bass sound is sent only to the woofer. From 201Hz up to 2KHz it is handled by the mid range driver. Anything above that, comes out only from the tweeter.

Hopefully this is easier to understand with the diagram. Worked for my brother.



Different combinations of sub and speaker crossovers can result in very different sounding results. The speaker crossovers are built in by the manufacturer to suit what they are trying to achieve. Sometimes you have the option of changing your subwoofer crossover setting. This can be a matter of preference or, in some cases, importance.

For instance, if your main speakers are only physically capable of going as low as 120Hz and you set your sub x-over at 80Hz, then there is nothing left to play between 80 and 120Hz... You would want a receiver that lets you x-over up at 120 mark so the sound below that doesn't get missed.

If this helped, don't thank me. Thank the person who booked a horribly long and boring conference call enabling me to play in this forum for a while to avoid falling asleep.