Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Upgrade from EP350 to EP500?

Its nice to see your tinkering pay off. I wonder if the positioning of the subs and mains has something to do with why the system sounds better with the M80s handling the 50-80Hz region?

Actually Fred, you're probably on to something there. I did move my M80's about 10 inches closer together and pushed the EP500's a little closer to the corners of my room. That was about 2 days ago.

Until today, I never thought of lowering the xo since my SMS-1 was showing such a smooth response. Since changing the xo to 50hz, all I've done is tweak the SMS-1 a little.

I was reading some posts over at audioholics on bass management. Some were debating on why people even have full range towers, then set the xo at 80hz and their towers to small, hence wasting the full range towers capabilities from 80hz down to 30hz or so. (depending on the towers freq. range) It was pretty interesting to read everyone's different opinions on the subject.

I can hear now that the M80's excel in this range, at least down to 50hz or less. Prior to me changing my xo, I was essentially cutting my M80's off at the knees.

I can't short change the EP500's, as I was muting the EP500's on and off, with them handling the under 50hz range, it made a huge difference rounding out the entire range....Ok, I'll stop rambling... Kinda got excited about my speakers again after a year of ownership!

Dana

For you all setting the xo at 40-50, what surround speakers are you using?

Your AVR enable for you guys to set individual xo for each channel?

My Marantz can only set a universal crossover and my surround can only go to a min of 80Hz, would I damage the surround speaker if I set the xo at 50Hz? (I have a SVS PC12+ which can go below 25 Hz easily)

I set my L/R at large now as I wanted the M60 to go lower than my current xo at 100Hz and center (VP150) at small.

Yes, Michael; those who set the crossover to their mains as low as 40Hz are able to set their center and surround crossovers independently. Considering your speakers, I'd suggest that the THX researched and recommended 80Hz crossover should work well for all of them, including the M60s. There shouldn't be a good reason for setting the M60s large. Let the PC12+ handle the range up to 80Hz that it does best. Take part of the bass load off of the M60s so that they can play what they do best a little more cleanly.

But by setting the xo at 80Hz, can the Orb Mod1 take the extra juice of lower Hz signal...Orb recommended setting at 100-120Hz...it would straggle to go to 80hz.

if set at 80Hz, would it damage the Orb Mod1?

Orb Audio says that the recommended setting is "optimal", but they quote a lower limit of 80Hz. The speakers wouldn't be damaged by the 80Hz setting, but the 80-100Hz area might be slightly weaker than the area above 100Hz(probably not noticeable on surround material).

With receivers that offer individual cross-overs for each channel, I'd love to see a test where the center channel is set to 80 Hz, the mains to 60, and the surrounds to 100. Each speaker's distance should also vary slightly as it would in a real room. Then have a 50 to 150 Hz sine sweep played in phase through each channel simultaneously, and plot what is actually being output to the sub. I have a feeling it won't be pretty.

I've always wondered how it would sound with different crossovers for different speakers, especially with the surrounds set to 100hz.

If sound is still directional down to 80hz then at 100hz you can still tell it's coming from the sub, which if it's located at the front and is playing back content inteneded for the surround/rear, might seem/feel weird or just not right.

That's been a concern of mine with the QS8's, but maybe there isn't enough 100hz or below content being sent to the surrounds in movies for it to be an issue? Although I can think of some movies with certain passages where the surrounds are very active and seem to run almost full range. What about with multi-channel music, do they not send 80hz info to the surrounds?

Amazingly enough, non-localized frequencies when combined with the playback of their higher frequency harmonics really are localized by the brain to the speaker they were crossed from.

But my issue was not with that. It's that I'm wondering how the person programming the digital crossover maintains phase coherence when using different crossover points. People like to complain about comb filtering between individual drivers playing the same content. That's a measurement artifact which varies with mic placement. What about the comb filtering which results in a digitally summed signal comprised of out-of-phase components? There's no getting around that. The only reason wouldn't be noticed is that the bass content of the mains/center/surrounds isn't likely to be the same. But if it ever was and there is a phase mismatch in the cross-overs the resulting output to the sub would have serious artifacts.

Wow. Another epic win for Chris. I NEVER thought of it that way before. Massive "Ah ha!" moment. Thanks!