Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners Axiom speakers & your AVR crossover setting

Where does everyone have their speakers crossed in their AVR? Do you set to the standard 80 or let Audyssey help?

I think you'll find various answers depending on your equipment, room, and preferences. Some like the M80's crossed at 40, 60, or 80hz and the VP's and QS's around 100hz. IIRC it's recommended that if you do use and change the Audyssey xo's you should only increase it.

htnut has it right, too many variances, personal preferences, to give one answer for a crossover setting. For some, Audyssey helps alot while others prefer to not use it.

A good starting place is to set all your speakers to small and cross all of them over at 80Hz this is what Audyssey actually recommends. You can raise the crossover of a speaker w/o effecting Audyssey. However, Audyssey does not calculate an EQ curve for a speaker below the crossover point determined during your receivers auto-setup (that’s what’s actually setting your speakers crossovers). So if you lower a crossover setting for a speaker the Audyssey EQ curve is not being use below where you lowered it from.

IMO it’s a good idea to start this way to get a good baseline. From there if you want to experiment to see how things sound with different settings you have a common reference point to compare things to.

To answer your specific question I have all my speakers set to small and everything but my M80 L/C/R set to 80Hz. My M80s are set to small and 50Hz right now. I do this for two reasons. I feel that the 50Hz-80Hz sounds much better coming from my M80s than my subwoofer. Also, I want all the bass in movies below 40Hz going to my Buttkicker so I start the roll-off higher than 40Hz.

I’ve also run my M80 large with double bass, or LFE+Mains in another room to help smooth out the bass by having multiple sources. But what works best for you is going to be totally dependent on your setup, especially the room and your personal preferences.

Cheers,
Dean

Thanks guys; I was more so looking for opinions than direction. I appreciate the reasoning behind the settings.

I run my M80s at 40 or 60 Hz, VP100 at 100Hz, QS4s at 120Hz. It seemed logical, but I've not experimented with it much.

M80's set to small crossed @ 50hz

Dana

M80s @ 60HZ, VP150 @ 80HZ and QS4s @ 90HZ.

I believe mine are 60 on the mains (M80s) and 100 on the center and surrounds (VP150 & QS8s).

It looks like most of you have your mains set to small. I was under the impression that for larger, full-range speakers, they should be set to large. Is this the "new" thinking? My M60s are currently set to large, but now I'm confused.

Joe, it's not really new...and to each their own... but the general thinking is to set even speakers that are physically large to the "small" setting, as the sub is still the best speaker to handle the bass. Plus, the subs' amp takes a good load off the receiver, which now doesn't have to push watts for those lower frequencies.

Personally, I have my Denon receiver to send bass to both the M60s and the sub, because in my poor acoustic environment, the more bass sources, the more even the bass response.

Fronts Large 40hz

Centre Small 60hz

Surrounds Small 150hz

Just set my center and surrounds to 100HZ. Sounds pretty good, I might up the qs4s and see how they sound.

Joe, it isn't "new" at all; the basic rationale behind bass management is to have the sub handle the frequencies where it does best, up to 80Hz or so, and to have all the speakers set "Small"(regardless of their physical size)so that part of the bass load is taken off of them and the higher range is played a bit more cleanly.

Doesn't the large setting mean full range, thus effectively eliminating any crossover?

Well, as I understand it, they will run full range, but the front channel frequencies below 40 hz will also go to the sub.

I reran Audyssey and this is what it came up with the last time I ran it. Before that, I was running fronts on small at 60hz, centre small at 80hz and surrounds at 150hz more a less sticking to conventional wisdom. Fred made a good point, imo, about running the fronts large to help even out the bass in the room. I know there's different opinions on this, but the M80's can certainly handle their share of bass, so why not run them large? If you push your reciever to extreme levels, I can understand peoples reluctance to tax the avr amp too much and let the sub amp take over more of the bass, but that's where a separate may be of benefit.

For me all speakers set to small, also confirmed after running Denon setup. Audyssey settings matched what I normally manually followed, 80's at 60hz, 150 at 80hz, Qs8's at 90hz.

There must be something a little odd with my room, although it's not much different than what other people have described reg their rooms. I always get, what I consider, high crossover points on the surrounds...up around 120-150hz.

Thanks, I may try that and see if I like it.

Yes that’s how it works.

Like Mark I ran mine like this to even out the bass in my 20x20 apartment but included the crossover to send the very low LFE to the Buttkicker as well.

However, as John mentioned I found that running large in my house (bigger room and higher SPL) left my Denon 2807 straining which was one of the main reasons I upgraded.

So would that be the LFE+Main setting in the Denon?

Yes Denon calls it LFE+Mains.

I have been missing something on my 60's. All my calibrations have been done on Small. I wondered why there did not seem to be much bass - now it is clear it was due to my crossover being at 80. I have listened to music on Pure Direct before - but never movies. I tried Transformers without a sub and the 60's on Larger and they put out some serious bass. It is like discovering the speakers all over again.

Thanks!

Geez, I really can't wait to try it now

Me too.

It appears many of us allow audyssey to set our 150's & Q's at 100hz or above. My 150 was set to 100 & q's to 110. It set my 80's at 40, but I raised it to 80. I may try the 80's at 60 per some feedback. Those of you running 150's and q's in the 80/90 range, have you set manually due to preference? Or did audyssey set?

Rob, if you were using Pure Direct, it wasn't the 80Hz crossover, but the fact that in that mode the sub doesn't get sent the bass from speakers set "Small". No "direct" type mode should be used; instead use stereo or preferably one of the surround modes such as DPLII.

I still have pretty crappy mains, but a VP150 for a center. It produces better base than my Sony floor-standers.

If your receiver is setting the VP150 to cross at 100 Hz, it may be because of positioning. It's -3 dB point is 85 Hz, so it should be able to go lower. How do you have your VP150 placed?

Also my receiver is limited to a single, global crossover setting, so all my speakers are at 80 Hz. My QS8s seem to do fine. The auto-EQing of the receiver did bump them up a tad toward the bottom end. They're already down 3 dB by 95 Hz, so setting of around 100 Hz is pretty well suited to them.

Audyssey set my system M80s to 40, VP150 to 60 and QS8s to 80, this is where I left them.

My 150 sets on a media stand, towards the front about 3 inches from front edge. It is at ear height and is level with the tweets on the 80's. I might move it all the way up to see if the positioning on the media stand is effecting xo point. I started this thread due to all the chatter about the vp180, and I wonder what benefit there would be to upgrading if cc is xo at 100hz???

Pretty easy to find out, no?

Hi Pitbull24,

To answer your last question first, one big advantage of the VP180 is that it's a 3-way system with six drivers and a refined crossover that eliminates some of the compromises of more modest center channel speakers.

If you listen to multi-channel music, whether from DVD-A, SACD, or stereo material run throught DPL-II(x), DTS Neo6, Logic7 etc., you will not hear any hardness or stridency on male or female vocals, especially at very loud playback levels, either from pop/rock or opera (unless the stridency is in the original source recording--and there's plenty of those) through the VP180.

Also (and I've said it before here many times) Audyssey and other auto-setup/EQ systems are error-prone so don't rely on their settings as absolute. If your ears tell you otherwise, then play with the crossover settings and the Small/Large settings. It varies so much with room size and with speaker location.

In my particular setup (an average room size of 2,100 cu. ft), if I set my M80s to "Large" and use my EP500 subwoofer, I get way too much upper bass. The best balance is with the M80s set to Small and an 80-Hz crossover (which I use for the center and the surrounds). Ian at Axiom, in his big cathedral ceiling living room uses 40 Hz on the M80s.

As a default setting to start out with, it's hard to beat an 80-Hz crossover and Small settings for all the speakers. It's why I recommend it, and also why Tom Holman of THX recommends it. Then if you want play with Audyssey or some proprietary auto-setup system, go ahead and use the one that sounds best to your ears in your setup. It's just that we get complaints at Axiom of "not enough bass" or the like and when I or the audio experts investigate, we find the customer has used Audyssey or another auto-setup that has clearly miscalculated on the crossover frequencies, subwoofer setup, and speaker size settings.

Last, when you set a tower speaker to "Small" you are NOT wasting the bass capabilities of the speaker. All crossovers have "slopes" (think of a ski slope, not a cliff), so the reduction in bass output is gradual. The woofers in your M60 or M80 are still working but with less excursion (less excursion means lowered distortion and cleaner more articulate bass) and they continue to contribute to overall bass output and smoothness together with the subwoofer.

Regards,
Alan

Great info Alan! Keep twisting and I may have to place my order:^)

I just wanted to highlight some of the stuff a few of us have caught crap for saying here before.

Grunt,

I'm glad you pointed that out, I was thinking the same thing. Well done.

Thanks for that post Dean. I have always thought of 80 Hz as the set and forget crossover. Its good enough, but if you like playing, you might find better.

I wanted to highlight this horrible sounding past time.

Did you mean pastime or am I missing a play on words?

Assuming he meant pastime, that does sound pretty horrible.

I dunno. You can't catch what you havn't passed.

Been in the military as long as I have and you get pretty use to it.