Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater took delivery of the m22 and m2 audyssey question

Yup.

That is all upto the recording engineer and I would think/hope the artist as well. They are the ones that decide how the recording will sound. The only way to know for sure if you are hearing the way it was recorded is to have as linear a playback as possible, thus the strive for that flat line response of a speaker/subwoofer; this at least eliminates the speaker messing with the sound.

There is no accounting for personnal listening preferences and some people just like that mid bass punch and will adjust their systems accordingly or seek out speakers/subs that play the way they think it should sound.

I would also agree that a 50HZ crossover on a pair of M22s just makes no sense at all. For an HT application in particular, back a few years ago, even with subs, I noticed at the mid-bass level Alan talks about, the M22s, used in a L/R configuration and a crossover of 80HZ, still strained a bit at high volumes so I chose to go the M60(later M80) route that pretty much eliminated that problem. Even with a crossover setting in the 60-80HZ range, the floor standers just seem to handle the low-mid bass with considerably more ease.

As far as a music is concerned, with any band or orchestra an electric bass in the mix(unless the player is messing with tunings) "bottoms out" at around 60HZ so that mid bass region is almost always going to predominate anyway.

Unless it is movies with effects and digital bass or pipe organ music, one will never hear bass much below the levels that I describe above, so a 80HZ setting for music, especially for smaller speakers, is much more practical, no matter what Audyssey measures in the set-up.

With the mid bass punch there is also the issue of speaker to listener distance which is IMO one of the most noticeable things that changes with distance. If I sit six feet from my M80s I feel an intense mid bass punch but as I reach 12 feet my normal listening distance it diminishes considerably as the direct energy from the speaker drops off and blends more with the reflected energy from the room surfaces. Unless you know something about what the sound engineer intended, like the EBM I listen to, hard to say how much punch they intended you to feel.

So for things like explosions in HT listening I go with experience which tells me that shock waves are directional and can carry one hell of a wallop. This is why I usually have my front speakers crossed over around 40-50Hz since where I have to place my subwoofer for the flattest bass is not the best place for delivering mid bass punch to the chest. Still eyeballing one of those HSU mid bass modules, maybe a tax refund purchase. . . .