Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Home Theater Large vs. small setting on mains for music, HT

Yup, you can lose info if the sub isn't set to above or equal the highest crossover on all the speakers.

LOTR is a prime example of what setting your speakers to small can do for your bass activity. Again, I spent a lot of time this past weekend just testing the center channel, though I did test all of them on and off. A scene where the hobbits first encounter the ringwraith, where he gets off his horse and crouches down on his hands...there's an incredible hit off bass when his hands hit the tree and leans over the hobbits. And it's only found in one place...the center channel signal. So if the speaker is set to large, you'll never hear it...the Hz signal is too low. But if you set the speaker to small and run it through the sub...whump! It's pretty powerful.

This is where the dilema comes in. Large is the full spectrum of quality sound, no compression (my thinking of what's happening) for the mains. Set to small...and you get more bass activity.

BTW, my crossover is disabled on my subwoofer. It's only taking in what the receiver gives it.

I would be interested if another H/K owner would run this test and see if they yield similar results. The test was mainly between (on the center channel) speakers set to 1) Small crossed over at 80 Hz, 2) Small crossed over at 60 Hz, and 3) Speaker to Large.

As I stated before...these test mostly were checking dialogue. Which, as far as I know, generally resides in the 1000-5000 Hz range...which should have nothing to do with 60 or 80 Hz cutoff.

Any thoughts...?

>>...there's an incredible hit off bass when his hands hit the tree and leans over the hobbits. And it's only found in one place...the center channel signal

Interesting. I didn't think the DVDs were supposed to be encoded that way. Question for you -- in the subwoofer "speaker" settings it looks as if only some of the options include the LFE channel in the text string that you pick. I assumed that was just to save space on the screen, ie "you always get the LFE channel but I don't have room to spell it out on every option" but now I'm starting to wonder if some of the crossover options do not LFE to the sub and only route LF content from the mains, center and surround. If that were the case then setting a speaker to "Large" would drastically affect what you get on the sub -- not a problem with the receiver, just "too many options".

I don't actually... um... HAVE a center channel speaker (although I'm gonna order one real soon, honest) so I might not be able to do this test. I will read up on the crossover settings some more, particularly this "does the LFE channel always go to the sub ?" issue. I suspect that the settings are the problem, not anything inherently wrong with the receiver (or so I hope).

JB

I like to run my M60s at large with the LFE sent to both the mains and the sub. Works for me. All "small" settings sounded pretty thin - and not at all acceptable for music. My $.02.

Well, you've got a newer generation of receivers, but the only place I see LFE+x is when the speakers are set to large, and you can change it to LFE. When they're small, I think it's assumed.

You're right. The 630 works the same way -- I was working from memory and mixed up the "Sub" and "LFE" settings. There does not seem to be any way to accidentally stop LFE content from going to the sub except by setting it to "None".

The interesting thing is that the 630 seems to let you send LF content from the mains to the sub even though the mains are set to "Large", but does not offer the same capability for the Center channel -- ie if you set Center to "large" then there is no center channel content going to the sub. Not sure why mains are treated differently (maybe for stereo ?)... but until reading posts in this thread I had always assumed that center speakers would always be "small" anyways.

The crossover treatment for the LFE channel is interesting. LFE can be low-pass filtered, but it shares a filter with one of the other speaker channels (ie you pick L+R or Center or Surround etc... and it uses the same crossover frequency as those speakers). This explains a lot, and tells me that I probably have some really stupid settings today and am losing some LFE content as a result.

None of this explains why running "Large" on the center channel gave Misfit Toy clearer dialog. I also don't understand why a deep bass slam would be encoded onto only the center channel and not onto LFE. I guess if either of those two changed then Misfit Toy would be happy again

If you run all speakers large, you truely are working in 5.1 (or 4.1 in your case)...the sub is ONLY getting the LFE channel signal that the designer designated for the subwoofer. In rare cases, it seems mostly with DTS movies, that low frequencies get sent to channels such as the surrounds and center channel. I assume this to be because movie theaters are equipped with speakers that can handle the full spectrum more efficiently. But home theater isn't designed that way, which is where the small speaker setting comes in. The subwoofers only job is to handle the low end. Basically the ideal setup is to cutoff your surrounding speakers for you subwoofer to take over the low end omnidirectional Hz range. Meaning you wouldn't know what direction the bass is coming from anyway, so why not send it to the speaker that can handle it.

What this means in an envirnment where all the speakers are set to small is...the subwoofer is getting it's LFE signal, or .1, from the DVD...PLUS all the low end frequencies that are channeled to it by the crossover in the receiver. Eqauting to a lot more low end activity than if all speakers were set to large BUT still getting all the sound we were intended to hear in the theater. So, speakers set to small is really the best way to get maximum impact out of your home theater.

Also, I sent and email and have called Harman Kardon seeking answers regarding what is/maybe really going on when the speakers are set to small on their receivers. They didn't have an answer for me when I called, so he told me to send an email and he'll pass it along to the technicians.

Hey, what's the email address on that? I'd like to ask about the delay settings...

I think it's one of the help desk reps, not a general email. But his address is graskin@harman.com.