Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions HK630 and 7.1

Good morning all,

I received my M22's yesterday and set them up as my rear surrounds. I listen to a lot of music, in the various 5.1 modes on the HK630, so I thought I would try 7.1.

Do any HK630 users know how (or if it is possible) to get the receiver to put out the same signal to the rear surrounds as it sends to the front mains? I am not worried about the surrounds, just the rear surrounds.

We played around alot last night, and ended up pulling out an old Kenwood receiver, using the pre-outs on the HK, and sending the signal to the Kenwood. Then used the Kenwood to run the two rear surrounds as if they were front mains.

I would greatly appreciate any help on this issue. I don't want to hook the rear surrounds to the Kenwood, and I don't want to hook them to the mains on the HK along with my M60's, since that would reduce the ohms to 4 and I would have no rear surround channel for the few movies that actually support it.

Thanks for any help.

Cheers,

I'm not sure why you'd want to do that, but one solution might be to put banana clips on the end of the speaker wires of your side surrounds at the receiver end, select the "play all channel" mode and pull the banana clips for the side surrounds out of the receiver when you want to listen to "main" content from the front and back.

Paul

The simple answer is, I like really loud music....

When I play a CD through these speakers (rear surrounds), using 7.1 stereo, or Logic 7, or DTS Neo6 (7.1 channel), there doesn't seem to be much coming out of the rear surrounds. The fronts sound the same.

Generally, if it's not loud enough, I just turn it up...

Din, if you've calibrated your speakers, then your surrounds sounds like they're supposed to, if you want them louder, then you can just go into your speaker level settings and bump them up a couple decibels.

Din, keep in mind that you're mentioned modes which have different effects. Processes such as DPLII(x), Logic 7 and Neo:6 extract ambience naturally present in two-channel recordings and steer it to the surround channels where it belongs, to give a little more realistic effect. This is relatively subtle, however, and the surrounds aren't supposed to have nearly the loudness of the mains, even in recordings which have a lot of ambience to extract.

On the other hand, "all-channel stereo", "seven-channel stereo", etc. simply duplicates at equal level the front channel in both the side and back surrounds on that side. This isn't a natural effect, but can be useful for parties, etc. Your 630 has a seven-channel stereo mode which may be what you called "7.1 stereo" which should have the side and back surrounds playing the front channel at equal loudness, assuming proper calibration. Re-check your manual, but with the correct settings for seven speakers and seven-channel stereo mode you should have experienced this.

In reply to:

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"7.1 stereo" which should have the side and back surrounds playing the front channel at equal loudness, assuming proper calibration. Re-check your manual, but with the correct settings for seven speakers and seven-channel stereo mode you should have experienced this.

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JohnK is correct. In 7 or 5 channel stereo the 630 sends the same signal to all speakers. It should be noted however that the actual db put out drops as a result of the load placed on the HK.

I'm guessing here but if you want M22's to sound like M60's your going to have to raise the rear level at least +3 and maybe more. You are also going to run the risk of over driving the M22's if you get silly with the volume. If your going to be a die hard multi channel guy, send the M22's back and get another set of M60's. Problem solved!

Thanks for the tips guys. I will play around some more tonight after work.

I was using the 7.1 stereo mode, and you guys have confirmed what I thought. It made sense to me that the stereo mode would send the same signal to all the channels.

I was considering getting another pair of M60's, but I thought I would try moderation, something I am not very good at.

I watched Gladiator (DTS-ES), and Star Wars Ep V, and VI (DD-EX) with the new set-up. There was a subtle difference, but I didn't notice too much.

Can anyone suggest any movies that really take advantage of a 7.1 set-up?