AR HC6 or Take5.2? (1 Viewer)

[MattyK]

Hmm. I'm also a little intrigued by your impressions on the mid-range - it makes me wonder about room dynamics (yours or mine ). I found the center and LR front timber matching to be superb, to be honest. I was always surprised at how well they did together given that the center was sealed and the sats ported. I'm dead nuts on with you regarding the sub - I'll bet, though, that there is a more optimal (and undoubtedly far less convenient) placement. You'll know it, because you'll be able to boost the crossover to 90-100 and it will still disappear.

Anyhoo, hope you're happy with the purchase! Oh, and I'd give 'em a bit longer to break in - but you probably already know that. Cheers!

MattyK

 

[John Garcia]

Fortunately, this room is sort of a den/movie/guest room, not exactly a dedicated HT (though it's kind of turning into that), so the sub can somewhat go anywhere except the front left where the door is. I will have to experiment with placement a bit, but the initial spot was the right front corner of the room about 6" from either wall, facing along the longest straight leg of the room. I may try angling it towards the opposite corner diagonally or across the front of the room, to see if I can dial it in with the x-over at 100, wich the sats seem to be OK with. For now, I don't want to have to run a long sub cable to the opposite end of the room.

My dad will play with them for the week and I will go back and do the calibration, so they should have racked up enough hours by then and I'll try to report back on how they sound after a fair amount of break-in.

I certainly don't expect them to sound as good as my personal HT, which is just over $8K; and if they DID, I'd be looking to sell some stuff off... It is a great little setup (especially for the price). Any negatives are minor, and are more or less common to sub/sat systems of this type. I don't want to sound like I am complaining about them, because I'm happy with them I'm just trying to give my observations about them.

 

[terence]

Cool John looking forward to it!

 

[GregC]

Congratulations on making a great purchase. The HC6 is a very good little system. Regarding the lack of "midrange" is it possible to set the receiver to "no sub" and the L and R speakers to Large, then connect the sub with the two front satellites as if they were a stereo pair? I own an AR sub which allows this to happen and found it a better approach with improved blending of the sub and my sats. Instead of using the receiver's fixed crossover point, I used the sub's variable crossover to better tune the crossover point and create a better "midrange". It doesn't help the localization problem, but I used sub positioning to mitigate this problem. For me, the localization was less of an issue than the lack of "midrange". YMMV.

 

[John Garcia]

Thanks. One of the negatives of the sub, as noted, is that there are no speaker level outputs, so I can't use this type of arrangement. If I do decide to upgrade his sub, I will be looking for one that has this capability to see if it helps, but the sats are rated as -3dB at 80Hz. If he wants more performance, I'll pick up a couple of AR bookshelf speakers to fill in that midrange and use one of the sats as a rear center.

95% of all subs out there do not have a variable high-pass, it's normally a fixed passive filter on the speaker outputs, and the x-over adjustment only applies to the low pass for the sub itself.