Dual Surround Speaker Question - Poor Man's Lexicon? (1 Viewer)

[Gregory S]

Has anyone paralleled (not electrically, but through the receiver) say the left side surround speaker with the left rear surround speaker and the same for the right side and also use a single rear center speaker for EX stuff?
I think the Denon receivers are capable of directing the signal to either the side surrounds, the rear surrounds or both simultaneously. There may be other receivers or processors that can also, do this.
I was thinking of using:
* dipoles: left/right side surrounds (more for ambience)
* direct radiators: left right rear corner surrounds (more
for directional information)
* dipole: rear center
This would probably take a lot of level tweaking between the 2 surrounds to get the right balance of ambience and directionality.
This is sort of a poor man's Lexicon.
What were your experiences with this set-up.
Thanks,
Greg

 

[Wes]

What could be done if your room was big enough to support it would be to take a couple DPL decoders and install them in the channels of the Surround Left and the EX and then another one for the right side. Then place the new center in-between the Surrounds and EX. You could even go one step further and install the DPL decoders on the Front Left and Surround Left, then also the right channels. This last one would be more comparable to Logic 7 as that is what their processing is doing in a nut shell.
I simply pull my Front L/R into the room by installing a midrange on the side of the room just in front of the main seating. See drawing!
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Wes
[Edited last by Wes on October 22, 2001 at 09:02 PM]

 

[Larry Chanin]

Greg:
I have been experimenting with the physical speaker arrangement that you mention, but I don’t have a receiver that can duplicate the tricks of a Denon so I can’t exactly answer your question from personal experience. You can get an idea of my set-up at Larry’s Home Theater . Right now I’ve turned off my corner rear speakers and have gotten pretty good results with a single center rear speaker.
I’m not sure precisely what you mean by paralleling the rear and side surround speakers through the receiver, but let me attempt to discuss a few possibilities.
If you mean sending the same signals to rear corner speakers as the side surrounds, I would think that putting directional side signals in the rear of the room would compete with the surround back (rear center) speaker and would tend to wash out the rear center signals. It is likely that this arrangement would make it harder to localize or distinguish sounds intended for the rear versus the sides.
If you mean sending the same surround back signal to all rear speakers (corners and rear center) then you would have to tap the surround EX signal from the Surround Back PRE OUT and add an amplifier to power the third speaker. (Some receivers do not permit powering speaker outputs and PRE OUT outputs simultaneously, but I have read postings where Denon owners say they have done so.)
In the second case you wouldn’t have side signals competing with rear signals, but you probably would be trading a localized and directional rear center effect for a diffuse rear sound field. Suppose for the sake of discussion that you had just two rear mounted EX speakers. Since the EX signal is mono as you move both of them closer to the center of the rear wall the sound should become more localized. As the speakers are moved to the corners the sound is spread across the rear wall and becomes more diffuse. A three speaker arrangement would be overlaying a diffuse sound field over a localized sound field, so in a different sense one type of effect would be competing with an other type, particularly if all three speakers were operating at the same level. If your intent is listening just to movies, then I doubt there would be any advantage to the three speaker arrangement. (Nevertheless, I should point out that I intend continue to experiment with this arrangement by running the center rear speaker louder than the corner speakers. However, more than likely when I upgrade my receiver I’ll use the corner speaker just for multi-channel music.)
On that note it would appear that Denon thinks locating direct radiating surround speakers approximately in the corners of a room is the recommended way to listen to multi-channel music. While I don’t have a Denon receiver, I’ve read the Operating Instructions for the AVR-5800. It would appear that Denon recommends turning off the side surround speakers and routing the surround signals to just the corner speakers.
With regard to this being a Poor Man's Lexicon, there are at least two major differences. The Lexicon's surround back channel is stereo, not mono; and the Lexicon has their proprietary Logic 7 processing which can produce a 7.1 channel sound field from a stereo signal.
Larry

 

[Earl_C]

"This last one would be more comparable to Logic 7 as that is what their processing is doing in a nut shell."
Uh..not really. I think this might help: http://www.lexicon.com/downloads/DC-...ory-Design.pdf
It's a bit more sophisticated than you imply and the results reflect that.
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[Gregory S]

Thanks for the advice.
Wes,
WOW - Lots of speakers.
Larry,
I was planning (thinking) of driving both side and rear speakers with the same signal.
Earl,
Thanks for that great article from Lexicon on surround sound.
What's the going price for a Lexicon DC-2 now a days?
Now that DPL II is out, with supposedly faster steering than Logic 7, I wonder how they stack up against each other?
The nice thing about the Lex is that you can get 4 surrounds in stereo all of the time. I wonder if you can use a Pro Logic decoder between the surrounds to give you a direct rear center. That would give you 2 side surrounds and 3 rear surrounds. ANYONE TRY THIS?
Thanks again,
Greg

 

[Earl_C]

"What's the going price for a Lexicon DC-2 now a days?"
Seems to be getting very reasonable these days. Check this out: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...threadid=87538
"Now that DPL II is out, with supposedly faster steering than Logic 7, I wonder how they stack up against each other?"
I doubt that. It might be more stable in some instances but then again, you can find material where Logic7 is more stable.
"The nice thing about the Lex is that you can get 4 surrounds in stereo all of the time. I wonder if you can use a Pro Logic decoder between the surrounds to give you a direct rear center. That would give you 2 side surrounds and 3 rear surrounds. ANYONE TRY THIS?"
You wouldn't want to. There's no way of determining what the decoder would do from movie to movie and you could collapse your entire rear stage into one speaker. Not recommended.
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[Jerome Grate]

Please clarify, I can use a dpl decoder or dpl receiver lets say and attach one to the left surround pre out and one to the right surround pre-out, the select dolby 3 stereo for each decoder and this will give me an extra left and right surround speaker including rear center.
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[Earl_C]

Jerome,
Logic 7 uses sophisticated technology to search for cues already encoded into the surround channels, extracts them and then intelligently steers them amongst the four surrounds. Some of this is based on the initial set-up and configuration (speakers levels, distances etc.). I doubt you can find any cheap receiver to match the kind of processing and sophistication to piggy-back it with. You can also handicap the rear sound stage by adding supplementary processing on top it, creating something unintended and unpredictable. But this is still a free country and no one says you can't and hey, you might like what you hear. I just don't advise applying one type of matrix onto another.
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[Jerome Grate]

Well, I have the HK AVR 500, it has Logic 7 for movies and cinema. Granted I can only use it for DPL and stereo sources but, based on the begining post and the fact that DPLII is pretty much the same as Logic 7 can the set-up talked about here work.

 

[Earl_C]

There's only one way to find out. But there's no way of telling what you'll get and it'll depend heavily on the program material of course. If the rears in 5 channel Logic 7 are identical, regardless of the fact they're stereo, the PL decoder will collapse everything into the rear leaving you with no side speaker output. For the same reasons you wouldn't want to apply Surround EX decoding to ProLogic material, I don't think you'd get anything meaningful from this set-up.
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[Jerome Grate]

Thanks, not worth the try, to much moving and wiring.
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ONCE, I CONSIDERED SPARING YOUR RETCHED LITTLE PLANET CYBERTRON, NOW.., YOU SHALL WITNESS IT'S
DISMEMBERMENT...
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