[Ronnie Ferrell]

First I want to personally thank Anthony Gomez for his wonderful PEQ program. It has helped me out a ton! For me it was a "must have" for setting up my BFD.

Man what a difference the BFD made in the sound of my room. We have added more furniture to the room and after moving my sub back in after giving it some clothes, I figured I would start from scratch again with my BFD. Spent about 2 hours tonight and came up with this using 5 filters. I am shooting for a house curve and not a flat response. This is measured from 10-100Hz. The vertical lines mark every 10Hz. The graphs are with RS Db Meter corrections applied.

BEFORE BFD:
[c][/c]

Simulated filters using PEQ:
[c][/c]

After applying BFD filters:
[c][/c]

Notice how close PEQ came to real world results! Not bad! FYI: Each filter was tweaked individually. I did not just set all of them at once. You have to tweak one at a time and remeasure the results. I did no less than 10 full sweeps and plots using the test tons I made and burnt to a CD.

I have two bad holes at 70 and 90 but it is my room. If I move my meter a foot it will shoot up and flatten out at these dips.

My room is a "room from hell" shape wise and this is the best it has EVER sounded. I am very pleased with it...... (at least for now )

FYI: This is using a 122L sealed tempest sub so not much there below 20Hz.


Ronnie

[Allen Ross]

nice, i should try the actual software instead of just tweaking to personal tastes

[Keith M.]

where can one get a copy of this PEQ software?

I plan on purchasing the BFD this week...

[Ronnie Ferrell]

Quote:

where can one get a copy of this PEQ software?

From Tony's site Here or from Here

Tony also has the test tones on his site. I used NCH Tone Generator and made my own tones. I faded then in and out so as to keep the sub from "popping" when the CD tracks start. I used 10 sec. tones.

Another trick I did was to set my receiver input to CD and then chose Dolby prologic. This way I could set my mains to small, center to small, and cross the sub at 80hz. I did this so that I could use the CD with the same speaker settings I use when watching a DVD in DD or DTS. My receivers settings for stereo CD playback only lets me set the mains to full range and cross the sub at 40 or 60. This is how I listen to audio CDs, but I wanted my system calibrated for my HT settings. The above trick worked well!

Ronnie

[Saurav]

I have separate stereo and HT systems. Right now, I have L&R of the stereo going through my own summing circuit which goes to one (L) input on my plate amp, and the receiver's LFE out goes to the other (R) input on my plate amp. It seems funky to read about it, but it works fine, because at any given time only one of my systems is being used.

Could this be made to work with the BFD? I looked through some websites, and it seems like the L and R 'engines' can be set independently. So if I kept my current summing circuit, I could just insert the BFD in front of the plate amp, and set things up for both movies and music. Is that correct, or am I missing something here?

Thanks,
Saurav

[Ronnie Ferrell]

Saurav,

You are correct. For any given stereo filter, you can set both the left and right channels together with the same values, or you can set each independently of each other with different values.

I heard of people using a BFD to tame 2 subs, both with different sets for each filters at the same time. You scenario would just be the opposite of that. Both are doable. Also the BFD has 10 banks of presets. So you have 20 mono banks (2 channels x 10) of 12 filter sets to play with! You can play with different sets of curves and listen how each one sounds by flipping between the presets.

(Boy, I hope that makes sense!)


Ronnie

[Saurav]

I read about the presets, but if I could set up L and R separately, I could eentually settle on a single preset which would work for both HT and music. Though I see the advantage of different presets, I could have separate settings for LPs vs. CDs. Hmm.... now this is starting to get interesting

The device itself has just one set of inputs and outputs, right? I mean, it might have different connector options, but there's no input selection - correct?

[Ronnie Ferrell]

Correct again. No input selection, only different input types. There is no RCA inputs or outputs. You have to use 1/4" mono phono plug to RCA adapters. Remember this is a piece of PRO gear.

They don't lable the channels L/R it is labled Input 1, Output 1 and Input 2, Output 2.


Ronnie

[Saurav]

Quote:

You have to use 1/4" mono phono plug to RCA adapters.

Yup, I realized that, but a quick trip to Radio Shack can take care of that.

Thanks for all the help.

[Wayne A. Pflughaupt]

Saurav,

That’s a pretty novel idea, using separate sends to the sub for music and movies. I’m surprised more people haven’t thought of it.

You’re on the right track. Since you only have one sub, both BFD channels would be set identically. However, if you are using different crossover settings for each send, you could compensate for any response differences between the two.

Also, many people like higher levels of bass for movies vs. music; the two channels could be set up for that, too.

Regards,
Wayne A. Pflughaupt

[Saurav]

Quote:

That’s a pretty novel idea, using separate sends to the sub for music and movies. I’m surprised more people haven’t thought of it.

Thanks for the compliment. I'm not sure how many people have independent music and HT systems that share a subwoofer Also, this does require summing the L and R signals from the stereo preamp. I built a little circuit to do this, but I'm not sure how easy this would be using commercially available equipment.

Quote:

You’re on the right track. Since you only have one sub, both BFD channels would be set identically. However, if you are using different crossover settings for each send, you could compensate for any response differences between the two.

They aren't different now because I have just one plate amp and don't want to change setting every day, but I'd probably use different settings for the two systems, since my HT speakers are much smaller than my music speakers. With a BFD, I'd probably run my plate amp's XO wide open (or disable/bypass it entirely), and effectively get two XOs using the BFD.

Which brings up a question - are all the filters parametric/bandpass, or can I set general low-pass/high-pass filters too? What would be perfect would be the ability to set a 2nd order 70Hz filter followed by a 4th order 125Hz filter or something like that. Oh, with variable phase/delay too