Matt^M

I Lost My Bass! But in a worse way

Hello everyone, I just got a surround sound system about a month ago and have my first problem, so I figured this would be a good place to ask.

Ok I just got Halo 2 for my xbox and it won't utilize my bass channel! It works for all my other games and even on the little bit before the game starts. I emaile dthe game creators and this is what they said:

For Halo 2 we decided to do what commercial decoders are expecting and we use a 5 channel mix (four surround plus center) and count on the decoder to be set up properly to redirect the front speaker signal to the subwoofer. We intended on then utilizing the LFE at times (as we can send full 5.1 mixes through the audio chip) but time and disk space got in the way. You have not seen the last of the audio content for Halo 2 however...

So I guess I have to somehow redirect my center channel to my sub? I have NO idea how to do this. Here is my set-up, hopefully someone can help me out:

Well I guess I can't paste links, but I have a JBL speakers and a Sony STR-DE597 Surround Sound Reciever.

I have all of my speakers plugged directly into my reciever and my sub hooked up to my reciever through LFE.

Jay Mitchosky

You aren't going to redirect the center through the sub. I've had Halo 2 since launch and there's plenty of low end there. Note that your sub can receive low frequencies from two sources: 1) the general soundtrack, and 2) the dedicated .1 LFE channel. How are your speakers set? If they are set to LARGE then ALL of the general low frequencies will go to the speakers with only .1 LFE to the sub. It's not until you set the speaker(s) to SMALL that you engage the receiver's crossover to redirect general low frequencies to the sub. Typically receivers will set that crossover to 80Hz. So frequencies below 80Hz (for example) will be redirected to the sub so long as the related speaker(s) are set to SMALL.

If a soundtrack has no dedicated .1 LFE channel (as seems to be the case with Halo 2 according to this comment: "We intended on then utilizing the LFE at times but time and disk space got in the way. ") the only thing your sub will get are the redirected frequencies from the main channels that are set to SMALL. It could be that you have all of your speakers set to LARGE and so no low frequencies are crossed over and the sub sees nothing.

Unless you have some very robust speakers that extend flat to 20-30Hz you would do well to set them to SMALL and let your sub do the work. Remember, the speaker size in your receiver settings doesn't reference the speaker's physical dimensions but rather their frequency response.

This topic is best served in the hardware forums instead of construction - moving now.

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