Re: Looking to change from Mirage BPS-400 to....?
Maybe this is one of the problems you're encountering, particularly the 3rd paragraph (excerpted from this article over at hometheaterhifi.com
"Bass Management Woes: Trouble on the Slopes"):
Quote:
| As a result, to this day, surround sound processors feature odd, mis-matched slope combinations. I recall an old receiver I once owned which would low-pass the sub with a 3rd order slope and high pass the mains with a 2nd order slope, at, of all frequencies, 90 Hz. I never did find a speaker which "fit" that particular combination.......For the most part, things have not improved.......... |
Quote:
Using any full-range speaker with an arbitrary combination of slopes just doesn't work. Let's take the THX crossover as an example which, as we said, is just as arbitrary as anything else when used with non-THX speakers. At 40 Hz, the speaker should be down 24 dB if it's to fit into the scheme of things. But a full-range speaker, having no 80 Hz roll-off of its own, will be down only 12 dB. This means that in the region of 40 Hz - 60 Hz, the speaker is literally doing too much work. You can't compensate by lowering the subwoofer level, as that lowers the entire subwoofer signal, essentially robbing you of the juicy 20 Hz - 30 Hz region.
Many of you many already be thinking, "Just lower the crossover frequency to be closer the speaker's actual cutoff." Yes, no, maybe. You'd be closer to getting it right, but still would not have a perfect splice: your speaker would still have to exhibit a 2nd order roll-off at whatever frequency you chose.
Ported speakers will never fit. In addition, lowering the crossover frequency means you'll be cashing in on all the negative aspects of using an inordinately low crossover frequency. We have an entire article* detailing why you don't want to do that, and why you would not want to set the crossover frequency different for each speaker in your setup. |
As an example of the non-ported recommendation, check out JBL's largest loudspeaker made expressly for HT satellite use, the
PT800 (I've never seen JBL use a sealed enclosure for one of their conventional loudspeakers).
* here's the link that is inside that article:
Feature Article <-- this thing's alive! 
I just copy/pasted the link and when I posted this message on HTF, it showed up like you see i.e. something automatically added the words "feature article" and the HTML stuff so you don't see the link itself. Spooky........
