Advantages / Disadvantages to running your speakers LARGE or SMALL (1 Viewer)

[Jim Carr]

You guys all know the settings on your receiver to set your surrounds and main speakers as small or large. What is the advanatages or disadvantages to doing this? Is there any real reason for either?

thanks!

Jim

 

[Stacy Huff]

Here's a discussion involving some very knowledgable folks that I found very informative. For what it's worth, after reading this article I set all my speakers to small. Hope you find it worthwhile.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...ight=Sub+Music

 

[Jason Wolters]

Jim,
Although it didn't take much space to pose your question, it will take a lot to comprehensively answer it.
In a nutshell, no speaker should ever be set to large unless it has the capablity of handling bass. i.e 3 way design. With this said, it is normally better to set everything to small due to the fact that a decent sub can always reproduce the low bass frequencies better than most mains. This is a general answer. Understanding bass management in DD is a long process. There are many variables.

 

[Jim Carr]

Thanks Jason.. you answered my question.. and helped me come up with about 100 more Here is a start...
I have the Polk RM6600 speaker system with the PW250 sub they offer.. it's all low end stuff.. but better than the SONY box set I started with.
Anyway.. my question is polk suggests you run the main speakers thru the sub (in to sub, from sub OUT to receiver)... should my main speakers still then be set to small?
thanks alot!!
Jim

 

[Tom D]

If you read on in your owners manual, what polk is suggesting is that you use your receivers elft and right speaker outputs, to feed your sub. from the sub speaker level out you feed your left and right front speakers. On your receiver you disable the subwoofer and set the front speaker setting to large - in effect what you are doing is sending all the bass information including the lfe track through to tour subwoofer and then using the built in crossover network of the sub to feed your left and right speakers. The rest of the speaker settings should be set to small. The thinking behind all this is that your speakers must have a roll off point before 80 hz, since most receivers will not allow you to play with crossover settings Polk wants you to hear a seamless crossover from your speakers to the sub. Since they know what there speakers are capable of, they have designed the sub/sat hook up to give you a smoother sound with there preferred method of hook up.
If on the other hand you hook your speakers up to the receiver and your sub to the sub out jack then you woulkd set all your speakers to small and sub on, This way any information below 80hz will be sent to the sub. and any info above that freq. to the speakers.
Most often than not, it is recomended to set your speakers to small and let the lower frequencies be handled by a powered sub so that there will be more "head room" in the receiver to handle hi current passages where all speakers are working equally hard.
Hope this helped

 

[Jim Carr]

Thnaks Tom that did help. I have one question though.. this Onkyo DS575x receiver only lets me set the Center and/or the surrounds to small/large. It says nothing about mains or fronts. I guess I should set the CENTER to large?

thanks!

Jim

 

[Nick G]

Jim, did you read the thread that Stacy linked, especially the post by Brian Florian (sp?)? Your answers lie there. In a nut shell though, set everything to small and let your sub handle the lows.

Nick

 

[Bob_A]

I think the important question should be: if we are using an external sub with a loudspeaker, what should we set the crossover at? In other words, the loudspeaker will be set to "small", and then we will need to cross it over at, say, 40-80Hz. As for preferring the bass of a loudspeaker to that of a subwoofer...I do not see why this idea is so far-fetched (and why this inherently must mean that you need a "better" subwoofer), particularly for frequencies above 40 or 50Hz. Sometimes you may find that a loudspeaker has more "tuneful" or "quicker" bass than that of your corner loaded external sub, sometimes you may find yourself localizing the external sub when playing music, and you may also find that the driver blending is preferrable as well.