Can anyone help me get my Infintiy IL-60s in phase? (1 Viewer)

[David Ruiz]

For a long time now, I've had a single pair of Infinity IL-60s, which I used as my front left/right speakers. I've been using a B4+ as my subwoofer.

I don't have a center and I didn't have any surround speakers, so basically, all I had was a 2.1 stereo system.

The bass was perfect when it was just those.

Today, I received a second pair of Infinity IL-60s and the bass has completely disappeared. The speakers are out of phase and I don't know what to do to keep them in phase with the fronts and with the B4+ all at the same time.

Can anyone give me any advice?

The B4+ is in the back of my room, opposite the front IL60s.

 

[ChrisWiggles]

Are you running the second pair as surrounds? You might just want to set them to small. Otherwise, it'll be a complicated game of placement and room acoustics between all these speakers producing bass. In fact, I'd set them all to small unless listening to music, place the B4+ where it needs to be and call it a day.

 

[David Ruiz]

Yes, I am running the second pair as surrounds.

The thing about setting them to small (the mains, I mean) is that the bass does not get re-routed to the B4+ when small, it just disappears forever.

When playing the airplane collision scene from "Fight Club" (Front speakers set to large) there is very, very, strong bass in this scene coming from the front speakers. When playing the same scene with the front speakers set to small, the bass completely disappears and the B4+ plays absolutely nothing in this scene.

The same is true of every movie I have tried, which is why I prefer to keep the front speakers on the large setting (plus, it sounds much, much better that way, as voices sound much more natural on the large setting than on the small setting).

I could change the surrounds to small and see if that works, but I won't change the large setting on the front speakers because I really lose out on way too much bass if I do that.

 

[ChrisWiggles]

That is extremely bizarre, any AV processor should route that bass to the subwoofer, or other speakers set to LARGE. What receiver/processor are you using, there may be some more detailed settings that you are overlooking.

 

[MikeyWeitz]

Yes, you probably did not tell your receiver that you have a sub. Need to set sub to on.

 

[David Ruiz]

Sub is always set to on, on the receiver. That is not the problem at all.

The receiver I'm using is a Philips FR 975.

I did some more testing and it seems like I get the best bass response with front speakers set to large and surrounds set to small. All of the strong bass in that Fight Club scene I mentioned comes back and sounds great.

When I set all speakers to small (sub on) the bass disappears completely and you can't feel/hear any of it.

I still am getting some cancellation by setting the surrounds to small, but not as bad as it was before. I tested this by playing music with a lot of heavy bass. When I set it to just stereo mode (fronts large, sub on) the bass is powerful enough to shake the couch. When I turn the rear speakers on (small setting) some of the bass disappears, but it's still quite powerful.

 

[rob-h]

You are not getting cancellation by setting them to small. By setting them to small everything below the crossover freq is sent to the sub. It has to be produced from multiple sources at the same time to get cancellation. You are probably noticing that with all speakers active that you have less headroom. Thats why its lacking bass in that config. Have you calibrated your sub?

 

[David Ruiz]

Of course! It's the first thing I did when I bought it. I calibrated it with DVE. All speakers set to 75 dBs while the B4+ is set to 86 dB to compensate for the wrong bass tones in DVE.

 

[MikeyWeitz]

What is a B4+?

 

[David Ruiz]

The best and most affordable subwoofer on the planet.

 

[MikeyWeitz]

R u referring to the SVS B4+?
If so, then you should be getting PLENTY of bass no matter what.

Not sure about the affordable part tho.

 

[David Ruiz]

I am, but only if I set the surround speakers to small, otherwise I get no bass. I also get no bass if I set mains to small.

 

[MikeyWeitz]

It's your bass management. Cancellation from smallish (driver) rears would not be enough to knock your bass out.

How do you have a $2k+ subwoofer and a cheap Phillips receiver?

Do your infinitys have the built in powered subwoofer? Are you using them? If so, that's your problem!

 

[David Ruiz]

The rear speakers (IL-60s) are not small. Each speaker has a self-powered 500 watt 12" driver on them, which might explain why all 4 speakers (set to large) at the same time, might be canceling each other out, not to mention the four 12" drivers that the B4+ has.

I've got eight 12" drivers all running at exactly the same time in all different parts of my room.

I'm going to upgrade my receiver soon, but I wanted the speakers first. The problem I'm having, is most likely not the receiver though. I'm going to upgrade the receiver no matter what, even if I can get great bass response from my current setup, all I'm saying is that I really, really doubt that the problem is being caused by the receiver.

 

[MikeyWeitz]

If the powered subs are on, that is your problem.

Turn them off on ALL speakers and let your $2500 sub do it's job.

Re calibrate with all the infity 12's turned off. They are doing you more harm then good.
Then run all the speakers small.

Problem will be solved.

 

[Greg Bright]

Have you tried reversing the wires to the surround IL60s? That seems to be the most obvious cure. As an aside, I run my IL60 subs in series with my corner sub which has a 50Hz high pass filter, disabling the 150Hz XO on the IL60 and running them as small. Obviously I disagree with the previous post.

 

[LanceJ]

I agree.

Also, it is not totally uncommon for a receiver's/processor's internal wiring to be reversed.

BTW: for 100% phase cancellation to take place, all channels involved in this have to be carrying the SAME signal. So surround mixers wouldn't place the same bass signal in every channel for this exact reason, & why would they anyway? To create intense bass? No, because they have the LFE channel available for that! And as far as music is concerned, for artistic reasons they also wouldn't do this. I run my own music surround system "large" on every channel (each has an 8" woofer) and have encountered no bass-related problems with 5.1 music or movies.

Also, electrical phase cancellation is a real possibility when using bass management. This can happen when cramming multiple bass signals into one channel i.e. choosing "small" on a processor. The more manipulations that are performed on a signal, the more possibility for errors, whether its done in the digital domain or otherwise.

I have no idea why the receiver would shut off the subwoofer output when the "small" setting is chosen-if anything, the sub should get louder. Maybe its DSP chip is fried?