Hello,
I had a bit of a problem. When initially calibrating my receiver, a Yamaha RX-V665, I noticed that the center (Canton GLE 455) and surround channels (GLE 430) had a bit of a gap between, say 65hz and 80hz when setting up the receivers internal crossover to 60hz. When raising the crossover to 80, they sounded quite a bit better, with a more even soundfield and more "depth" in the centre channel (more oomph on impacts and low male voices...). However, at 80hz, my mains (Canton GLE 490's towers) simply lacked the deep low end they had before. The overall bass volume was about the same, but I could clearly hear the deep bass tones coming from the subwoofer. (A Yamaha NS-SW500)
I learned to live with this, frequently shifting between a 60hz crossover for music and a 80hz crossover for movies.
-
Eventually, it got old.
So I went to my local HiFi store and asked around for a solution.
One option was to buy a receiver that allowed me to set a different crossover point for each speaker.
Sadly, none of the receivers on display was capable of such a feat. (Or the salesmen simply didn't know which one could do this.)
-
So I came up with an alternate plan: I hooked up my GLE 490's directly to the subwoofer with speaker cables, and changed those speakers to LARGE in the menu of my receiver (the other speakers were kept at small).
I then changed the subwoofers crossover to 55hz, which to my ears sounded like the sweetspot for mains.
I also raised the receiver's crossover to 90hz, which is what the GLE 455 center is rated at (-+3dB).
I kept the SUB-OUT of my receiver enabled, but switched the RCA cable from MAIN IN to LFE only, as the manual of my sub stated that this bypasses whatever internal crossover is set on my subwoofer (55hz), so that the receiver could still send the full LFE + BASS of the center and surround channels.
-
After hooking all of this up and playing around with the SUB volumes both on the receiver and the SUB itself a bit (measuring the output level per channel with a tone sweep) I finally found the sweet spot for my system.
The only question now remaining is this: is it actually okay to feed my subwoofer two signals at once? Can the internal electronics cope with running both speaker wire (Mains) and a RCA cable (LFE+ Bass out)?
For now everything seems and sounds fine, but I just want to make sure that what I've cooked up is going to be okay in the long run.
The subs manual didn't really specify this, so I'm kind of curious if any of you have tried something similar in the past?