2 channel system and subs.

Rick U said:
Very nice set up. I've been tweaking settings on my subs all day. At one point I was ready to swear off subs altogether. Now the system is sounding better than ever. Lots of trial and error but here is what worked best. I turned the subs off then ran the room calibration sweep (Dirac Live) and saved a filter setting as close to flat as possible. Next I set the subs to 56 hertz and adjusted with the volume by ear.

Love the wheels on your Wilson's. My boys would be racing those across the living room.
Click to expand...

Never had a problem with my kids.

children-locked-up-in-a-cage.jpeg
 
I'm using a combination of crossover and DSP (via the Dual Core) and loving the results.
 
lol, Mike you've now officially crossed over to the dark side, you'll never have a simple system setup agian....

Welcome to the club my brother :-)
 
annapolis Raider said:
lol, Mike you've now officially crossed over to the dark side, you'll never have a simple system setup agian....

Welcome to the club my brother :-)
Click to expand...



I've learned the hard way that you can't gear (as in audio gear) yourself to great sound. You must fix the room, ensure perfect, stable power. And most importantly, creating great sound is a multi step approach. Subs are for midrange - not bass. A Crossover for the subs so they don't play too high into the frequency (I found 125hz to be best) and DSP for 150hz down only is the ONLY ONLY ONLY way to fix long, difficult bass nodes. Its a shotgun approach - not rifle.

The biggest obstacle is overcoming laziness to try these types of things, a willingness to invest hard earned dollars and most importantly, checking preconceived notions at the door.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
 
Most Audiophiles will hate hearing this but, the room is the ultimate speed limit on the performance of any gear. The bigger the room generally the higher the speed limit. I don't care what gear you buy, a bad room with trump the performance of perfectly good gear every time. In the long run, actually measuring and attempting to fix the issues will always be cheaper than saying "well that didn't work, I'll try some different gear"

It was very interesting at this year's CES when you actually had some good examples of BIG room sound, with the Focal Grande Utopia setup and the Perfect 8 setup. I heard from more than a few people had never heard sound like that from a stereo. There's a reason, its called Physics.
 
+1

Well said, especially checking preconceived notions at the door.

Mike said:
I've learned the hard way that you can't gear (as in audio gear) yourself to great sound. You must fix the room, ensure perfect, stable power. And most importantly, creating great sound is a multi step approach. Subs are for midrange - not bass. A Crossover for the subs so they don't play too high into the frequency (I found 125hz to be best) and DSP for 150hz down only is the ONLY ONLY ONLY way to fix long, difficult bass nodes. Its a shotgun approach - not rifle.

The biggest obstacle is overcoming laziness to try these types of things, a willingness to invest hard earned dollars and most importantly, checking preconceived notions at the door.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
Click to expand...
 
Rick U said:
Very nice set up. I've been tweaking settings on my subs all day. At one point I was ready to swear off subs altogether. Now the system is sounding better than ever. Lots of trial and error but here is what worked best. I turned the subs off then ran the room calibration sweep (Dirac Live) and saved a filter setting as close to flat as possible. Next I set the subs to 56 hertz and adjusted with the volume by ear.

Love the wheels on your Wilson's. My boys would be racing those across the living room.
Click to expand...

Thanks Rick.. The Wheels are the easiest way to get them temporarily setup. According to Wilson, you shouldn't leave them on the castors when they've been setup because the woofers aren't designed to be at the height they are with the castors. I can attest they're correct, once I put them on the spikes, the bass cleaned up a lot and was actually deeper and tighter.

I'm still a believer in not using an active crossover. I do agree that time alignment is a big issue without one. It's a damned if you, damned if you don't scenario. Without active crossovers the highs and mids keep musicality (at least from my experience with the Bryston). With active xovers bass does integrate a better, but you lose all the goodness of a pure sounding source with that crossover in the signal path. I'm interested in trying something else, but at some point the issue becomes moot when I consider price. Here's what I mean: If I spend $15-20K on a crossover, I could easily just upgrade my Sasha's to Alexia's for that price (plus just a bit more, but hey it's not that much more). For it to be worth it, the most I'd be willing to spend would be about $4-6K.

Here's how it looks now.

attachment.php


And in "Disco" mode with my Philips Hue lights (totally off-topic, but they're fun as heck)

attachment.php
 
Great setup. The way you have the sub in the pics, you can manually adjust time alignment by moving it forward and backward a small amount at a time. Somebody told me a long time ago it was where the cone starts not the front exterior that matters. ???????? I play with it until it sounds right.

YAY for Phillips Hue lights. they are soooooo much fun. I have a whole light bar w 10 bulbs above my chair and 2 behind my subs to play with when I'm listening.

photo.JPG

Edit - pic is upside-down ???????? I'll work on that.
 
Love it Jock. That's a heck of a light bar. Hope you have it bolted to the rafters!! I just replaced all our recessed lights with their new R30 bulbs. Very cool. Now if I could get a wall mounted keypad to control them that would be a home-run.

Bryan

the professor said:
Great setup. The way you have the sub in the pics, you can manually adjust time alignment by moving it forward and backward a small amount at a time. Somebody told me a long time ago it was where the cone starts not the front exterior that matters. ???????? I play with it until it sounds right.

YAY for Phillips Hue lights. they are soooooo much fun. I have a whole light bar w 10 bulbs above my chair and 2 behind my subs to play with when I'm listening.

View attachment 5771

Edit - pic is upside-down ???????? I'll work on that.
Click to expand...
 
I've never found an active crossover that doesn't negatively affect the sound quality of the mains. If your system is resolving and accurate enough, anything you put inline can (and typically does) negatively affect the sound quality.

There are a lot of great articles on how to get a subwoofer to align with the phase of your mains. JL has a series of 3 articles and there is a 3rd party Website that discusses how to do it. Essentially, you have to plug the ports on your mains (they act as essentially a 2nd speaker per channel), and once you do that you can get your phase aligned. From there it's a matter of picking the right x-over freq and then levels. So suffice it to say, I've figured out how to integrate subs into my setup seamlessly. After that, I went and changed my whole system, upgraded my amps to the 2000 series, my Sashas to Alexias and my F110's to a pair of HGS-18's (beasts) and I couldn't be happier.

The articles are named:
Adding a Home Audio Subwoofer – JL Audio Help Center - Search Articles.pdf
Aiming With White Noise.pdf
Aligning the Phase.pdf

They even have several noise loops you can download to play to use for this exact purpose. Some of this info can be found at https://jlaudio.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/categories/200262694-Home-Audio-Support. If you can't find the other's, I'll gladly post them here if you ask.
 
KingRT10 said:
If you are going to use a sub in a 2 channel system, do yourself a favor and purchase an active crossover.
Tacking a sub on at the bottom of your full range speakers, is a comlete disaster. It muddles the bass on certain Cd's and will only sound good on Cd's that you have the sub balanced for them alone.

(I have SF Elipsa's and JL subs)
Click to expand...

A long read but it echo's your sentiments.


almost everything you ever wanted to know about subwoofers
by Barry Ober
http://soundoctor.com/whitepapers/subs.htm
 
I use a JL Audio CR-1 crossover. JL's T/S group has a specific procedure to properly volume and phase align your sub and crossover using a crossover point of 80Hz. Using JL's crossover correctly phase aligned will significantly enhance the mains mids and highs, while providing a low end only a few esoteric speakers with separate bass towers can match.
 
LenWhite said:
I use a JL Audio CR-1 crossover. JL's T/S group has a specific procedure to properly volume and phase align your sub and crossover using a crossover point of 80Hz. Using JL's crossover correctly phase aligned will significantly enhance the mains mids and highs, while providing a low end only a few esoteric speakers with separate bass towers can match.
Click to expand...

I read a white paper from one it's designers recently, apparently to do it right one sends subwoofer signal through and delays the mains.

The internal speaker crossovers time and phase change plus different frequencies travel at different rates or something like that.

It's complex, and the unit is supposed to make it simple.
 
Fundamentally a crossover allows the low bass to be removed from the mains removing a big source of vibration. It also frees up the stereo amp from having to reproduce the most demanding frequencies.

I've read and communicated with the Sound Doctor, he knows from where he speaks.
 
Fundamentally a crossover allows the low bass to be removed from the mains removing a big source of vibration. It also frees up the stereo amp from having to reproduce the most demanding frequencies.

I've read and communicated with the Sound Doctor, he's a wise man.
 
Last edited:
LenWhite said:
Fundamentally a crossover allows the low bass to be removed from the mains removing a big source of vibration. It also frees up the stereo amp from having to reproduce the most demanding frequencies.

I've read and communicated with the Sound Doctor, he's a wise man.
Click to expand...
Must be an echo in here.......haha.

He says it straight out that the controls on the sub woofer will only add more delay to an already delayed and out of phase subwoofer. Being 360 out of phase, as in measuring well on a computer screen isn't going to help things in reality.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top