where do you cross over your ht setup

John Z, I do exactly what you say not to, and I am not 100% satisfied with how my Sub sounds. Although 100% satisfied with audio is an oxymoron, especially with Subs. Anywho, can you or someone else, explain the technical reason the two filters will interact poorly.

I am going to tinker with cabling tonight and I intend to try your recommendations, but I would like a technical foundation on which to ponder. Thanks in advance.

Yeah you can run into problems if you stack crossovers or interstect them. It's often best to set the crossover on the sub as high as possible if you don't have a bypass, and are using the processors internal crossover. If you like the sound you are hearing "distortion", then there you are!
If it ain't broke, don't fix it!
Still, there are numberous articles by industry professionals that say you shouldn't do what you're doing in general. Still, tinkering and tweeking is ultimatly where it's at, as system set ups and equipment matching will have a great deal to do with all this. Still, what I find is that the single greatest areas or down falls for most is both speaker placment, seating placment, and system set up paramaters and tweeking!...not to mention other room acoustics problems. All that is followed by poor gear selection for appropriate needs being a distant last!
Good luck

For lack of a better word, I fiddled around with the setup last night. Changing around the settings for large and small, Xovers (5hz increments), and the Sub Xover bypass.

The jury is out on HT, but, the bass did improve with multi-channel music when I, set only the rear speakers to "small," selected 80hz as the Xover point, and bypassed the Subs internal Xover.

I am still curious about the technicalities. I would imagine that like most everything else in audio, less is more. A signal running through two Xovers is unnecessary and doubles the potential to degrade the sound quality. Not to mention slope differential (db per octave) or overlap.

Thanks for the tips.

Distortion...Every crossover except 6 dB/octive is a cascade of several filters. The common 24dB/octive slope used with electronic crossovers is four stages. Guess how you make a 48 dB/octive X/O.

There is nothing evil about "stacking" two crossovers, however the very steep crossover may not be desirable, and if the two X/O are set to different frequencies things could get messy.

Eldartford, that makes sense. I can see were two Xovers set at different points with different slopes would interact and possibly get messy. Thanks much for the explanation of Xovers, I didnt know that.