where do you cross over your ht setup

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.

60 Hz.

Distortion- I'm glad to hear you heard a difference trying it this way. It never hurts to experiment!

It's just good advice I wanted to pass along that I came across on Polk Audio's website. Although I do not use Polk speakers or a Polk Sub, the information provided there applies to any speaker setup. In fact, Polk asserts that connecting your active sub via line-level cables can often sound worse than a speaker-level connection unless you do it right. This may sound counterintuitive, but his reasoning is that the speaker-level connection will avoid the filtered LFE output of most pre/pros and that any cable effects introduced are much less of a degradation to the audio signal than the double filtering of multiple crossovers in the signal path. Getting a good "blend" between your sub and mains is only made more difficult if the crossover point for LFE output is fixed at something like 80 or 100hz, as in many mid-level A/V receivers.

You can find the info at www.polkaudio.com, click on "Home Audio" then "Setting up a home theater system" under the FAQ's & Advice section. You can find a fairly detailed explanation of why it's bad to "stack" filters there as well. Check it out.. it's a good read even for seasoned audiophiles.