Connect a Subwoofer to Anything... Easier than you think

good morning i'm randy i'm the chief audio man and today we're talking about how to hook up a subwoofer if you don't have a sub out on your amplifier please subscribe if you haven't already subscribed we're getting we're getting a big bump and i appreciate that may not mean a lot to you but it does mean a lot to me we're also giving away some speakers who doesn't want free speakers crazy people that's who everybody wants free speakers i will link that video in the description it'll give you all the instructions on how to sign up for the giveaway what you need to do come on in let's talk about subwoofers [Music] today okay so i've gotten a few questions on if people can hook up a subwoof woofer without um a sub out on their amp and the good news is absolutely yes for sure you absolutely can so generally and when i say generally i mean always there's three ways to hook up a subwoofer there may be some other technical things but anyway three common ways to hook up a subwoofer if you have an av receiver [Applause] almost guaranteed you have one if not two sub woofer outs and those will be a single cable and that single cable takes both channels from a pcm standpoint pcms2 channel or all channels from like bitstream which would be you know five channel seven channel nine channel dolby atmos all that good stuff and it combines them so it none of that matters it combines all the signals into one and then it goes in and on the back of a subwoofer you will have what says lfe you take that one wire from your av receiver and you just plug it right into the um the rca that is labeled lfe okay the second way to hook up a subwoofer is if you have where called pre-amp outs and preamp outs of your amplifier will look just like this it'll be just two regular rcas a white and a red one or if you're from japan they're both black which is kind of cool um anyway what you do is you take your preamp outs and you go right into here okay so what that's doing is taking both signals right and left and it's sending them to the subwoofer and with a sub out and a preamp out as you turn up the volume on your av receiver or your amp it increases the voltage to the subwoofer which then in turn raises or lowers the volume of the subwoofer and that also works for the other one so in instances where you don't have a subwoofer out or don't have a pre-amp out you can use what's called line level inputs or speaker level inputs it's very easy to do you just take uh your speaker cables out from your amp just like you're going your speakers but instead of going to your speakers you will connect them to the speaker level inputs okay that way you're getting a signal it's it's identical to basically an rca and it's not identical but it's close enough for us it's just like an rca because it's taking both left and right channels it's taking the signal off of there and it's also taking the voltage variability off of there to control the volume of the subwoofer and then all you do all you do is take your your cables out from here to your speakers and you're done and you don't have to uh worry about having a sub out on your amp or your preamp now disregard the preamp you don't have to worry about having to sub out on your amp you're almost always going to have a sub out on the receiver though one moment so one of the advantages of well let's back up okay so you've got your signal to your subwoofer okay and your component whether it be your amp or your receiver is now controlling the volume of your subwoofer okay so the next important thing to do is to set what's called a low pass frequency and low pass frequency simply means you just want the base going to the subwoofer that's it okay so on the back of a subwoofer normally almost always there is going to be a little knob okay and that knob is going to go from 60 hertz and sometimes up to 106 this 160 up to maybe 250 it just depends on the sub so what you want to do is dependent on your front speakers and how low they go or and really how much bass you want to have you will set this to a frequency okay that sounds kind of complicated it's not just start out at 80. and they're not marked here so 12 o'clock on this is 110 the lowest setting 60. so just go boop right there in the middle start out like that and then you're good you can adjust it from there from that point forward okay so if we're talking about low pass frequencies and the good news is you always have one on a subwoofer so you don't have to worry about all that high frequency information going to your subwoofer on a receiver you have what are called high pass filters for the front channels and what that does is it instead of sending all that low base information to your maybe teeny tiny little bookshelves you set a high pass filter in that and then you're only sending the higher frequencies and when i say higher 80 to 150 hertz and up are going to your front channels or your front speakers or your speakers and the good thing about that is it doesn't your your fronts aren't trying to handle all that deep low end okay and it has a tendency to make your front speakers or your speakers sound much better because they're not having to try to reproduce those frequencies that they can't really reproduce anyway just because of the way they're designed so that would be set in your av receiver okay well what about if i have an integrated amp and i don't have a high pass filter on there and almost always you will not have a high pass filter on uh your amp your integrated amp or you know your low class dms well there's an option for that and we're going to go old school so if you're setting a high fast and low pass filter on your av receiver you're use utilizing what's called digital signal processing or dsp okay almost every speaker that's not powered is going to have they're going to have crossovers as well but those are not going to be digital those are going to be old school analog or discrete which means separate components if you want to put a high pass filter on your speakers your front speakers and you're running maybe an inexpensive class d chinese amplifier or you're running an integrated amp that doesn't have high pass filters you can get one of these this is a capacitor now they've been doing this in the auto industry for decades and they're called base blockers okay and it's just a capacitor okay so based on the resistance of your speakers and they're generally going to be eight six or four ohm speakers there is a crossover guide that tells you what value of capacitor you you need to buy or purchase or steal i wouldn't recommend stealing to cross over at a specific frequency okay does that make sense so i would say for an integrated amp style solution if you want to do this and you don't have to do this you could do it and just play around with it and see if it works or if it works better if it makes the music better so what you would do is you would i would recommend probably 80 hertz if your speaker is particularly light on bass maybe 100 hertz okay so that'll be a a capacitor value and this one capacitor is called a first order high pass filter and it will block the frequencies in a pretty um it's not going to be a steep slope and that's good you don't want a super steep slope unless you know exactly what you're doing if you have a very nice rolled off slope for your high pass filter that's a good thing okay so what you would do is you'd take this and you would cut your speaker cable well you cut the positive lead of your speaker cable and you just put this in line with it and wrap it up if you're good at soldering you'll be done in no time cut it solder one end here solder the other end here and so now this is in line with your uh speaker cable going into your speaker and then just uh put a bunch of electrical tape around it okay if that seems a little bit um intimidating to you and it can for some god know or god sorry god knows that i'm not a very good i'm not very good behind a soldering iron um there's ways around it you can crimp it there's products out there that you could um basically crimp the end of the speaker cable to the end of this and put it in line okay so that's a cool solution it's cheap too this is uh these capacitors are probably two or three dollars now they're not they're not the most accurate capacitors and when i say accurate i mean what is their um what's their tolerances so much more expensive capacitors will have like a one to two percent tolerance capacitor like this has probably a ten percent tolerance but who cares if you're just doing a high pass filter to your um to your speakers it doesn't really matter okay excuse me i'm gonna take a drink so if you're feeling adventurous and that's something you want to try and you can try it for probably less than five dollars a little bit of speaker wire and some electrical tape that can be an option for you and it's fun to to do things like that okay so um going back to the subwoofer um this is a polk subwoofer and much of the controls are done through the remote i don't like that i like knobs because it's way easier if you feel like you have too much bass just to go or want more bass very easy when you have a remote control the battery always goes dead it's always those flat little round quarter shaped batteries which i don't have and i go to the store to get it and i end up getting milk and forgetting it or i get the wrong one i digress so you're going to have um on especially on more affordable subwoofers generally you're going to have a volume control just like this this isn't a volume control this is the crossover but you'll have another one just like right there you just turn across turn the volume up or down okay then you might also have what's called phase control oftentimes on more affordable subs it's either it'll say 0 or 180 and what phase is especially in low frequencies they're a much wider sine wave so sound always goes in sine waves right so high frequencies are like this lower frequencies are like this okay so what happens is if your front speakers or their speakers that you're playing the music from is out of phase with your subwoofer what ends up happening is you can actually cancel out your lower frequencies so what phase control allows one to do is to get the phase in line with your front speaker so the bass literally sounds like it's coming from the front speakers instead of the subwoofer because lower frequencies are much less directional than higher frequencies lower frequencies almost go out well they don't almost they do go out in a circular fashion and they go out in a larger circular fashion as you get lower into the base frequencies but anyway so phase control uh it's very easy to set you have your child or somebody else go to the subwoofer and go to the switch and sometimes there's a knob okay and you turn on your music that you know and enjoy and you're very familiar with and you have them actuate the switch if it sounds bassier and you like it then you're done if it doesn't sound as bassy you switch it to the other way if that way sounds bassy then you're done if you have a potentiometer style of a knob it can be more complicated but if you have a potentiometer again just have someone go to it you sit where you want to sit and listen to music and just have them slowly turn it until that bass feels like it's coming from the front speakers okay does that make sense so um this again is this is an older poke all right what i'm going to do is i'm going to link two very affordable subwoofers uh one is a 75 dollar monoprice subwoofer and i actually own that and it's at my office at work and i use that with some edifier powered speakers works very well it's good it's only a 60 watt subwoofer and i will argue that if you are only using a subwoofer for music you don't need a 3 4 500 watt subwoofer those live in a home theater because with music or not music with movies and television shows and stuff they're very dynamic which means they they're they can be soft and then really loud and booming and exploding and stuff like that so in in those use case scenarios a higher powered subwoofer is very important so one of them is the monoprice i think it's 60 watts and the other one and this is starting to become a very reoccurring theme on this channel is a sony it's on sale for black friday again the thing that both of those subs have is speaker level inputs and if you're looking to add a subwoofer to a amp or to an amp that doesn't have a subwoofer out you need speaker level inputs okay if you have a powered speaker and you want to hook up a sub and it doesn't have a sub out you're out of luck unless you want to do some serious cutting and voiding of warranties you're out of luck because you don't have those speaker lines available in some rare instances you may be able to do that on some powered speakers it's simply a speaker cable going from one side to the other however in that situation you're only going to get half you're only going to get one channel of bass response i guess it's better than nothing but if you're gonna buy powered speakers look for a sub out okay another thing subwoofers come either sealed or ported excuse me um a for music and i'm speaking in wide generalities here there is obvious exceptions to this in general a sealed subwoofer is going to be faster and more accurate however for the same enclosure size it will not go as low as a ported subwoofer okay i have and i was gonna show it but that subwoofer actually doesn't have speaker level inputs i have a 10 inch sealed subwoofer and i love it child interruption [Music] i have no idea where we were um i think we were talking about some affordable options um the monoprice i think is [Music] 65 or 75 dollars and that's a great option 60 watts small room if you're only listening to music it'll work it's an 8 inch it'll work every day of the week um the other option is the sony um and again reoccurring theme on this channel the sony core series is an excellent um entry level into what i would consider high-end audio this is good stuff it's a hundred bucks it's higher power and the good thing about the sony is it goes much lower it's specked out to go to 28 hertz i have a much more expensive subwoofer that goes down to about the same frequency level the amount of price is only spec down to like 50 hertz okay so if you have the extra 25 dollars personally i would buy the sony simply because it goes down much deeper they both have line level or speaker level inputs i think they both have i know the sony has phase adjustment as well but if you're wanting to add a subwoofer and i will argue that if you buy a an affordable set of high quality bookshelf speakers that only go down to 60 hertz or 50 hertz such as the sony core series but however i think it's sold out on amazon right now you can get it from best buy or some other places or the numes the numes are a great great speaker for less than a hundred dollars so you buy the nume numes for 90. you buy the sony subwoofer for 100 bucks you're at 190 okay i will argue that that 190 dollar bookshelf and sub system will sound better than a 200 dollar pair of bookshelf speakers or even a 200 pair of tower speakers because it's not going to have that complete frequency range does that make sense so actually buying a high quality bookshelf speaker and adding a sub is going to sound better and have way more placement freedom than buying a set of equivalently priced towers and you're going to be hard-pressed to find a tower for the 200 mark unless you buy the sony core series which was on sale and i almost bought them today but i had to hold back because you may have seen up there i have the q a q acoustics 30 20. not the 30 20i because i am the cheap audio man and i try to buy something that's still in production still being sold but maybe a generation behind because then you save some money i have the 30 20s okay q acoustics they're pretty good um also on their way back is another pair of elac debut b 6.2s second gen debut found a really good deal amazon warehouse also on the way kef q150 okay so we're gonna have a heck of a saturday speaker shootout for under 300 coming up all right that was a mouthful this went longer than i thought it would oh but please subscribe if you're new here please sign up for the the speaker giveaway and uh like the video put the little icon thing on so you see when i when i drop videos i appreciate it i really appreciate it and have a good sunday

Channel: cheapaudioman

Views: 288,839

Keywords:

Id: SVgXpgufN1k

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020