Home Theater Basics - How to Setup a Subwoofer

hey what's going on guys youthman here today we're going to be talking about how to hook up a subwoofer to your home theater now if you're new to home theater this video should be super helpful to you if you don't mind like and subscribe and let's get into it so here we have the back of the monolith 13 inch subwoofer typically there's three different ways that you can connect a subwoofer to your home theater avr which is an audio video receiver or a processor the first and most common way is the rca this is an unbalanced input typically what you'll do is you'll take an rca cable like this and if you have dual rcas on the back there's two ways to connect it most subwoofers will allow you to connect one of these typically the red and that's going to be for the lfe channel which is the low frequency effect channel of your avr so all of the low frequencies will come from the avr into the subwoofer and then this amplifier will amplify that signal and power the subwoofer if you do not have an lfe input what you may need to do is just get a y splitter like this it has a female end here and two male ends here so we would connect the two males to the subwoofer like this and then we take this male insert it into that female there and you've got it connected now on the back of your avr or your processor you'll need to look for the rca sub out to connect the other end of that rca cable a second method of connecting a subwoofer to your avr if your avr or your processor has xlr inputs so this is a lot different connection than this right here you can see we've got three prongs on the back here we've got an xlr balanced input typically balanced inputs will give you i think it's about a three decibel increase in gain and so that's one benefit the other benefit of balanced is typically you have a lower noise floor and you get lower noise with this so if your avr or your processor has balanced i'd recommend using that and so simply you're just going to connect the male end to the female in here just like that now of course your avr or processor will need an xlr sub out and so you would take that and connect it to the back of your receiver or your processor now some subwoofers will have an extra xlr output here so what this allows you to do is connect another xlr cable from this subwoofer to another subwoofer and that daisy chains them together now these are pretty much unpowered signals and so all you're doing is getting the signal the lfe channel to this amplifier and then that's powering this subwoofer and then the other xlr cable here would go to the second subwoofer and then its internal amplifier would power that subwoofer of course here we have our two-prong iec power connection so of course you would need to plug that into your wall outlet and then we've got the power on and off switch right there now if you have an older subwoofer you may have speaker level inputs i wouldn't recommend this unless you just do not simply have a newer avr or processor that has one of the xlr or rca sub outs but if that's the case you can connect speaker wire from your speakers to the subwoofer and then from the subwoofer to your avr or processor now on the back of your subwoofer you'll have different controls the first control here is the crossover this tells the subwoofer what frequencies it's going to play now some people like to set the crossover on the subwoofer my preference is to turn this all the way as high as your crossover will go in this case it's 160 hertz now by turning this all the way to the right we're in essence just disabling the internal crossover inside this amplifier that way we can set our crossover for each speaker inside the avr or processor accordingly next we have a phase option some have a variable phase so it's a knob that you can adjust through different phases sometimes there's like a toggle switch like this which will set it from zero usually to 180 degrees now without going into too much detail on when to change that setting for the most part if you've got one or more subwoofers and they're the same distance from your main listening position typically we'll just leave that on zero now running software like rew which is called roomy q wizard you can take some measurements of your room with a calibrated microphone to find out which option works best in your setup if you have multiple subwoofers in different locations in your room that's where this will become very very useful the next we have the levels so this is going to allow you think of it kind of like a gain some people call this a volume it's not really volume you're actually setting the gain level input from the amplifier itself typically i recommend starting off with about half gain on the level typically that'll give you enough gain on the amplifier itself but then also give you plenty of flexibility inside the avr or processor to make some fine-tune adjustments to the level inside the avr on this particular subwoofer we do have an option to turn on or off the crossover so again here i have it set to off so even if i had this set to 40 hertz it really wouldn't make any difference but i always turn it to the right just to make sure this subwoofer does offer some eq settings so we've got extended as well as thx and then the last option is an auto on or always on option now i prefer to leave subwoofer set to auto on and that way the amplifier just isn't continually on when the amplifier no longer senses a signal from your avr or processor it powers down and then once you turn it back on it powers back up then over to your far right we do have an led indicator so this just lets you know when the amplifier is powered on and if it's in a standby status so in this particular model if it's green it's on if it's red it's in standby if it's flashing you probably have an issue with the amplifier now one last thought before i wrap up the video i'm not a big proponent of fancy cables so here you can see this is just an inexpensive cable i picked up on amazon and it works great also xlr cables same thing these are from monoprice they're very inexpensive very affordable so you don't have to spend really huge money to get great performance now if you found this video helpful be sure to like and subscribe because i produce weekly content on home theater tips tours as well as product reviews and check out the links below for some inexpensive options for cables and as always you guys be blessed and we'll catch you in the next video

Channel: Youthman

Views: 127,217

Keywords: Home Theater, Youthman, Home Cinema, Dolby Atmos, 4K, HDR, Dolby, Home Theater Basics, Home Theater Subwoofers, How to Connect a Home Theater Subwoofer, RCA Cable, XLR Cable

Id: dUzqJCcRe0Y

Length: 7min 7sec (427 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 22 2021