How To Set Up An AV Receiver HDMI, Bass Management and More

you hey guys I'm gene Dallas ala president of audio holics and today I want to talk to you about setting up an AV receiver a beginning a lot of emails hugo's be getting emails you know on the forums on Facebook people want to know how to set up their even receivers after everything is connected after everything is physically placed how to best configure their base management their inputs the video you know all the streaming features what have you so I think it's a good idea that I take I have a den and a VP processor that we use in the audio all showcase room now it's you know it's about five or six years old maybe even older actually then it discontinued this model but it was their flagship it was a big Billie Beru and to this day they've never equaled it so what's in this guy is pretty much in all their receivers and you know even the marantz pre pros it's kind of based on all of that so if i go through the base management of the ABP you should be well covered and i think if i show you real time on how to set this up it would help a lot of people so with that said let's go to the projector let's fire it up and let's get going let's get this thing configured you got to get your sleeves rolled up a little bit guys all right so I'll see you there okay guys we're back we're in front of the Denon AVP and I'm going to show you the on screen display and basically pulled up the manual settings now I understand that most of these receivers these days have auto EQ and auto setup and I think we should do that as a separate video let's kind of ignore that feature for now and let's just assume we're doing everything manual the old-fashioned way so we'll skip that in every receiver you buy these days that have on-screen displays and they all pretty much have bass management the first thing you want to do is you want to go into the manual setup and you want to go to speaker setup and then speaker setup you can see here we have speaker configuration subwoofer setup distance channel level crossover this one happens to have THX certification so some extra features there most of them don't but I would start out with speaker configuration and that's where we are here so you flip over and there you have your speaker sizes and they even give you diagrams so when you flip between large and small you see the speaker gets smaller when it's on small now I'm going to tell you you've heard us say this before 90% of the cases all your speakers should be set small okay and our particular situation our reference towers are massive they have huge amounts of base output we run them as large because we're also routing LFE base to them as well different situation for us so it like I said in most cases you want to put all your speaker set too small and you see we have the center channel small subwoofer yes surround back surround regular surround which is the side surround so it's all small now in our case we don't have front height channels so I put none now you know for the guys that do want to run large towers and you want to run a sub at the same time you can do it but just realize if you don't have any way to EQ the combined response you could tend to get too much bass output around the crossover region which could sound boomy so just keep that in mind try to listen to see what sounds best ultimately try to measure and if you can EQ EQ so there we go with speaker configuration next to have subwoofer setup now again this is the Denon flagship so it's a very advanced model most receivers don't give you this kind of configurability the Denon AVP actually is three independent subwoofer outputs that means I have channel control and and channel trim and delay for each subwoofer for three of them most of them are just parallel doubts but in this case they're all separate so what we did here was we're running two stereo subs and I configured them left and right sub so I have two subs in the front left and right and then I have a side sub and a back sub now I did that because I wanted to be able to feed two channel outputs into my mini DSP and then split that out into four independent outputs for all four of my subs okay but in your case if you're running once you'll want to go to one spot one speaker in most cases I would tell you to go to two subs if you have that ability as mix not even is left and right I'm just happened to run stereo based on my friend channel so it's a little different but in most cases I would run all your subs mono have the same signal going to all your subs and then the LFE plus main basically routes the subwoofer channel to the subwoofer the LFE plus all the bass combined small plus it allows the main speakers to play large if you're running small speakers then you're going to want to set that to LFE or thx and what that does is it will not allow your subwoofer to be on and to channel so if there's another setting for that but it also won't route bass deep bass to the front channels so we'll go back to what a headset next you got your distance and this is where you need to break out your tape measure another cool thing about this Denon is most of the lower end products will only give you one foot increment adjustments the Denon is so precise that it gives you a point point one foot increment and now again you could do this with the auto EQ or the auto setup with the microphone it's very accurate at measuring distance or you could do it like I do I use a tape measure and I go to the primary seat and I measure from each speaker and that's how we figure out our distances and you see you've got your front left right center I've got two subwoofers here got your surround left and right and surround back left and right and you could adjust that up and down depending on how far away your speakers are and you know ideally you want to get all your speaker's as close to equidistant as possible to the sweet spot doesn't always work out that way and that's why you have these channel channel delay settings so we'll go back now you get to channel levels probably the one of the most important setups when you're setting up your speakers now you could do it two ways you could do it auto which means that the receiver will send pink noise through each speaker for a certain amount of time and you get just your SPL meter out and you adjust the levels or you do manual like I prefer and to let you stay on each speaker so you have plenty of time to make the adjustments that you need so we'll go here you're going to start hearing some noises pretty soon there you have your front left your Center and it just takes you through all the different speakers and then you need to basically use your SPL meter pointing straight up close to the money seat and calibrate each channel so they're about at the same level I calibrate to 75 or actually I use 80 DB just because I like to be really high up above the noise floor the room 80 DB slow C weighted scale on your SPL meter and you go around and then when you get to your subwoofer channels if you do what we do and you use multiple subs and you EQ and you get everything flat you have every seat a good seat you could actually boost the subwoofer channels a few DB higher than the rest of your channels and get away with it and it won't sound offensive so there you have that now the other thing you need to do is your base management again in most cases I would tell you to just use 80 Hertz crossover and be done with it let all your speaker's be set to small and do that but for those that are a little bit more advanced again I'm doing things a little bit differently because it'll way I'm routing my main speakers I set my front crossover much higher because I want all that bass to go to those powered subs that are in my front speakers and still run a mysterio bass again that 250 Hertz on your situation most likely should be 80 Hertz okay center channel 80 surrounds 80 now I chose 90 for the surround backs because they they're sealed design and they just don't have a whole lot of bass output so I'd rather have my sub or four channel handling the bass then having my surround back channels and aren't as good at bass trying to produce the same thing now this is a LFE plus main is not something you'll find on a lot of receivers you'll find it on the better products what this is actually is the subwoofer channel on blu-rays there's actually an LFA Channel and although you set all your crossovers to 80 Hertz LFE could actually go up to to 120 Hertz it could actually go even higher I believe I think the spec is 120 Hertz on blu-ray so I set mine to 120 Hertz when I have the option some products that really depends the older products used to truncate so if you set your crossover at 80 Hertz you would actually lose the LFE that's anything from 80 to 120 Hertz I'm not really sure at how many movies actually have LFE content above 80 Hertz but I tend to set mine at 120 because that's the deep the blue race back so if you have this option go in there and set that to 120 you'll be good to go and that pretty much covers your speaker and bass management setup so I mean guys this is so important I can't tell you how many people's homes I've been to they have a whole surround system set up they didn't do any of the calibrations and then set up any other subwoofer channels or the base management nothing so please get your base management set up get your speaker's playing the right signals at the right levels with the right delays and you'll be 60 to 80% there okay now you know some more advanced settings you know HDMI set up this is basically if you're using a video scaler you know you figure out if you want to use you want to use the receiver as the video scaler a processor or you want the blu-ray to do it or you want your projector to do it you really need to figure out exactly which product you want to do this kind of stuff and I tend to choose the one that has the best chipsets in and and ideally you want your source to do it as much as you can so in most cases I do pass through when I use a receiver let's see if there's anything else oh here's another thing you got to look at anybody that's using external inputs if they're running DVD audio or SACD and you don't have the ability to decode those formats if you have an older product but you have multi-channel inputs denne is really cool with the fact that they actually give you a DSP ability and what that does is that will boost the because when you use SACD there was a problem years ago when you ran two analog outputs it'd be 10 or 15 DB too low so by putting the DSP on the bit on the inputs here it'll boost those levels and it'll also give you base management because years ago they didn't have base management on the analog outputs so I don't use it here you go with the boost I don't use analog preamp outputs anymore on the blu-ray players there's just no need if you have HDMI and you have a product that's hdmi 1.3 or above your best bet is usually to use HDMI it just makes your whole world a lot easier now if you ran all your speakers small and you set it to L Fe plus main equals L Fe so it's not sending the base to the main channels you're going to find in some cases you're not going to episode before output into Channel and that's where you have these extra to channel settings so if you're finding that your subwoofer turns off when you put on a two channel CD make sure that your receiver if it has an advanced setting for two channel make sure you set it up right so you see here I have the front set for large and I have the subwoofer on most of the dennings will give you this I think there's also features and the other receivers for two channel setup so just you know check your user manual all the receivers are different but they all pretty much give you similar features like that then your auto surround mode I like to leave that on that way when a 5.1 or multi-channel signal comes in it knows to decode it and put it in that mode and I think that covers most of that then you know you got your network set up if you're going to do Ethernet into your receiver for streaming and networking I prefer a wired connection over wireless you could use wireless a lot of people use Wireless but I personally set up a little hub right by my Ethernet output of my wall and all of my audio equipment is plugged in through the Ethernet hub wire wired I just preferred it's a more stable connection and I guess call me old-fashioned but that's what I do when I can okay and then this stuff is just this is a preamp so we got preamp assign ability you could change what each preamp output goes to I'm not going to get into this because this goes beyond the scope of what most people are doing for the set up but I think that should cover it guys I think if you have any other questions just put them below and I will you know I'll answer them as best as I can the only other thing I'd say is you know setup your surround mode sometimes you have the ability to set different Pro Logic 2 modes or Pro Logic or the Dolby up sampler mode depending on what you're listening to I listen to Pro Logic 2x when music when I'm listening to multi-channel audio and then when I go to DVDs or blu-ray movies I switch to Pro Logic to cinema so you know you just got to make sure you're in the right modes depending on what you're listening to and you should be good to go the other thing I like to do is when I'm listening to music just to make sure I'm in the right decoding I go to wherever there is a status symbol here and it'll tell you so you're in this case we're not playing anything but it'll tell you what your surrounds in and it'll tell you what the signal is in if you're decoding 2.0 which is PCM two-channel stereo or 5.1 you should be able to get this information off your receiver this should be a menu or should say it on the front display always check that from time to time guys make sure you're actually getting surround sound when you're supposed to be ok and that's it I think we're set so please guys subscribe to this video if you liked it and feel free to answer your ask your questions below we'll be happy to answer till next time guys keep listening you

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 594,262

Keywords: audioholics, video review, How To Set Up An AV Receiver, av receiver set up

Id: Kshhv984GRw

Length: 15min 28sec (928 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 05 2016