Is 80 Hz the Best Crossover Frequency Setting for Your Speakers? Home Theater Basics

what's up YouTube how are you doing today I'm trying to do your techno dad and in this video we're gonna see if 80 Hertz is the proper crossover for your speakers and we're gonna get into it right after the jump and I'm back now if you're new to the channel my name is China and I've been into home theater for the last 25 years not only that I'm also a working DJ and music producer so if you want to learn how to properly setup your speaker system you've come to the right place and you should consider subscribing alright everyone where are we gonna cross over these speakers at that's pretty much the question and it's a very hot topic I know a couple years ago I believe I had a dent in a VR of showing some sort of setup and at that point in time I was actually experimenting with different crossover points for my main speakers and my center Channel and there was a whole bunch of comments in the comment section saying oh you've got crossover result raw what are you talking about what are you doing you don't know anything and it was actually pretty funny so why don't we get into the standards first and see why thx has dubbed these the standard and then we'll get into what I think and how to apply it to your speakers alright so I'm sure you may know and if you don't hate great I'm glad you're here to learn something new the standards the thx standard that is is 80 Hertz and that's where you cross over all your speakers well at least the ear level speakers I'm not talking about any kind of at most our height channels right now we're just talking about the ear level speakers so the five and a 5.1 or the seven and a 7.2 or whatever you like to call it that's what we're gonna be talking about today so the standard is eighty but that's not for your subwoofer that your subwoofer is supposed to be at 120 and that's what a lot of AVR is default the LFE channel to 120 Hertz so we've got 80 Hertz here and we've got 120 Hertz here so we've got about 40 Hertz of overlap and what this means is you know the low-end of your ear level speakers will stop at 80 Hertz I mean it doesn't stop exactly at 80 Hertz usually it rolls off at a slope of like 24 decibels per octave that kind of thing and your subwoofer will go up to 120 Hertz and it'll roll off there now if you don't know what any of this means or would like a visual representation let's jump onto the computer and check out what it looks like in Logic Pro so here we have a blank project and I've opened up an EQ I'll set up 80 Hertz for the top-end and 120 Hertz for the bottom now here's where they overlap but we can't really see what's going on so to better illustrate I'm just gonna swap these two so we can see the overlap a little bit better so this is the overlapping area where these frequencies are played on both your speakers and your subwoofer so why 80 Hertz why is 80 Hertz the standard that's a great question right so if we go and look at some speakers let's look at M and K Miller & kreisel they specifically make THX certified speakers and what you notice is these are all very small they all have L CRS or left-center rights as you can see in the picture here these are your left center and right channels you'll notice that five and a quarter inches is the largest size diameter driver in these speakers and if we look at the frequency response we see they go down to 75 Hertz this is why 80 Hertz is the THX standard the LCR's are small speakers and don't go low frequency wise all the bass is managed by the subwoofer so if you have a satellite or bookshelf speaker system with a subwoofer 80 Hertz is probably where you're gonna want to be at now for instance I'm actually reviewing a 5.1 sent over by Martin Logan and it's made out of their smaller speakers the motion for eyes which have a four inch driver that frequency response on those speakers are from 70 to 23 kilohertz and that makes sense to have you know an 80 heard crossover point so the big question is what if you have large towers or a 3-way center channel well surely they can handle more event No 80 Hertz they can go lower than that for sure right for instance I have a pair of klipsch RF seven threes that were sent into review from Cory so thank you Cory for sending those in by the way if you guys want to pick up some ro7 threes for yourself I'll put Cory's link down in the description for you guys to check it out anyway these speakers go down to 32 Hertz so why would I want to set the crossover at 80 Hertz and just like cut him off at the legs like that doesn't make any sense to me and these speakers are phenomenal like phenomenal Wow it's just crazy they got a lot of bass they got dual 10-inch drivers so they can definitely handle bass so what do you do in that situation so what I did was use the bath house a nightclub scene in John wick to test the crossover frequencies now of course this scene has a whole lot of stuff going on there's gunshots people screaming quiet music loud music glass shattering all this people communicating on you know the radios and all kinds of stuff going on so the scene has a lot of different sounds that that go all through the frequency range so I figured this would be a good way for me to kind of dial in my crossover point so I went with an 80 hurt crossover watched the scene then selected 70 watched it 60 50 40 you get the idea now I noticed something at 50 that I you know I started to go back and forth between 80 and 50 and 80 and 50 and that was drastic enough for me to notice that there's actually a fuller sound coming in at 50 Hertz and you know the rf7 3s have dual 10-inch drivers on both so there's four 10-inch drivers two subwoofer is the S vs PB 4000 so it's a thirteen and a half inch woofer and then we got the four tens that actually made a fuller sound with everything that was going on from the music to the like grunting and the people knocking things over and everything happening you know that was super full when I had the crossover point at 50 as opposed to 80 because now we're actually using those you know for 10 inch drivers along with the 13 1/2 inch driver in the pv 4000 so that's something to definitely think about when you're you know you've got all this equipment and you're kind of just not using the base at all in your towers so next on my list was trying to dial in the center channel which is the clips RC 64 3 it's the matching center channel for the RF 7 3 s and I know that it goes down to 57 Hertz so I tried it with 80 70 and 60 and what I noticed is that 70 seemed to be better than 60 and better than 80 and that's what I went with now there's a lot of gunfire coming out of that screen so a lot of the gunshots are coming out from there along with voices and everything like on screen like people screaming running out of the way you know that kind of stuff in the B dudes on the radio he's here he's here John Wick's here you know that kind of thing so it was a great scene to test it out and I landed on 70 Hertz for my crossover point on that specific center channel so here's my recommendation for you guys test things out put in a movie scene that you've seen a bunch of times preferably something that you like obviously right it's always gonna be something that you like instead of something you don't like and try the scene out at 80 Hertz and then go down to 70 go down to 60 go down to 50 but make sure you look up what your speaker's can handle and where they naturally roll off so if they roll off at 40 you know try them at 50 60 70 see where that nice balance is that you know it fills in that little gap with your subwoofer you know it could work out really well for you guys and maybe it could not it's totally subjective so make sure that whatever changes you make and that you like keep it there see what it's like for like a week at that crossover point and and then go back to 80 and listen again and see if that's actually making a difference and that's actually making your sound better that's my main advice for you guys right now now this topic is very subjective because it's all based on your listening in your room and your content and all that kind of stuff so it's really funny for me to hear all these people like telling me I'm totally wrong when there really are no wrong answers because it is so subjective now it's totally fine to just set your crossover point at 80 Hertz and move on and you're good you know especially if you have bookshelves or satellites however if you do have you know large towers and or a you know a center channel that's a threeway center channel that can go lower you might want to try and mess around with the crossover points just to see if you can get a better sound and I would also recommend you know doing your mains first and then your sander channel don't change all of them because then it's harder to distinguish you know if you make two changes it's harder to distinguish both changes at once instead of distinguishing the one change so I would start off with the mains first listen adjust listen to just listen adjust and actually evaluate if the sound is better or not and then move forward you're probably saying to yourself that's such a small difference that you can't hear that kind of thing I mean you know I listen buy critically listen to music and sound as my job that's what I do you know I'm a music producer I'm a DJ and even when I host my karaoke night guess what I'm doing I'm balancing the incoming vocal signal from whoever singing with the background track and balancing those two signals with the EQ one for the vocal one for the track and I'm doing it all live so this is what I do like this is what I do all the time so hearing slight differences here and there you know I can hear that the song that you guys hear every time you watch one of my videos it's called forever it's one of my songs and even that has like you know 25 tracks meaning kick drum snare drum there's a clap they're high hats everything like that all of those little individual tracks that make up the song there's like 25 maybe 27 of them I have looked it spin it's been quite a while but I've listened to that song like hundreds of times always mixing and guess what each of those tracks have an EQ so are along the whole like frequency range audio spectrum you know that's my job is to balance all these sounds that come in and all these different frequencies so just adjusting you know 10 10 Hertz here 20 Hertz there it is kind of a big difference and I can hear it even if you can't there will be someone that will and even if you can't hear it you might even just be able to feel or notice a little change in the sound whether it's better or worse that's really up to you guys alright guys so to wrap up this video 80 Hertz is the crossover standard set by thx and that's fantastic especially if you have bookshelf speakers with the sub or satellite speakers with the sub however if you do have large tower speakers that will go lower than 80 Hertz and a 3-way center channel that goes lower than 80 Hertz you might want to try and dial those in a little bit experiment with different crossover points to you know just kind of uplift your sound a little bit just make it that just that much better and of course this is subjective so if it sounds better to you great it could sound better to you and not sound better to somebody else that's totally can happen right that's this is the world we live in everybody has different years everybody hears things differently everybody perceives sound differently and that's pretty much it you know there is really no wrong answer here you do what you do I do what I do and if they're different hey it's just that different now if you guys have any questions for me definitely hit me up down in the comments below and on whatever a social platform you like to use the most that's pretty much it for this video if you liked it go ahead smash that like button and don't forget to subscribe to my channel using the button in the middle of your screen once again my name is Shauna D I am your techno dad and I'll see you next time

Channel: Techno Dad

Views: 350,291

Keywords: 80 hz crossover, crossover frequency, crossover frequency settings, crossover freestyle tutorial, home theater crossover, home theater crossover settings, home theater crossover explained, home theater speaker crossover

Id: gKGobUJ5dxI

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 18 2019