Subwoofer Set Up & Optimization

hey folks I'm Jean de LaSalle of president of audio holics and I'm marshal Guthrie videographer extraordinaire for audio Alex Marshall how're you doing tonight my friend doing great I am ready to be the Vanna White in our little how-to video here I like that you're not quite as elegant or as pretty as her but we'll take yeah yeah you can you can save that for the outtakes right anyways Marshall you know I can't believe how many questions I'd be getting on our base management videos on YouTube about how to set their subwoofer how to set the crossover on the subwoofer and you know we've covered this pretty much in in many of those videos but I think it's such an important topic that it needs a video of its own so I'd like to do a video talking about that with you today yeah there's just so many configurations too so we actually went ahead and pulled the amplifier out of a great little four hundred dollar subwoofer it's the RSL speed will four 10s and what's great about this subwoofer is it has every single connection possible for afford people to encounter when they're setting up their sub so we're going to in one simple video run through every single possible configuration of how to get a subwoofer up and up and running regardless of how complex your system is now for the majority of people that are setting their subwoofer up they're doing it in a home theater type environment where they're plugging it into an AV receiver or a preamp processor so in those cases which I would say is 99% of the time you're going to be using a line level connection yep and on this back of this sub they've actually denoted that and it's called lf-ii in that stands for low frequency effects and so if you see anything that says LFE in that's the one you take a single RCA style cable something that has a little end that looks like that you plug one end into the back of your subwoofer amp you plug the other end into the back of your audio/video receiver or whatever you're you doing to do your processing and and you let the majority of the crossover work be done then in the AVR and let's clarify one point the connection you make on your AV receivers even the LFE out or symbol for output yep that's that's where the bass managed so low frequency signal comes out of the receiver and goes to your subwoofer yeah on the back of your receiver might have preamp inputs you don't want to go there you want to go sub out Elfi out to the input on the back of your subwoofer so you know I noticed on that sub amp you've got line inputs and and lf-ii inputs we should we should talk about what the differences are between those two connections absolutely an RSL makes it pretty simple if you do use the LFE they actually put a little switch that you flip it over to a bypass to use the LFE setting it kind of disables everything else but if you are using a system that does not have a single subwoofer outer LFE out then you want to find yourself a preamp or a line out and use that instead okay now why you want to use the LFE input on your subwoofer connection in this case it's very convenient that RSL offered this what this does is it bypasses the internal crossover of your subwoofer so if you're using bass management on your AV receiver and you said all your speakers are small when you such a crossover to 80 Hertz that's the typical configuration you do in a 5.1 or 7.1 setup you don't want to cascade to crossovers you don't want to have the crossover from the receiver and the crossover from the subwoofer in parallel with each other because I'm sorry in series with each other because that's what causes a ripple right at the crossover frequency yet you know uneven frequency response it can make the bass very blue me so this is a very convenient way to bypass the subwoofer crossover yeah again just to keep it simple to the way across over works it says some frequencies are getting through other frequencies art so what the crossover does in this case is it sends the high frequencies to your main speakers it sends the low frequencies to your subwoofer and make sure that the speakers and subwoofer are only getting the frequencies that they are most able to produce well correct now there's three ways that we could bypass the crossover on your subwoofer RSO already gave you the first way which is using the elephant but that's the best easiest way for most people if your amplifier doesn't have that feature there might be a switch that says defeat crossover or just no crossover and if that isn't the possibility there you'll have to turn the dial all the way to the max setting of the cross we're setting usually 150 200 Hertz something like that you don't want to set it for 80 her so you don't want to set it within 20 Hertz of the crossover setting on your receiver otherwise you're doing that castigating which causes that problem when we're talking about right again so on the RSL you just go ahead and crank it in this case fully clockwise to its highest setting the highest number on there and that ensures that when your AVR applies that crossover internally in the electronics of that box and at the front of your room it does not get doubled up or doesn't get interfere dwith episode well for itself right so you know we covered that what about people see the phase switch there 0 0 180 degree or there's a variable phase where you could adjust it within this you know 0 to 180 degrees in increments of 10 10 degrees there is a little bit of a difference between the delay setting of the receiver and the phase the delay is a basically a group delay it delays every frequency equally by a certain milliseconds or feed or whatever the settings are the actual phase switch on your plate amp of your subwoofer will actually adjust the phase possibly at the crossover frequency so it's a little bit different so I would still recommend once you set the delays correctly and you get your AVR set up correctly have a friend sit behind the subwoofer you set up the couch at your primary listening position put 2 channel music on with a lot of bass and let them go zero degrees and then 180 degrees and then you determine which way that they sounds best and in the case with the RSL you've got a variable phase that goes 0 to 180 in increments of 10 most of the time you don't need that kind of adjustment usually just to switch a flip of a switch is good enough and also realize that it's really going to be dominating in one two in one feeding position but if you only have one sub that setting is going to be most effective in the sweet spot not so much multiple seats that's why you need multiple subs to even out the bass for all your seats right another topic we've covered is a probably a more advanced topic when it comes to setting phase on dual subwoofers so you know we got the phase thing usually leave it at zero degrees try to 180c what sounds best the other thing you'll get on these amplifiers on some of the more advanced subwoofers EQ presets and I'm not sure the or still doesn't have that correct we don't have anything in terms of like a movie or music setting although that is becoming more prevalent especially in those subwoofers that have some sort of digital EQ built-in if what I typically recommend in those cases is you set it for the flat setting and see how your your system performs if you want to get advanced and do some measurements you get an already W measurement system with a mic measure at the listening position to see how that subwoofer is performing in the room if you need to do any type of EQ at that point it's usually best to do manual EQ whether you do it in the receiver some of the newer Yamaha vintage receivers give you a PE cube all the way down to 15 Hertz so if you're able to measure the response in this and you see a big bump let's say a 25 Hertz then you can go in and manually filter that out with the manual EQ of the Yamaha receiver or whatever receiver you have that's usually a better method however if you want to play around with the presets and you want to try the movie mode or you want to try the music mode try them and see how it sounds it's a kind of thing you can experiment with if you can't measure it then you know trust your ear at that point we have years I should say whatever sounds best is critical and usually we talk about that flat setting if it only has a movie or music setting usually the music is a less adulterated EQ the movie settings tend to have a little bit of bump on the low end because they want those big explosions to really hit you in the chest right right so you know the next thing is some of these subwoofers and the RSL is not one of those because I think it just has a slotted port in the front and it's not something that you could plug correct there are some subwoofers that have multi port two or three ports sometimes they ship them with port plugs so there's different tuning options typically if you leave it with all three ports or all two ports whatever it is if you leave that open that's usually been Mac setting that's when you get the maximum output SPL output but typically if you plug one port you'll get more low end extension but you'll lose a little output above the higher frequencies and then there are options where you could set it for sealed so in a case where if you have too much bass in the room if you have a corner loaded sub and it just sounds boom to you you might want to try sealing that sub and what that does is that cuts down on some of the middle base to lower base frequencies but it also gives you a slower or more gradual roll-off instead of a 24 DB per octave slope you'll get up to 12 DB per octave slope so you might get a better integration in the room that's a that's another thing you can experiment with it's better if you can measure but also follow the manufacturers guidelines about how they tell you to place the subwoofer and how they tell you to use the different tunings modes that they offer yeah definitely a more advanced topic there if that just went over everybody said if you're a beginner starting out but you did spend money on the advanced subwoofers that have the variable port tunings you probably want to pick the middle setting something that gives you probably the highest output around 20-25 Hertz you see a lot of subwoofers they'll give you extension down to 15 12 Hertz and there's a certain school people not looking to alienate them that believe that going is deep is humanly possible is where it's at but for most casual listeners what they're going to want is a response somewhere towards 20-25 Hertz at the maximum output so that you do get the the most output at the frequencies that are going to have the most impact during the big blockbuster explosions yeah there's always trade-offs if you try to tune too low you lose max output so just keep that in mind guys is there any other settings on that plain app that you wanted to go over that we didn't discuss well we haven't talked about level and that's a pretty critical one again if you have an AVR that has an automatic automatic setup sometimes they call it room correction but it's all part of the same thing it'll it'll hit a little signal out there it'll measure the amplitude the volume of that signal and it'll adjust accordingly in the AVR but there's usually only a certain range that the AVR can either pump it up or push it down and so most the time we recommend that people start with the volume knob or the level knob on their subwoofer at the middle setting set it at the middle and then run that AVR and what the AVR should do is at the end it should give you a report saying what it sets the level of your subwoofer at if it's plus 10 or minus 10 that usually means 10 or +10 decibels or minus 10 decibels there usually means that the high or low end of its range and so what you want to do is you want to adjust accordingly turning up the volume on your sub or turning down the volume of your sub and then rerunning that until you're getting an adjustment in your AVR somewhere in the neighborhood of like 5 or 7 decibels at most if it's zero decibels you've hit it straight on you have the perfect setting on your subwoofer don't touch it leave it alone yeah in fact the newer iterations of Odyssey will have you going and adjust the level of your sub before it does the setup to reach 75 dB according to their microphone so it just gives you a better more accurate way of setting level the other thing too is like you were saying if you set your sub level too high on the subwoofer then the receiver is going to bump it down to almost its minimal setting just to get the levels right and what happens sometimes in that case is your subwoofer won't turn on at low volume you know you just don't have enough sensitivity going to that amp so as Marshall said it's a good idea to get that gain up on that sub a little higher if you can that way you're not doing a - 15 DB or minus 10 DB on your subwoofer when every other channels at plus 5 DB try to keep that you know narrow that down a little bit and this one is an easy one to address for folks that don't have an AVR what you want to do is you want to hop online you want to go by a sound level meter and basically run a pink noise through your speakers and through your subwoofer and try to get it at about the same volume again this is a very rough technique for people that are just starting out if you're watching this video and you're saying but Marshall what about the low frequency amplitude and isn't this frequency dependent then you probably want to be looking at the more advanced videos that we have on audio holics if you don't want to go out and spend money on an SPL meters there's nothing wrong with downloading an app for your phone there's so many free SPL apps just keep in mind that the microphones built into your phones are the cheapest that they can get away with to do voice reproductions they're not meant for accurate measurement it's better than nothing but it's not the thing that you want to be counting on if you're trying to squeeze every last bit of performance out of your system right yeah and there are some subwoofer companies now that have apps with their subs as well so that and they they calibrate for the mic they count they compensate for the mic issues so check out some of the newer subs with these little apps I think ELAC is one of them I'm off SVS is another one that that's doing that now yeah here's a quick feed you like has a great set up routine in fact akane like sub down by my foot here just out of the camera shot if you are just starting out you want a lot of the whiz-bang features that you don't have a full-featured AVR a good way to get most of the way there is by looking at a subwoofer that has a lot of these auto setup routines built into it like the e lacks well that's cool you know the other thing the other thing I wanted to tell our readers here in our viewers is before you even get into hooking up your sub watch our video on subwoofer crawl that I think Marshall you did that video right yeah I think I did it's a good shot of my rear end as I'm crawling around the room people that are into that that's a that's a really good that's a really good video to watch to help you figure out the best place to put that some buffer so you get the best performance right I don't know how deep you want to go also for folks that might be setting this up without an AVR but I will say that the RSL has speaker level inputs and so these are designed for people who are using an amplifier that only has two audio outputs they're full power and it's going to one for your left speaker one for your right speaker if you don't have anything that looks like the small round RCA port on there then you want to be looking for a subwoofer that has speaker level with these binding posts where you put the actual wire from the speaker and pass it through the subwoofer before going to your speakers or you could do it in a parallel connection if you're running your speaker's on large then you'll run to our extra pairs of speaker cable from your receiver or your amplifier whatever into that subwoofer you want to do that in parallel not in series otherwise you're going to cut you know have performance issues if you do that and the last thing that I'll mention on here is I know that we have the dual subwoofer video out there but for folks that just want to do a quick experimentation the RSL is great because it does have line outputs and so you could actually chain the output from your AVR to one subwoofer and then go from one so go first outputs to the other subwoofers inputs the alternative is you can get a Y cable this is a super cheap one I might recommend you spend a little bit more money than probably the sixty cents this ones cost but what it does it goes from a single output on your AVR and then it splits that into two directions and in that case you can run one two one seven one two the other stuff and you're not chained in the series I don't have a strong opinion jinan we one of those techniques is better I suppose the Y is going to the Y crossover we're sending each one a signal cable is going to give you less possibility of the signal getting manipulated through the electronics of the subwoofer well in actuality if you're going to hook up more than two subs you're better off daisy chaining because if you're going to just use one output you don't want to you don't want to put more than two subs on one out because it's not buffered yeah so when you run it from one sub to the next each time you go from line into line out you're getting a new buffering stage and you could just run as many as you want you won't have any degradation at all that's usually the better way to do it if you can inhale that's that's good that also offered that all these connections it's such a little price that's pretty awesome yep yep so if you have to go with if you go with more than two definitely do the the daisy chain or putting them all in series there boy I've right you know I've run out of connections on the back of this our SLI I don't think we're going to touch wireless really in this video because it's not applicable to every subwoofer but if you are looking for a wireless solution the RSL does have Wireless built in no extra dongles there well we forgot the most important connection of the power you know what that is right yeah it's not going to work if you don't plug it in good point my hand is actually covering it up so because the RSL really focuses on giving you some of these more advanced level features they have a detachable power cable yours might be plugged in which makes it harder to forget but with the RSL because it's detachable you might get a lot of connections up there a lot of wires run into it you're saying why isn't this thing lighting up I must have a defective unit make sure you plug that sucker into the wall well guys I think we wrapped up this topic pretty well I don't really foresee anything else to discuss about it but you know what if you have any questions that we didn't cover put them down below give us some comments tell us what we left out or what you want to discuss about sobra connections or tell us what you want to discuss about connecting any piece of AV equipment we want to be shooting more videos like this for you guys and we want to be helping you guys get your basic setup going that way you enjoy what you're purchasing please share the wealth with us share it on Facebook share it on your Instagram share it any way you want and until next time guys keep listening you

Channel: Audioholics

Views: 485,613

Keywords: audioholics, video review, home theater, audiophile, tech, headphones, speakers, amplifier, movies, music, audio, home theatre, projection, bass, subwoofer, audio calibration, subwoofer calibration

Id: MX21NVNISS0

Length: 17min 43sec (1063 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 13 2017