Receiver setting for subwoofer?

Question

Is there any reason I shouldnt run the "both" option, ie bass coming from the sub and my front/floor speakers? The subwoofer seems to operate at the same level/efficiency whether the receiver is set to just the sub option or if i set it to both, where I'm unsurprisingly getting a bit more bass. Thoughts?
The speakers and sub are both polk

I'll set my fronts to small (they were on large) and try the rest as well. Last night I watched the bourne ultimatum and the bass seemed too prevalent in too many scenes, not to mention causing pictures in the room rattling.

Answer 1

My advice is this:

- Tell your receiver to send the sound to only the sub.
- Tell your receiver all your speakers are "SMALL".

This will force the receiver to send the ".1" channel to the sub, and the low-frequency sounds from the speakers to the sub.

Here is why I suggest this:

You get a LOT of bass sound by wall reflections. Moving the sub into a corner with the longest walls gives the lowest sounds the best chance to reflect smoothly.

The L/R speaker positions are almost never in a good place to produce good bass. And having 3 sources of bass in a room creates a horribly complex interaction. Simply moving your head a few inches can cause huge swings in volume.

A single source of bass in the room solves a lot of these problems and makes it a lot simpler to adjust things.

Companies who make subwoofers even advise people with 2 subs to stack them on top of each other to avoid problems.

My system - I have L/R speakers with built in 500 watt subs in each. These are turned OFF in favor of a single, good subwoofer in the corner. So I do follow my own advice.

Answer 2

The first answer is totally wrong. You should only set the system to BOTH if you have large, full range speakers as your fronts. If you are using basic speakers, you want all the bass to go to the SUB ONLY so that it does not overwhelm the smaller front speakers that are not usually meant to handle low frequencies. Also, adjusting the sub level too high as was stated in the first answer will only HELP the smaller speakers, not give them more to deal with. Your sub crossover should be set around 120hz and so should the crossover setting on the receiver which ensures that only frequencies below 120hz will be going to the sub which are usually too low for the average front speaker to handle. When movie sound is mixed, it is not intended for the bass to go to the front speakers like the first answer stated, it is MEANT to go to a sub which is why music is mixed in 5.1.

Answer 3

"Both" is usually better - although there's a lot of confusion about what it does.
It allows full frequency signal to pass to your speakers, *as it was intended when the sound was mixed* rather than cutting your speakers off at the knees. The thing to watch out for is setting the sub level too high, and having it overwhelm what your speakers are dealing with well already.

Your mileage may vary, but give it a try.