jimafm

While you are at it, you might help your loss of mid range by using the movie EQ setting, if your receiver has it. It increases the mid range. The idea is to make the dialog easier to understand. In your case, it might help the music playback, as well. P.S. Drag your Dad over with his Eagles CD. It will blow his mind. Quality is in your head. The Eagles prove it.

Lpusedyou I agree with the majority. Power isn't your problem. You have a good grip on the situation. I'm more of the $10 wire type, myself. While at Disney in FL, we tested every type of speaker wire that came along. Double blind elimination, odd man out. No difference until we got to sterling silver! Even then, some thought they could tell a difference, but none said it sounded any better. Even Walt couldn't afford miles of that. Most of my listening is done while rebuilding tube audio gear. Keeps me from getting mad at the hack jobs I clean up. Electronic crossovers can be a good thing, but beware. There's phase shift in them thar hills and valleys. Also, you need to set the crossover frequency to what Klipsch used for your speakers. Finally, you want to come at least close to the slope of the original crossover. Slope is the rate the signal declines as it is "crossed off". Most electronic crossovers chop the signal much faster than a passive. Klipsch didn't just pick a point and rate at random, and the box design and drivers had to be considered. Your amp doesn't know any of this, which makes it suspect. There is room for improvement, mind you, but to see any benefit you need a bunch of test equipment. The main benefit of electronic crossovers is to eliminate the considerable power loss in a passive crossover. With your speakers' high efficiency (rated with the passive, by the way) and plenty of power, it becomes a non-issue. In high powered concert PAs, a single electronic replaces a passive in every speaker cabinet, saving a lot of amplifier power, weight and money. We also use electronic crossovers to greatly increase the fidelity and power handling capacity of the various speaker components. A five way system, for example, allows each driver to handle two or so octaves, which it can do with far more fidelity and efficiency. Chopping off the low frequencies allows as much as eight times the power handling capacity. I've gotten away with putting 1KW peak RMS into a 125W RMS rated JBL cone and 250W RMS into a 40W RMS rated JBL HF Driver. Cool, yes. Do you need it? No.

gagelle You will note the reference to "a violent demise" in that book. In tube gear, most electrolytics were used in the power supply to filter out hum. As the dielectric (aka insulation of sorts) dried out, the darn things would explode, sending boiling tar goo all over the place. They were usually aluminum "cans" sticking out of the chassis, and would blow all that gunk downward into the chassis, often rendering the equipment beyond repair. In old tube gear, one can often "reform" these electrolytics by bringing the line voltage up slowly using a device known as a Variac, usually over a period of days. Consider, however, that an electrolytic from 40 years ago was designed for a power supply fed, on a good day, by 105 volts of household power. As demand went up, power companies increased the voltage, allowing more power to be sent over the existing wires. Today, the "120 volts" in a modern home is more like 135, or roughly a 30% increase in voltage across the old electrolytic. This is a strong recommendation to replace the electrolytics with new, higher working voltage units. Since the "new, improved" household voltage can create problems with other components as well, it is also advisable to alter the power supplies so they produce the original voltage designed for. This is usually only possible downstream of the electrolytics, so you need to do both. Electrolytics are sometimes used today in audio circuits (solid state) to pass audio from one amplification stage to the next. It's a money saving trick, and definitely can degrade the audio quality. Normally, an electrolytic used as a "coupling capacitor" prevents the flow of DC from one stage to the next, and allows the AC audio signal through. "Leakage" is a faulty electrolytic (or any other type capacitor) passing DC, pure and simple. It has nothing to do with leaking goo or audio. The leaking of DC, however, prevents the various audio stages from operating properly, thus degrading the audio quality. Bottom line, electrolytics aren't the capacitor of choice in any audio circuit. There are tricks of the trade, but you will find quality manufacturers minimize their use where ever possible. For example, the legendary Klipsch used expensive, oil-filled capacitors in the crossovers, not the 10 cent electrolytics often used today. The actual drivers (woofers and tweeters) in those old Klipsch weren't as good as today's, but the quality of construction, wood and crossover components still produced a sound hard to duplicate today. Let's hear it for us old guys.

I believe that's John Myer's Grateful Dead rig. And it was a rig! You get ten guesses on where it is today.

Before you part with money to further complicate the issue, I suggest you check out what you have. It should work just fine. In 40 years, I've never met a sound system I couldn't improve. There's just too much to go wrong. Here's some things I'd look at: Lack of "punch" is often undersized speaker wire. Short runs need at least 14ga., low-ox stranded wire labeled speaker wire. Monster is great but overpriced, and you won't gain a thing from specialty wire costing big bucks. The junk that came with the Pioneer, Radio Shack and lamp Cord from the hardware store are a no-no. Over ten feet in length, consider 12ga. Don't worry about the rears, as they don't do squat anyway. I can't wait to see what the audio crowd has to say about the above. Then re-check speaker phasing. Put the system in stereo (towers only), stand between the towers and close your eyes. If the music sounds like it's in the middle of your head, you're out of phase. Check all connections at both ends. Next, try the same trick in surround, standing mid way between the center and one tower. This is harder. What you need is crowd noise or something coming out of both the towers and the center at the same volume for this test. Unfortunately, I have yet to see a test disk with this critical track on it. Phasing is fundamental. Until that is perfect, you will never get where you want to go. Next, I'm concerned about bi-amping the towers. It's easy to screw that up, so compare your present setup to using the passive crossover Klipsch built them with. If it sounds better, use those extra channels for the bedroom or terrace. Not that I think you are dumb, just that I've found it to be a common problem with electronic crossovers in general. Even if you have the Pioneer properly configured in the menu, I don't trust the Pioneer to do what it claims it is doing. As for the "boom", consider our old friend phasing. Put on some bass-heavy stereo music (towers only; Pioneer in "Stereo" mode) and have someone else flip the phase switch on the sub while you listen for the best bottom (i.e. smoothest and loudest) while sitting in your normal listening position. Ignore the opinion of the tester person. They are too close to the forest (sub) to hear a tree fall. Next, have your tester person vary the crossover point. Less is best. Every time you increase the crossover point by an octave, you increase the distortion and lower the power handling capacity of the speaker. I often disconnect the sub and set the towers to full range (and even mono if available) in the amp. Then I try to memorize the notes I can hear in a piece of music with a good bass guitar line that I play over and over. Next, I turn on the sub only, and adjust the crossover point to reproduce that bottom note and below, but nothing above*. Finally, set the crossover frequency in the Pioneer to give you that same sound in the sub. That will keep those low frequencies out of the towers, significantly cleaning up and tightening their sound by letting them do what they do best and not asking for more. *A word about the "nothing above" statement. "Nothing" is code for less than normal. We're looking for the crossover point, and we know we've found it when the note we want is there, and everything above that is attenuated or gone altogether. Having the sub reproduce the same program material as the towers is like having two cooks in the same kitchen. I know this sounds complicated, but it isn't, and well worth the trouble. Too much HF in the sub or too much LF in the towers will really muddy up the system's overall performance. Why? Consider the cones trying to vibrate at two octaves at once. Can you sing two notes at once? Something's got to give. Now, consider several octaves from the same cone. Those speakers need all the help we can give them. Also, there's the phasing by time between the sub's location and the towers. Sound moves slowly enough to be affected by speakers different distances away from you and each other. Yes, you can compensate for speaker to listener distances in the Pioneer, and you must do it accurately with a tape measure. Don't trust an auto setup program for this. The program can't see your room, so it can be confused by reflections off that bronze statue of James Brown. Setting the speaker to listener distance accurately still doesn't compensate for the physical differences between the speakers. In an ideal world, all speakers are in the same horizontal plane, i.e. a straight line at the base of a triangle with you at the tip. Best way to get it right? Rearrange the furniture. Good luck with the wife. Finally, don't over do it on the sub's volume. Most people do. A great sound system is one you aren't aware of. You want the sub and rears to just be audible with the Pioneer's tone controls set flat and the loudness switched off. That way, you can doctor the low end all you want, up or down, to suit the movies you spend too much time watching. The low end of movies is all over the place from one studio and director to another. There seems to be no hint of standardization. As for my crack about spending too much time watching movies, I have a theory. If "Music sooths the savage beast", movies agitate him. Those Klipsch are way too fine to waste on Dirty Harry alone. And don't believe that crap about "you can put the sub anywhere". In a corner of the same wall as the TV is my favorite. The corner closest to the TV is best. Behind the TV is next best. Beside the sofa, back of the room, etc. is out. Regarding your concern over power, don't be. Those high efficiency Klipsch will run you out of the room now with the Pioneer at 25% power. Get a DVD of The Eagles' Hell Freezes Over and listen to the bonus (audio only) track at the end. You will undoubtedly want to crank it. Then play it again, and stick your good ear in front of each speaker. You won't believe what you learn. Quality is all in your head.