I decided to go to Radioshack and pick up an analog SPL meter last night and do some basic Avia disc calibrations.

Mind you, I have a total crap Altec Dolby PL(the rear channel doesn't even carry any low freq whatsoever). I had cracked open the stock altec "sub", if you could call it that, and rewired it to an old powered JL with a bad amp. So yeah, it's all ghetto rigged up but I was getting some decent bass punch.

Now after calibration, I ended up having to turn the bass control all the way to zero! Apparently this is the proper level and I have to say it's very strange! I guess I didn't realize that not everything had booming bass all the time. Things sound more natural now, but man, I really only feel that deep chest-shaking bass once in a great while now. I guess I just have to get used to it? Kinda like getting used to 6500k on my HDTV, I'll never go back to blue-whites.

Mind you, I have a total crap Altec Dolby PL..........You can't really use AVIA to calibrate a DPL setup. Not in any standard fashion, anyway. AVIA is designed for calibrating a Dolby Digital 5.1 setup in which the 6 channels' output is entirely discrete, all the speakers are set to SMALL, and are all bass-managed properly and accordingly. A DPL setup does not provide discrete output nor the proper bass-management for which AVIA is designed to be used.

You can't really use AVIA to calibrate a DPL setup. Not in any standard fashion, anyway. AVIA is designed for calibrating a Dolby Digital 5.1 setup in which the 6 channels' output is entirely discrete, all the speakers are set to SMALL, and are all bass-managed properly and accordingly. A DPL setup does not provide discrete output nor the proper bass-management for which AVIA is designed to be used.

Is there a different way I should calibrate it? What do you recommend? Shall I treat it all as one channel and calibrate it by frequency?