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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
I am running Dynaudio Audience 42's and a 42C as my center. I believe they are rated down to 50Hz or so. My receiver is a Marantz SR8001.
This speaker is somewhat small but has a pretty robust woofer, from what I understand. There's no reason to believe that it can't handle a full-range signal at a reasonable volume, although it wouldn't hurt to try playing the speakers with their port plugs inserted to find out whether that makes a difference.
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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
I was unaware that running only the fronts as large would redirect bass below the crossover from the other channels into just the fronts. I will try running all of them as large to see if it sounds better.
If you tell your receiver that there is no subwoofer, then that's where the bass from the Small speakers will go. Setting them all to Large will increase the total bass capability of your system, as even the surround channels occasionally contain strong bass. I've experimented with running my speakers (Ascend CBM-170 SEs) as a 5.0 system, all set to Large, and there were scenes in a couple of movies where enough bass came out of the surrounds to rattle my windows!
I wouldn't have thought these speakers could do that, but that's what happened.
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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
I'm assuming that none of my speakers can reproduce an LFE signal since they do not go low enough? But does that signal still somehow affect my speakers in some way?
First, let's be clear on our terminology. The LFE (or ".1") channel is a specific audio channel that contains whatever excess bass mixers choose to put there. The entire LFE channel of a soundtrack is ignored (thrown away) when downmixing for 2.0 (your receiver is told that there is no subwoofer), and I assume that this is the case for 5.0 as well, although I'm not sure whether every receiver does the same thing. Most likely none of the LFE channel's content will ever reach your speakers, no matter how you set up the receiver--the LFE channel, which is boosted by 10 dB before amplification, only ever goes to the subwoofer or else it's discarded.
As for LFE--Low Frequency Effects--in general, this can be present in any audio channel, and your speakers should be able to reproduce some portion of it, but not all of it, and not at the expected loudness. For that, you'd need a subwoofer, of course. As for effects it could have on your speakers, it depends on how hard your speakers try to reproduce really low frequencies. In general, the harder your speakers work, especially for bass, the more distortion they will produce.
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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
The popping occurs randomly. I can't determine any sort of pattern to it. I have heard at it both low and high volumes from all three front speakers. I don't think I've ever heard it while playing a cd from my ps3 in direct mode at pretty high volumes. Mostly from cable tv and from blurays/dvds.
That pretty much rules out all but the center speaker and its corresponding amplifier, I think. When you get a chance, change the center speaker setting in your receiver to Off or None, and watch BDs, DVDs, and cable TV like you normally would. As I implied earlier, I doubt that what you're hearing is the speakers bottoming out, so your issue is different from that of the OP (the S-520 is notorious for bottoming out but the Audience 42 should be fine I believe).
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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
I guess I can try the fake subwoofer method, but then I'm assuming all of my audyssey settings are gonna be messed up, and I have to run that annoying autosetup again.
Oh...right, I keep forgetting about that stuff (I do it all manually with parametric EQs). Tell you what, try turning off your center speaker before you do anything else. If the popping stops, then we'll know that it's either your center speaker or its amplifier inside your receiver.
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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
The easiest solution seems to be to just bite the bullet and get sub!
That would solve your lack-of-bass problem, but it would probably not solve your popping problem.
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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
But I have this problem with buying things I can't really afford...
Those Audience 42s aren't exactly chump-change, but without a sub you're not getting the most out of having such nice bookshelf speakers. I'm not trying to tempt you--I would have recommended less expensive speakers and a sub if you couldn't afford more.
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Originally Posted by Neoguri /forum/post/15512408
and I've been eyeing those nice Rythmiks. :/ And living in a loft and all, I'm hesitant to buy a sub and not being able to use it to its full potential.
A Rythmik sub would go nicely with these speakers, but maybe in your situation you don't need it. I could be wrong, but I don't think that you're bottoming out your speakers. Try what I suggested earlier (don't worry about Audyssey for now) and let me know what happens.