Hey all,

I recently moved and now have a much bigger space to mix in 5.1. It’s great but it’s going to be some time before I can afford to buy bigger speakers (and upgrade to a atoms setup).

So right now I have Focal CMS 50s for my front L,C,R and they just don’t seem to have the power and bass to reach my listening area (about 11 feet from the TV screen and speakers).

On a whim, I tried sending the left and right signal to the focal sub and then sending the signal from the sub to the left and right speaker with the cut off set around 150 Hz. It actually sounds amazing both for the stuff I’m mixing and when I play movies and TV on the setup.

But I’m wondering if you think this temporary solution is a dumb idea or not. Obvious downside is that I lose the LFE completely, but I pretty much never use it. The other concern is accuracy but in some ways I feel like I trust my front speakers more in this setup. It is a little weird that L&R have the increased lower range and the Center doesn’t but center is mostly dialogue and L&R mostly music. So again, it actually sounds great this way.

Wondering if any of you have done something like this and if you think it’s not worth doing, even as a temporary solution. Obviously I need to get bigger speakers but I also need a new interface, computer, TV screen, etc.. and I just bought a house so I can only do so much.

Your thoughts would be much appreciated!

If you're going down the path of bass management why not just bass manage all three front speakers? Could be done in software.

Yeah I'd say the same as Mattias, Voxengo make a bass management plugin I'm sure there are others or you could look at a monitor controller that does it.

Bass manage across the entire LCR if you can. Even if you have to do it in software. I hear problems in dialog in the center channel that the sub reveals. In addition to Voxengo, the Waves M360 will do what you need. Ultimately, it's much more convenient to do it in hardware so all the signals from the computer go through the same chain.

add a speaker processor and a sub; get a measurenent mic, download rew, learn to measure and interpret data. then tweak response until things measure AND sound right (and of course translate well)...

Hi deedeeyeah,

Please could you recommend a speaker processor. Ideally it would be able to act as a bass manager for 2.1 and surround, a room correction tool (like Dirac Live, ARC3, GML4 etc) and a monitor controller. Does such a thing exist?

I'm trying to set up my monitoring for stereo and surround with a sub.

Thanks for any insights!

i dunno any such thing that combines all features that you are looking for- i'm using a desk for switching speakers and lake speaker processors or lake cards in a yamaha dme64n with an icp1 controller to correct fr and align speakers - lake is the facto standard on live sr and has some unique features; not sure they suit your needs...

The JBL Intonato does what you are asking for.

We use the Trinnov D-Mon series for all of that.