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Downsizing from 5.1.2 to 3.0

ThatM1key

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I've been thinking about this for a while. In order to have 5.1.2, I have to arrange my room in a specific way and it's a tight fit. If I enjoyed movies and multichannel music more I wouldn't mind this setup. Initially that's how I thought but now I'm getting sick of having this 5.1.2 setup. I watch a movie on my setup like every 3-4 months, I'm not much of a movie person like I used to.

My plan is to do a 3.1 setup. I'm debating if I'm gonna keep a sub in this setup, as I don't like using one. It's great for movies but for music, its terrible, no matter the XO setting. It does sound good with music when you send it a full range signal, it blends in much better but the program is with my receiver. if the sub gets a full signal, the front speakers get the signal too, which a waste of bass power. My towers, the polk S55's, are pretty great at doing bass. Most of the time I set them to -10db bass and they still bass well. When it comes to sub, my room is super terrible. The spot it's currently is terrible but the best. When I sit in my chair, I can only hear about 50% of its volume output, which means If I turn it up, the neighbor's are not gonna be happy.

I got a bit of the "audiophile overthinking" bug. I like playing uncompressed music on it. I always think of the "Direct" vs "Sub with DSP". I prefer the direct route than to play with a subwoofer with DSP. I know that, let's say you have a subwoofer and use tone controls. I know for a fact that any signal gets thrown in the "44.1khz digital chamber" unless you enable the pure direct. I know my receiver (Sony STR-DN1080) is heavily based off the Sony STR-ZA1100ES, which Amirm did a review of it a while back. Everybody knows if a speaker itself does bass it'll sound worse but I believe its the opposite with my receiver. It's either (for my receiver), add a sub, deal with the 44.1khz chamber, deal with more distortion-noise & supposedly since the towers don't do any bass work they'll sound better or do "pure direct", no sub, no 44.1khz digital chamber, less distortion-noise, but since the speakers do bass, they'll technically sound worse. If I had to pick, I would do the "pure direct" path then the DSP path. I truly never understood the "Get a sub BRO, It'll sound better BRO" (When it came to AVRs & music) unless your rocking a SVS PB16 or something like that.


Why keep a center when I'm mainly gonna do a stereo setup? Because I use the "Dolby Surround" DSP when watching YouTube and listening to some compressed music. I'm still gonna watch multi-channel movies/tv shows because a good chunk of them don't offer a 2 channel track. So might as well, keep the center, it doesn't take that much space for me.

Mainly I used the heights (Bookshelfs pointing down) because it worked well with the "Center Lift" feature. It really did make the center sound like it's coming from my TV's middle. I do like Dolby Atmos movies but a chunk of them don't offer a good DA experience unless it's the john wick movies. Will I miss the heights? Not that much, I don't mind the center sounding like it's coming from the bottom of the TV and I don't watch that much DA content.

I would like to know what you guys think.
 

ernestcarl

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I've been thinking about this for a while. In order to have 5.1.2, I have to arrange my room in a specific way and it's a tight fit. If I enjoyed movies and multichannel music more I wouldn't mind this setup. Initially that's how I thought but now I'm getting sick of having this 5.1.2 setup. I watch a movie on my setup like every 3-4 months, I'm not much of a movie person like I used to.

My plan is to do a 3.1 setup. I'm debating if I'm gonna keep a sub in this setup, as I don't like using one. It's great for movies but for music, its terrible, no matter the XO setting. It does sound good with music when you send it a full range signal, it blends in much better but the program is with my receiver. if the sub gets a full signal, the front speakers get the signal too, which a waste of bass power. My towers, the polk S55's, are pretty great at doing bass. Most of the time I set them to -10db bass and they still bass well. When it comes to sub, my room is super terrible. The spot it's currently is terrible but the best. When I sit in my chair, I can only hear about 50% of its volume output, which means If I turn it up, the neighbor's are not gonna be happy.

I got a bit of the "audiophile overthinking" bug. I like playing uncompressed music on it. I always think of the "Direct" vs "Sub with DSP". I prefer the direct route than to play with a subwoofer with DSP. I know that, let's say you have a subwoofer and use tone controls. I know for a fact that any signal gets thrown in the "44.1khz digital chamber" unless you enable the pure direct. I know my receiver (Sony STR-DN1080) is heavily based off the Sony STR-ZA1100ES, which Amirm did a review of it a while back. Everybody knows if a speaker itself does bass it'll sound worse but I believe its the opposite with my receiver. It's either (for my receiver), add a sub, deal with the 44.1khz chamber, deal with more distortion-noise & supposedly since the towers don't do any bass work they'll sound better or do "pure direct", no sub, no 44.1khz digital chamber, less distortion-noise, but since the speakers do bass, they'll technically sound worse. If I had to pick, I would do the "pure direct" path then the DSP path. I truly never understood the "Get a sub BRO, It'll sound better BRO" (When it came to AVRs & music) unless your rocking a SVS PB16 or something like that.


Why keep a center when I'm mainly gonna do a stereo setup? Because I use the "Dolby Surround" DSP when watching YouTube and listening to some compressed music. I'm still gonna watch multi-channel movies/tv shows because a good chunk of them don't offer a 2 channel track. So might as well, keep the center, it doesn't take that much space for me.

Mainly I used the heights (Bookshelfs pointing down) because it worked well with the "Center Lift" feature. It really did make the center sound like it's coming from my TV's middle. I do like Dolby Atmos movies but a chunk of them don't offer a good DA experience unless it's the john wick movies. Will I miss the heights? Not that much, I don't mind the center sounding like it's coming from the bottom of the TV and I don't watch that much DA content.

I would like to know what you guys think.

Presuming your processor can mix anything to 3.0 or 2.0, why not try those modes for a while and see if you prefer it. I don't use a sub in my open plan main living room as the placement for a sub and bass response is not particularly good or very even. In my dedicated listening room, a single 12" Rythmik sub is perfectly fine, and I currently allow the main monitors and sub to widely overlap (covering two octaves, or more when the LFE kicks in). A lot of manual wrangling with room positioning and DSP made it possible -- in fact, I don't think it would've been possible without the latter.
 
OP
ThatM1key

ThatM1key

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Presuming your processor can mix anything to 3.0 or 2.0, why not try those modes for a while and see if you prefer it. I don't use a sub in my open plan main living room as the placement for a sub and bass response is not particularly good or very even. In my dedicated listening room, a single 12" Rythmik sub is perfectly fine, and I currently allow the main monitors and sub to widely overlap (covering two octaves, or more when the LFE kicks in). A lot of manual wrangling with room positioning and DSP made it possible -- in fact, I don't think it would've been possible without the latter.
My avr is pretty good at downmixing signals. That's what im gonna do with my 5.1 to DA movies.
 

Ataraxia

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I've thought about downsizing my electronics to a good amp fed by miniDSP Dirac unit, 2.0, 2.1. Even dropping the AVR.

The most I've run is 2.2 with my huge AVR.

I'm finding my PC running Tidal FLAC > Schiit Modi 3+ > Emotiva BasX A100 > LS50 Metas is excellent playing music and Netflix audio is also excellent. This is mostly nearfield.

I like simplicity, plus I will probably be in small rooms for a while.
 
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ThatM1key

ThatM1key

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After basically reversing my setup, it sounds like my old room, lack of any bass from my towers. Before I swapped sides, I was able to hear ~70% to 80% of bass out of my towers but now its like 5% to 10%. I can crank up the EQ to +10db bass, It won't do that much. I basically had to use my Subwoofer. When I did use it before I swapped sides with that too, I could hear about 50% of its output but now its about 30% to 40%.

Before I swapped sides I had the perfect imaging with my towers but as much as I try, its almost there, its just the right speaker always sounded a little bit louder, even with the calibration.

Sony's Calibration is for the most part, spot on with the measurements but this time I felt meh. Speaker Levels & distance were spot on but the subwoofer measurements always sucked. No matter the setup the subwoofer would always be +10db, 7 foot and no crossover. After that I tweaked the settings to all speakers 120hz XO & 0db subwoofer setting.

It sounded great in my man cave chair but in my bed. Everytime there was male on screen, the pops on the sub where annoying. "P" words were super annoying. I was afraid to annoy my family members mainly. I listen in actual stereo in my bed because the bass is a lot better from my towers.

Am I thinking about rearranging again? Maybe. My man cave chair and bed take up about 1/3 of my room.
 

Descartes

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I've been thinking about this for a while. In order to have 5.1.2, I have to arrange my room in a specific way and it's a tight fit. If I enjoyed movies and multichannel music more I wouldn't mind this setup. Initially that's how I thought but now I'm getting sick of having this 5.1.2 setup. I watch a movie on my setup like every 3-4 months, I'm not much of a movie person like I used to.

My plan is to do a 3.1 setup. I'm debating if I'm gonna keep a sub in this setup, as I don't like using one. It's great for movies but for music, its terrible, no matter the XO setting. It does sound good with music when you send it a full range signal, it blends in much better but the program is with my receiver. if the sub gets a full signal, the front speakers get the signal too, which a waste of bass power. My towers, the polk S55's, are pretty great at doing bass. Most of the time I set them to -10db bass and they still bass well. When it comes to sub, my room is super terrible. The spot it's currently is terrible but the best. When I sit in my chair, I can only hear about 50% of its volume output, which means If I turn it up, the neighbor's are not gonna be happy.

I got a bit of the "audiophile overthinking" bug. I like playing uncompressed music on it. I always think of the "Direct" vs "Sub with DSP". I prefer the direct route than to play with a subwoofer with DSP. I know that, let's say you have a subwoofer and use tone controls. I know for a fact that any signal gets thrown in the "44.1khz digital chamber" unless you enable the pure direct. I know my receiver (Sony STR-DN1080) is heavily based off the Sony STR-ZA1100ES, which Amirm did a review of it a while back. Everybody knows if a speaker itself does bass it'll sound worse but I believe its the opposite with my receiver. It's either (for my receiver), add a sub, deal with the 44.1khz chamber, deal with more distortion-noise & supposedly since the towers don't do any bass work they'll sound better or do "pure direct", no sub, no 44.1khz digital chamber, less distortion-noise, but since the speakers do bass, they'll technically sound worse. If I had to pick, I would do the "pure direct" path then the DSP path. I truly never understood the "Get a sub BRO, It'll sound better BRO" (When it came to AVRs & music) unless your rocking a SVS PB16 or something like that.


Why keep a center when I'm mainly gonna do a stereo setup? Because I use the "Dolby Surround" DSP when watching YouTube and listening to some compressed music. I'm still gonna watch multi-channel movies/tv shows because a good chunk of them don't offer a 2 channel track. So might as well, keep the center, it doesn't take that much space for me.

Mainly I used the heights (Bookshelfs pointing down) because it worked well with the "Center Lift" feature. It really did make the center sound like it's coming from my TV's middle. I do like Dolby Atmos movies but a chunk of them don't offer a good DA experience unless it's the john wick movies. Will I miss the heights? Not that much, I don't mind the center sounding like it's coming from the bottom of the TV and I don't watch that much DA content.

I would like to know what you guys think.
Used to have three tower speakers with two subs was great, sold and decided to go the other way 9.4.6 !
 

Miker 1102

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I have the Sony 790. I cannot hear the bass unless I rattle the walls in my room but I generally like the room correction and upmixing for multichannel music. I agree with you about the two channel. I use the pure direct for mains and feel like I am getting much more out of the speakers that way. I have the same debate with myself all the time about this. I actually been trying different avrs because I was hoping to get a better two channel output but I think the Sony sounds better for the money every time.
 

Doodski

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I have the Sony 790. I cannot hear the bass unless I rattle the walls in my room but I generally like the room correction and upmixing for multichannel music. I agree with you about the two channel. I use the pure direct for mains and feel like I am getting much more out of the speakers that way. I have the same debate with myself all the time about this. I actually been trying different avrs because I was hoping to get a better two channel output but I think the Sony sounds better for the money every time.
Once a person gets past the entry level Sony receivers stuff they sound okies. Some of the older STR-AV models do have issues though.
 

Miker 1102

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I like the upmixing on the Sony. I just bought a Denon 4300 to try the Auro 3d. I got into avrs for the multichannel music mostly. I have tried a Marantz 6015, A Pioneer lx305 and neither one sounded as good to me and they were both like 1k more. I am hoping I like the Denon more than the Marantz. I didn't get the hype about the "Marantz sound' or Audessy. The Dirac on the Pioneer was stellar its just the Pioneer upmixing and stereo mode sucked. The Marantz was good sounding but I was hoping for 10 percent better than a 300 dollar Sony.
 
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