Restorer-John, I'm afraid that I'm going to have to call you out on this. Sorry man, but truth ranks higher than any one man's ego. Here is what Paul said in that video:
"What we want is the sound quality signature of the amplifier. Now every piece of electronics ... have a sound to them. This amplifier sounds different than the amplifier you have at home. It just does, and, you've gotta just take my word for it. ... but trust me for the moment, amps and preamps sound different. And, because of that, and because the job of a subwoofer is to disappear, and to augment the sound of our main speakers as if the sub is not there ... The idea is to not hear the subwoofer as something separate, so to do that, we want to take whatever sound the amplifier is offering to the system, and keep that sound into the subwoofer. That's why we want to use the amplified output. ... Now your subwoofer has to have a high-level input, and many of them don't. ... So let's imagine that your subwoofer only has the RCA jacks, or XLR jacks ... then you can take these [the RCA line-level outputs of the preamp] and run those over to your sub. So, let's attend to the last part of the question, which is, what if my equipment doesn't have a dedicated subwoofer output? Thank God it doesn't. Here's why. The only products that really have dedicated sub outputs are usually home theater based ... When you get into high-end audio you want to rely on the subwoofer itself to provide that filtering, and you don't want it in this [places hand on the preamp]. That's a good thing that your system doesn't have a separate subwoofer output."
This whole thing is nothing but gibberish. Virtually none of it makes even a whit of sense, and much of it is incorrect at face value, e.g., his claim that the only products that have dedicated subwoofer outputs are "home theater based". But let's not dwell on this one little assertion, which is a mere distraction. We need to focus on his argument. Let's be clear about what Paul is saying. He is saying that if your subwoofer accepts high-level inputs that these are the inputs you should use, taking the signal from the stereo amp that powers your main stereo speakers even if you use a preamp or have an integrated amp with preamp outputs, the reason being that this is necessary in order that the subwoofer will not sound like "something separate". This is very possibly the most patently ludicrous claim that I have ever heard from any audiophile. Perhaps you have chosen to pretend that you didn't hear what Paul actually said, so that you could play the white knight or whatever. I don't know your agenda, but it certainly does seem that you are pretending not to have heard what Paul actually said. Or maybe you didn't actually watch the video.
Paul additionally asserted, without providing a shred of justification, that even if your preamp has a dedicated subwoofer output, it is better to use the LP filter built into the subwoofer. Seriously? Even if the only user-selectable parameter provided by the preamp is a manual control for the crossover point, this will still almost certainly provide a more correct sub-main interface than using the subwoofer's internal LP filter, because the subwoofer has no means to apply the matching high-pass filter to the main stereo speakers when using the speaker-level connections. Of course on this point you obfuscated the matter, and I'll get to that in just a moment. I would have assumed that the average idiot understood this much, but there are evidently some people who have not figured this much out even though it inarguably belongs under the heading of "Basic introduction to subwoofer setup".
And now we come to what Restorer-John wrote.
Oh, but what is the true meaning of "perfectly correct", in your use of these two words? Do you mean, "acceptable", or do you mean, "best practice", or do you mean, "the best way to do it, for anyone who can possibly do it this way?" In truth all you really mean is this: "in my opinion there isn't anything overtly wrong with doing it this way". I just wanted to make this clear and get it out of the way.
If we suppose that you are correct in that most people with a stereo amplifier connect a subwoofer this way, the obvious question is "Why?" Fortunately you have provided your reason, sort of.
Is this entirely correct, or is it that it just has the air of correctness because it incorporates an element of truth? To satisfy my curiosity I took a gander at Yamaha's integrated amps and what I learned is that the insanely expensive ones with the dancing galvanometers have stereo preamp outputs while the less expensive ones without the dancing galvanometers have a single subwoofer output.
But more to the point, even if what you say were entirely true, would it have any bearing on the veracity of Paul's ludicrous argument for using the amplifier's speaker-level outputs? It wouldn't. Even if the stuff you wrote were entirely correct, none of it would have any bearing at all on the question of whether what Paul said in his video made sense or was correct. To deserve to be taken seriously, you would need to have said something in the way of justification for Paul's claim that if you don't feed the subwoofer a signal that has passed through the same amp that is used for the main stereo speakers that you'll hear the subwoofer as "something separate". Nothing you wrote provides any validation for the actual argument that Paul expounded in that video!
So far as I know, the speaker-level outputs of any subwoofer with speaker-level outputs are simply pass-through, so that you can daisy-chain the speakers through the sub. Perhaps there is a very odd one somewhere that applies HPF to the speaker-level outputs, but if so it is a very rare animal. For any subwoofer that I've ever heard of with a builtin HPF, to make use of this capability while using speaker-level outputs from an amplifier, you'd have to connect the speaker level outputs of the amp to the line-level inputs of the subwoofer and then connect the HPF line-level outputs of the subwoofer to a different power amp to provide power to the speakers! What you have written here is perfectly silly on its own merit, before even considering how it relates to the claim that Paul made in the video! If you consider how it relates to the claim that Paul made in the video, this is plainly contrary to the rationale Paul used in advocating the use of speaker-level outputs of the amplifier to feed the subwoofer, because Paul said, "we want to take whatever sound the amplifier is offering to the system, and keep that sound into the subwoofer." Obviously, if you pass the line-level HPF output of the subwoofer to another amplifier dedicated to powering the speakers, you will not have done what Paul is telling you that you have to do in order that the subwoofer will not sound like "something separate".
Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! What Paul said in that video was not the least bit correct. It was unmitigated garbage, plain and simple, and about as far from being "absolutely correct" as it could possibly have been. It was _dumb_ _as_ _hell_. Did you actually even watch the video? Anyone with a lick of sense will know that the argument that Paul expounded in that video does not make a lick of sense and does not deserve to even be taken seriously. If he were known to be suffering from some form of dementia I would ignore it, but I don't think there is any question that the man has been propounding this same kind of nonsense for probably as long as he has been in the business.
Not that any of it matters in the grander scheme of things. But when another person sees something that is obviously bullshit and that person is motivated for whatever reason to call it bullshit (in this case I was motivated by another person's disingenuous defense of Paul), why would you do something like what you did? You didn't even give it an honest, sincere effort. Not even a half-assed effort. Probably not even one-tenth of a full-assed effort.
I personally won't be responding to single reported incidence of wider internet sillyness on this forum ever again and I want to apologise to all concerned for doing so on this occasion. The ASR that I know is friendly and informative, we really don't want it to be become a posting board for crimes against objectivity, that's no fun at all
