Thank you! I’m going to try out your suggestions with the plugging the mains and crossover adjustments! Never thought of doing that, will be fun to try out. Also I’m using thick carpet pad for isolation now on both the turntable feet and stand, there were major skipping problems without it. Looking into the isolation products you recommended.
About the LFE input, I am not using it. I am using the line in left and right inputs on the sub from the MiniDSP. Is LFE is the better input to use?
The LFE bypasses the crossover circuit. Not better, but it allows you to do all of your adjustments in the SHD.
Check your manual: I’d think the SHD software does bass management so it should sum the L/R to mono for the sub. Then you can run a single cable to the LFE input.
The SHD offers crossover slopes as steep as 48dB/octave. Try using that and bump the crossover up to 150hz to get an idea what the FIR filters will do.
That will remove the octave above the T6s’ woofer resonance. The phase will be mucked up (somewhat audible, but not terrible). With that XO, the T6s will never break a sweat at any volume that won’t injure you.
Live with that a few days to re-acclimate your ears and fine tune your sub level. If you can’t localize the sub position, you’re good. If you can (which is unlikely, but possible), knock it down to 140Hz.
You’ll have increased the dynamic headroom of your system by about 6dB and reduced the distortion below 300Hz by something approaching an order of magnitude.
Just so you truly get what I’m on about, take an hour and do an experiment after a week:
• Play your favorite bass-heavy song at the loudest volume you’ll ever listen to. Walk over to the left T6 and put your hands on its side walls. Make a mental note of how much the cab is vibrating.
• Don’t change the volume! Now defeat the crossover, pull the foam plugs out of the ports, mute the subwoofer and play the same song again. Lay your hands on the T6s again. Note how much those speakers are vibrating now.
• If the T6s aren’t outputting quite as much low bass as when using the sub, go into the MiniDSP Control Panel and add a parametric EQ centered at 30Hz with a 2-3 octave width and turn it up until the low bass is comparable to what you were getting with the sub.
At this point, not only feel how much the T6 cabinet is vibrating, but also sit down and listen to a few songs.
Now, replace the port plugs, unmute the subwoofer, turn off the EQ and activate the 150Hz, 48dB/oct XO.
Play that first song again.
That is why you bought the sub. The improvement should be noticeable.
Forgot… when you use a sub, you eliminate Doppler distortion from your system. It also reduces IMD in the mid/bass region.
Get that free software to create the FIR crossover filters and you are done.
You’ll have to spend several times the cost of what you currently have to get any significant improvement.
