RM-6600 and PSW350 hookup

stevedmoody

How important is it to run the front speakers through the PSW 350 like the manual suggest? I will be wiring my house anyway but it will be more of a pain to run the front channel cables through a wall over the ceiling down another wall to the Sub and then back up the same wall again. I read about the set up on the reciever but I am wondering if I will lose sound quality.

jcaut

The reason that the speaker wire should be run through the sub is that the satellites need to receive a filtered signal, so that the bass that they are incapable of producing is filtered out, and reproduced by the sub. Most receivers don't provide any way to do this, and so Polk includes a high pass filter on the sub's speaker out terminals.

As far as HOW important it is.... I can't say, but I suspect the satellites could be damaged rather easily if you feed them too much bass.

Hope that helps, and welcome to the forum!

Jason

[Deleted User]

Hello,
Thanks for posting your question about satellite/sub-woofer connections. The real goal is to provide the sub-woofer with a full range signal. There isn't a need to first go to the sub and then to the satellite, however. The owner's manual should show two connection methods, one with the wires going from receiver to sub to satellites. The second shows two sets of wires leaving the receiver, one set going to the sub-woofer and the other going to the satellites. Both produce exactly the results, use the one that requires the least speaker wire.
Regards, Ken Swauger

jcaut

Pardon my error.

MikDrago

I have the same speakers and hooked them up through the sub and out to the fronts. This is definately the way to do it. It sounds good through the LFE input but you can fine tune the sub frequency with speaker inputs. It is worth the extra work.

Mike

Sean De Freitas

I thought the recommended way was stupid and was going to take far too much speaker wire, and cost even more than what I had already paid, so I hooked it up with an RCA out of my Yamaha amp into the LFE RCA in on the back of the sub (PSW 350). Frankly the sound was average, and the low frequencies I found very loud, wooly and unclear. Not a nice result at all in fact. Almost to the point of thinking this system was not what everone had been raving about on the forums.

Almost as a last option, I re-jigged the wiring with some spare speaker cable I had left, and set it up the recommended way (ie front L&R out of the amp and into the sub, then returning back to the front L&R speakers. All other speakers out of the amp as suggested. Boy, what a difference. I could not believe this was the same system. The sub was totally seamless. In fact I actually had to go over and put my hand on the sub to see if it was working (which it was). Instead of being aware when the sub was kicking in, you just were enveloped in an overall audio experience. In fact none of the speakers were obviously on. I was just amazed, and totally, totally sold on the system (and particularly hooking it up this way).

I have since gone out and spent even more money on the 16 guage (I bought Monster) cable, which has improved the sound even more.

No way would I ever go back to the non-standard way. Even though it seems totally wrong to tell your system it does not have a sub-woofer, and then direct all the frequencies through your main speakers, this way DOES work and will blow you away.

stevedmoody

I figured since I was already crawling around in the attic I would run the wires to the sub. I figured the sound could be better and I would be much better prepared for when the wife wants to change the room up and move the system over.
Thanks for the replies.