Monitor Speakers with Onkyo TX-NR818

welshmatt

Hello,

I just purchased a new Onkyo 818 receiver to work with my setup. I am using Polk Monitor 70s as my Fronts, Monitor 60s as my rears, a CS2 for my center, and a PSW505 for my sub. My new receiver has an option for the Frequency setting for my speakers and is currently at 40hz. Will I do any damage by changing this value? Is there a certain range I should be running this at? I did some internet searches and forum searches and found some reference to crossover but I am unsure on that. I am currently just running a 5.1 setup in my home theater. Any help would be appreciated on this. Also could anyone recommend a good set of speakers for my sides that will compliment this setup?

Thanks
Matt

adabro

Did you run the Audyssey setup to get that 40hz setting?

cnh

I would not run an Onkyo 818 at 40hz on a pair of M-70s; it won't give them enough POWER. My Onkyo 805, might and I do run M-70s on it and a CS2 up front. I believe I've set my crossover to 60hz for L/R/C and 80hz for the surrounds, which are the smaller M-30s (they do fine).

I let the SUB take up the bass. You should and can experiment with different crossover settings and your room and see what sounds best to you. That could be 50hz, 60hz or even 80hz.

And NO, you won't hurt anything doing that!

cnh

dbKiller

Like cnh, I have my fronts set to crossover at 50Hz and it sounds great with my setup.

welshmatt

Thanks for the information, I have played around with it abit tonight and moved the speakers to 80 hz which is marked as THX. I plan on experimenting abit more this weekend moving the range down to the 50-60 range to see which i like the best. I think I am going to be looking at the Polk Monitor30s for my sides. I am so far very please with the Polk Speakers and think they are an incredible value for the money!

Thanks
Matt

cnh

welshmatt wrote: »

Thanks for the information, I have played around with it abit tonight and moved the speakers to 80 hz which is marked as THX. I plan on experimenting abit more this weekend moving the range down to the 50-60 range to see which i like the best. I think I am going to be looking at the Polk Monitor30s for my sides. I am so far very please with the Polk Speakers and think they are an incredible value for the money!

Thanks
Matt

You're welcome and you're right. For the money it's tough to beat an M-70 grounded front end for HT. That's if you're cheap, like me! Once I got the HT up and running, I set it and forgot it. Moved on to the two channel set up, tubes, better sources, etc.

cnh

Geoff4rfc

cnh wrote: »

You're welcome and you're right. For the money it's tough to beat an M-70 grounded front end for HT. Once I got the HT up and running, I set it and forgot it.

cnh

Yes sir, you have been a die hard M70 owner for sure!!

@ welshmatt, welcome to the fray and congratulations on your set up! If you find the time, once you acquire your M30's, btw, M40's make excellent side surrounds as well, give your M60's a try as wide's next to your M70's, providing you've got the space.

It doesn't have to be too wide of a space, I had mine set up in an area that was 15.5' wide across, just enough room to put the subs in between the mains and the wides.

Your 818 can decode as Audyssey for wides and it sounds pretty awesome. Anyway, just food for thought.

teekay0007

Matt - Welcome to Club Polk!

You won't do any damage to the speakers or the AVR by changing the crossover values around. And that's what you should do to find what sounds best to you. Keep in mind, as cnh mentioned above, that it takes a lot of power to drive the lower frequencies out of the towers. And if you're powering your system with just the AVR and no external amps, you may find that you're not driving them to their fullest and you might want to conserve that low frequency power by letting the sub do the heavy lifting. Remember that the power ratings for almost all AVRs is for two channels driven and not five or seven channels driven. The more channels you're driving, the less power you have to go around to the additional speakers.

With this in mind, I'd start out by trying crossovers for the 70s in the 60-80 Hz range, the CS2 at 70-90 Hz and the 60s at 80-100 Hz (you don't generally need to be driving backs/surrounds to below 80 Hz). Also, unless you have a pretty large room that you know definitely needs the seven speakers, I'd try running five (in a 5.1 setup) for a while to see how it sounds. Lots of people I know have found that the extra two speakers do very little to improve their surround sound experience. In fact, most movie and concert soundtracks available today are done in 5.1, rather than 7.1 surround. Just hook up the 60s to your surround R and L terminals and leave the surround back connections alone. This will also leave more power, as mentioned earlier, to drive the fewer speakers.