MULTICHANNEL INPUTS w RM6900 Bass Management

MARTYNAT

I'm REALLY confused about my RM6900 bass-management setup with my new Denon 1920 DVD player, which I bought to play SACD and DVD-A releases, in addition to movies.

But Polk's instructions for setting up RM6900 bass managment bypass the subwoofer jack in the analog 5.1 inputs cluster, so how does this affect playing SACD and DVD-A music discs?

To me, if nothing is connected to the SUBWOOFER input, doesn't that cripple the discrete channel playback?

I understand the "crossover compensation" that's recommended for Dolby Digital, but SACD and DVD-A discs are certainly in a different league. All six channels should be connected in. Right or wrong?

Thanks for any insight.

aaharvel

Welcome to the forums.

Yes, use all 6jacks on the multi-channel analogs, including the sub/.1 jack. But i'm going to warn you right now, chances are your bass management through those jacks will be fubared regardless. My Sony's SACD bass management is fixed at 100hz when the internal player's bass management sets the speakers to "small." It's the only aspect of SACD that i do not like, because the bass management in players (overall) sucks compared to the bass management capabilities in a quality AVR.

Last night I actually compared the multi-channel SACD layer of my Norah Jones disc to the redbook CD layer, and although the highs and mids, soundstage and imaging were inferior with the redbook version, the bass and the overall tonality of the music was superior because, again, there were no bass management issues.

I'm thinking the only way you can get perfect multi-channel SACD sound quality, as it was intended, is if you forego the analog ins and outs and go with digital. But the equipment that can actually do that is both rare and expensive.