Rti8's Large or Small setting??

dragonbd

I have a pair of RTi8's for fronts that are running off of a Denon AVR-988. When I run Audessey, it set's the RTi8's to LARGE as well as the CSi3 Center. Should I go in manually and set them to SMALL?? and what crossover setting? 60hz for RTi8's and 80hz for center?? just a bit confused here.

McLoki

For home theater use, I would set them both to small. Experiment with 80hz as the crossover and try 60 (for both fronts and center) to see if you like that any better. I have towers as well for front speakers in my system and have them set to small with a crossover of 80hz. That is more a function of how my room works with (or against) bass though than a reflection of how deep the speakers will play.

I will say that unless your front speakers will put out bass at an equal depth and volume as your subwoofer, you should always set your speakers for small (for home theater uses anyway). It is just a question of what crossover works best with your speakers in your room.

Welcome to Club Polk.

Michael

texastown

I have the RTi8's and the CSi 5, with a sub. The instructions which came with the speakers said to set the RTi8's at large and the CSi5 at small.

At first I tried the small setting for the 8's that everyone here advocates and I found them dull and empty sounding. So, I took the advice of the Polk instructions, switched them to large and they filled up the room and sounded much better. I have the crossover at 80 to the sub and I keep the sub setting in my receiver to extra (or always on) as that also helps fill the bass sounds in as the 8's bass sounds aren't especially full on their own. I do keep the sub at a low sound setting, but that's really whatever you like.

Sound good now. I'd say try it set both ways and see which you like.

Willow

Mine are set to small with a xover @ 60 and my csi3 set to small xover @ 80.
Mind you I'm not using the power of a receiver. I have more than enough headroom and juice to my main 3 speakers.

kuntasensei

The general guideline is to set the crossover 10-20Hz higher than the speaker's lowest rating, so that you give it time to transition to the subwoofer. If you have a capable sub for the low end, I recommend crossing the RTi8s over around 60Hz. You'll still get significant output down near the speaker's lowest extension but run less of a risk of muddying up the sound by asking the speaker to reproduce more than it is capable of.

If the Denon offers it, you should be able to run your CSi3 at a 70Hz crossover, for the same reasons stated above.

Many of us Onkyo users have found that Audyssey tends to detect any speaker with significant output below 60Hz as Full Range. No doubt Denon's implementation is similar. I'm running an Onkyo 705 with RTi70 mains, a CSi40 center and RTi28 surrounds... and MultEQ XT detected all of them as full range. You should definitely change that. Because Audyssey essentially aligns speaker-to-sub phase (via both distance/delay and EQ'ing in the time domain), altering the crossovers after equalization shouldn't throw off response... and you should still get good reproduction of music.

For more information on proper setup/use of Audyssey and getting the most out of it, check my Audyssey section of the Onkyo 705 FAQ over at AVSforum, which you can find here.

McLoki

kuntasensei wrote: »

The general guideline is to set the crossover 10-20Hz higher than the speaker's lowest rating, so that you give it time to transition to the subwoofer. If you have a capable sub for the low end, I recommend crossing the RTi8s over around 60Hz. You'll still get significant output down near the speaker's lowest extension but run less of a risk of muddying up the sound by asking the speaker to reproduce more than it is capable of.

Yup, yup. Exactly what I was thinking....

solidus28

I have a Sony STR-DG1000 receiver and it will only allow me to set one frequency for all speakers (excluding the sub). I have 4 RTi10s and a CSi5, so would it be worth me trying to set my own frequency? If I used the 10-20Hz higher rule, then I'd be stuck around 70Hz because of the center channel when all of my other speakers could be set around 40-50Hz. Do the speaker's passive crossovers filter out signals below a certain frequency?

kuntasensei

You could probably get away with 60Hz for a CSi5 since they still have some fair output below their -3dB point, depending on how steep the slope of the crossover is on that Sony. In-room response should be lower than spec'd response, so 60 would probably work and still give you fair output down below 40Hz with your RTi10s.

McLoki

solidus28 wrote: »

I have a Sony STR-DG1000 receiver and it will only allow me to set one frequency for all speakers (excluding the sub). I have 4 RTi10s and a CSi5, so would it be worth me trying to set my own frequency? If I used the 10-20Hz higher rule, then I'd be stuck around 70Hz because of the center channel when all of my other speakers could be set around 40-50Hz. Do the speaker's passive crossovers filter out signals below a certain frequency?

Personally, I would stick with 70 or 80hz. If you go much lower than that, most AVR's will start rolling off the LFE channel at that frequency as well.

If you really want to get more out of your 10's, try them with a large setting instead of small. My guess would be it will sound better with all speakers set to small and a 70 or 80 crossover though.

Michael

solidus28

I'll probably try and play with the settings in the morning. I have had all the speakers set to large since I installed them and it does sound pretty good to me. I watched the Transporter 2 Blu Ray today just for something with a lot of action in it and it sounded awesome! It would be great if changing them to small and setting the cutoff frequency made it sound even better! I guess I'll see.