Emotiva and Subwoofer hookup -help!

mhartman29

My parents had an unused Polk PSW250 sitting around their house, which they graciously offered to give to me. While that is shipping to me, I'm trying to figure out what kind of cable I need to get to hook this thing up.

I have the Emotiva lmc1/lpa1 combination. Since the 250 is a powered subwoofer, should I use a subwoofer cable from the LMC Subwoofer output of the LMC into the subwoofer? Or do I need to connect the subwoofer to the LPA (power amplifier) and then connect it with speaker wire?

What's the proper way to do this?

jabrax

LMC1 Sub out to the sub

kwikrnu

I hooked mine up yesterday and didn't set the front speakers to small on the lmc menu. I guess it is factory set to large and couldn't figure out why the sub wasn't working. :duh:

mhartman29

That was the second thing I was wondering. It seems like you need to set your front speakers to "small" in order to use the subwoofer with the lmc. But, I have RT3000s for my front speakers. They aren't small at all. Does that designation really matter?

kwikrnu

I couldn't tell a difference between the large and small setting. I have untrained ears though.

cfrizz

It isn't the size of the speakers that matters. It is recommended to set your speakers to small with a crossover of 80 so that all the real deep bass is handled by the sub. It puts less strain on the speakers & the sub has the ability to go a lot lower than the speakers are able to.

I hate to think of what watching the War Of The Worlds would do to a pair of drivers in speakers!:eek:

tonyb

My speaks handle that movie and then some,but then again,they do have 6 12 in. woofers between them.If you have big floorstanders,like the 3000p's,with a built in sub,setting it to small will kill your soundstage.Read your specs,play around a bit with the crossover settings.A sub should pick up right before your speaks start rolling off.

If your AVP won't let you set it to large,do so in the player setup and use analog cables to your AVP or receiver.

kwikrnu

thanks for explaining that.

mhartman29

OK, I'm sorry but I'm really confused. Polk seems to say you shouldn't connect your subwoofer through the SW output, since the receiver might have a low pass filter. Not sure if the emotiva lmc has a low pass filter on the SW output or not -- I'm trying to look that up right now. If it does, it sounds like that is not the option to use.

It sounds like the Polk SW should have a have "LFE" line input that bypasses the subwoofer's built-in low-pass filter. But, if setting the speakers to small is the only way to get the SW output to work that probably isn't ideal for my situation either since, as tonyb mentioned, that would kill the bass output from my RT3000s.

What's the solution???? Argh!

jabrax

I'm not sure about the LMC, but i would figure it to be similiar to the MMC.

If you set the speakers to large, set the Sub to enh (enhanced) and your sub will play in all modes. (This is if the lfe has this option in the speaker setup