Monitor 60's

Qtip-Josh

I have 2 monitor 60's hooked up to a new Sony receiver (100X5). I have little to no bass coming from the speakers. I am new to the home theater thing and not sure if it's normal for these speakers or if it's a receiver problem. I can't simply set the bass higher on the receiver as far as I know?!! Do I get an equalizer to help manage my levels or is there a trick to setting the receiver levels??

coolsax

do you have a subwoofer hooked up as well? if not then check to see if the sub woofer is actually set to off on the Receiver. The default setting my AVR showed a sub, once you take that off you should hear some decent bass with the 60's as the AVR won't be trying to send the lower frequencies to a nonexisting sub.. or if you have a sub most of your bass is going to come from there. I did some two channel listening recently without the sub and the 60's put out pretty decent bass.

also welcome to CP!

MrGlobe

not sure if you looked, but are the metal jumpers on the back of the speaker still connecting both sets of posts?

Since the 60s can be bi-amped, they have 2 sets of posts so you can run 2 sets of wires from each speaker. If you are not bi-wiring them, then you need to have either the metal jumpers that came with them connecting the 2 sets of posts, or you need to connect the two sets with regular speaker wire.

If the jumpers aren't there, and you have the speaker wires connected to only one set of posts in the back, then you're speakers are only receiving sound to one part of the speaker. 1 set of posts goes to the tweets and 1 set goes to the mid (if i remember correctly)

I too have a set of 60s and have listened to them in 2.0 channel for many hours. They have clean bass that is impressive for a 5 1/4" driver.

Also, your receiver should have adjustments for both treble and bass. They may be under "Tone" or some other setting.


(edit) also, the speakers will need to be "broken in" if you have just purchased them new. The sound you hear from new speakers is not the sound you will hear from speakers with 100hrs of use. They will warm up and hit lower notes after you use them for a while.
Hope this helps

wutadumsn23

Good advice here, if those suggestions don't fix it I'd be surprised. Probably the sub on the AVR needs to be set to off if you aren't running one, since like cool said the default setting on most AVR's is set to on or present. Welcome to Club Polk.

-Jeff

Qtip-Josh

I do have a Klipsch - 10" 420W Powered Subwoofer which is plenty bass but it would sound even better with full sound coming from the monitor 60's. I was messing around and found a setting that gets a little more mid bass from them. I still have to find the treble and bass setting on the receiver. It just suprizes me that everyone says that they have great bass but I don't really hear it! I'll keep playing around. Next step, rear speakers...

MrGlobe

Another possible issue might be your speakers being set to "small" instead of "large". When a speaker is set to "small" the receiver sends only the middle and high notes to the speakers, and then sends the low notes to the sub. This allows your receiver to use less power thus giving you more headroom. If, however, you set the receiver to "large" if will send all the low, middle, and high notes to the speakers.

Mon40CSMM10

This is assuming that the metal jumper plate is connected to the speaker posts, and that speaker wire is connected to either one of the sets of posts.

In general, setting the speaker to Small or Large should only affect what the receiver sends to the speaker based on the crossover setting. Anything below the crossover setting will be sent to the LFE channel (that includes the subwoofer).

So make sure to check the crossover setting. If it's set to something like 200 Hz, then that explains why only midrange and high frequencies are being heard. Either lower the crossover setting (e.g., down to 80 Hz or 50 Hz) or use the Large speaker setting instead of Small for the front speakers.

In my own case, I actually have the front speakers set to Small instead of Large, with the crossover set to 50 Hz. (That means everything below 50 Hz is getting rolled off or attenuated... and my tests show that these speakers can actually reproduce sounds down to 30 Hz using a CD with test tones when they are set to Large.). True, I'm not getting the absolute lowest bass possible with that setting, but for the room size and dimensions, it still sounds very good for music, movies, and video games.