What's the highest your surrounds and center should be set over your fronts.

[ChrisY]

One of my buddies sets his surrounds and center 6db over his fronts on his receiver . When im watching movies with him they sound to loud to me over the fronts and his wife feels the same way but he thinks it sounds great. Does he have them to high?

[Wireworm5]

IMO you want all the speakers at the same level at your listening position. You hear the loudest speaker which covers up the sound from the other speaker. Then you have the problem of distance, you hear the speaker closest to you assuming they're set at the same volume level. This is where using time delay comes in handy. When you compensate with time delay and have all the speakers at balanced levels then you should be hearing all the speakers and not have anyone dominate the others. This gives you the best sound and may take a day or two get used to if your not acustomed to a balanced soundfield.

[kexodusc]

Wireworm is dead-on. You definitely want the levels to be matched.

Having said that, does your buddy set the receiver values at +6 dB, or is it 6 dB higher when measured with a SPL meter? Different sensitivities and room positions can affect the relative loudness. You want all the speakers to sound equally loud at the listening position, the numeric value on the receiver's display is not a good gauge for that.

[Wireworm5]

I don't have auto-calibration so setting delay times is a process of experimenting 'til it sounds right. In an unconventional set up my center is 5' from the sweet spot. all freq. set at 0 db and the delay time at 3 miliseconds. I never bothered with delay times before, but once I realized I had this feature on my receiver and tried different times, then I realized the effect it has on acheiving a balance sound.
I can also adjust the delay times in various soundfields and compensate for room liveliness and size. I managed to improve some soundfields from the default settings but its still not quite right and have to experiment some more. But in 6 channel stereo mode it sounds perfect to me, so I leave it there 95% of the time.

[ChrisY]

Wireworm is dead-on. You definitely want the levels to be matched.

Having said that, does your buddy set the receiver values at +6 dB, or is it 6 dB higher when measured with a SPL meter? Different sensitivities and room positions can affect the relative loudness. You want all the speakers to sound equally loud at the listening position, the numeric value on the receiver's display is not a good gauge for that.
kexodusc im not sure where my friend's receiver values are set at and I dont think he's ever used an SPL meter before, all I know is that he has the center and surrounds 6db higher than the fronts and it sounds unbalanced to me but he loves it and thinks its perfect.

[kexodusc]

Well, it likely is unbalanced, but without an SPL meter, it's just a guess...the numbers on the receiver are useless for gauging the relative volume of the speakers...
If he's happy, that's all that matters, I guess.