Help with Athena AS-F2's and subwoofer...

[tmeader]

Hello all, I'm trying to figure out the best method of getting everything hooked up with my new setup. I have a Onkyo TX-DS575X receiver, Athena AS-C1 center, Athena AS-F2 fronts and Polk Audio RM2350 surrounds (speakers from the Polk 6700 home theater package) along with a Polk PSW350 sub. Basically, all the reading of the Polk guides for hooking up speakers has me thoroughly confused. To read their advice, one would think that the line-level in or LFE in on you sub is from the devil himself. It seems their staunch belief that subs should only ever be hooked up via speaker-line level in from the receiver (for the front R/L) and then out to the fronts from the sub. They claim this is the ONLY way to be sure of proper bass response. My question is this: It seems that the AS-F2s have extremely deep bass ability... as such, is it truly that crucial to have the bass for those being filtered through the sub initially? Also, in the aforementioned Polk preferred hookup method, what exactly happens with the lower bass info for the center and surrounds? I know that if you have it setup via the LFE input, that any speaker set to "small" on your receiver has bass info below a certain depth sent to the sub LFE channel. Is something similar done when you have the sub hooked up via the speaker-line level connection, or are the center and surrounds virtually "on their own" at that point?

My first thought for this setup is to hookup the receiver to the sub via the sub preamp out on the receiver, into the sub's LFE input (unfiltered). Then hookup all the other speakers directly to the receiver... setting the fronts to Large and all others to Small.

Thoughts? Any insight or explanations would be GREATLY appreciated... thanks in advance to any and all that reply.