Quote Originally Posted by Woochifer
I have, and it indeed can sound impressive if it's setup correctly and if the room is well situated for it. This was a setup with four identical tower speakers all the way around along with the matching center speaker in a large room.

The argument in favor of setting all the speakers to SMALL and rerouting all the lows into the subwoofer has to do with room acoustics and frequency wave interactions. The room locations where the main speakers typically sit do not produce the best bass, and the bass will vary by location, relative to your seated position.

Redirecting the bass into the subwoofer allows you to optimally place the sub in a location where the bass sounds the best. This also allows you the option of further tuning the bass using a parametric equalizer, which IMO is absolutely essential in any small to medium sized if you're serious about high quality sounding bass.

Keeping the speakers set to LARGE maintains the phase and timing coherency better, but in my experience, fixing the acoustical effects has a much greater effect.



The original soundtracks for movies get mixed in large screening theaters. The mixes presume that the surround channels will get output into speaker arrays with multiple monitors along the side and backwalls at a theater. This is very different from a home 5.1/7.1 alignment where the surrounds act as point sources. In practice, theaters also use a crossover that directs the bass away from the surround arrays.

For the DVD/BD release, the soundtrack will either use the theatrical mix or get remixed to optimize around the 5.1/7.1 home theater alignment. This type of remixing will put more spatial and directional imaging cues into the surrounds.

In all these cases, I recall that the monitoring is done using full range monitors. But, also keep in mind that these studios are acoustically controlled and generally larger spaces than a home theater. So, they don't have the same degree of room-induced effects in the low frequencies that you have in a typical home.

In actuality, you don't really want a true theater experience. Keep in mind that movie theaters are optimized for large audiences, so they avoid a lot of directional imaging cues. The home theater can optimize for a smaller seated position, so the sound can do a lot more aggressive directional imaging.
Great explanation...thanks for taking the time to inform me.