Bose Blues

[Woochifer]

As the others have said, check the owner's manual and make sure that it's connected right. The Bose AM systems require that you patch the receiver's speaker output through the bass module, which then redirects the output to the satellite cubes. The cubes are not designed to plug directly to the receiver.

After you check the connections, you should make sure that the output through all five speakers is identical. You do NOT do this with a movie, you need to use the test tone generator in your receiver. Movies are inconsistent in how much sound gets directed to the surrounds, only with a test tone can you ensure that the level output to each channel is consistent. To make absolutely sure that everything is done right, I would go further and get a SPL meter over at Radio Shack to ensure that the sound output levels are equal all the way around.

Another reason you're not getting enough output through the surround speakers could have more do with the soundtrack itself. If the surround levels sound low, it might be because the recording engineer intended it to sound like that. Most soundtracks are mixed with most of the sound up front, and not a lot in the back other than ambient sounds. Only with certain action films and larger scale movies will you get a lot of activity in the surrounds. Multichannel music discs such as DVD-A, SACD, and concert DVDs will also have a lot more sound mixed into the surrounds.

[Worf101]

Sigh, I don't know how many folks I've told this to. You just can't hook up a Bose minicube system to a receiver and get 5.1 sound. It doesn't work that way... You think I like giving people the bad news? Well can't say I never warned ya.

Da Worfster