Thank you. I will play later tonight!

I ran the ARC last night setting the front (T2s) to full range, the other speakers to and 80KHZ crossover and a 500HZ limit.

We watch a movie last night and it sound seamless a crossed front and well balance.

I have a question, why set the limit so low as to the 500HZ? and what is the fear with moving up? I know I can play and what ever makes me happy is the right answer, but I was curious of the logic.

Thanks

JimOhio

Jimohio wrote: I have a question, why set the limit so low as to the 500 Hz? and what is the fear with moving up? I know I can play and what ever makes me happy is the right answer, but I was curious of the logic.

You have touched on a very big topic. It has been discussed elsewhere in the forum (albeit briefly) and in audio forums and journals at great length. Here are some basic facts, after this, you'll have to do some research as the depth exceeds the needs of this forum I believe. So:

1. The actual effects of the room on frequency response are mathematically defined by the size of the room, most typical homes, even big ones with large rooms, are likely to see this maximum frequency somewhere below 300 Hz.
2. Frequencies above that are affected by the reflectiveness (or absorbtiveness) of the environment and are not the peaks and valleys associated with the first item.
3. This reflected energy at higher frequencies varies tremendously by speaker type and often is the determining factor for much of the speakers' sound quality.
4. Therefore, correcting at higher frequencies is not "room correction", it is "speaker correction", and often not correct for many speakers - especially those with wide high frequency dispersion like the GoldenEars and other thin-film, flat-panel type transducers.
5. The 500 Hz suggestion will guarantee you fix the room bass issues and at the same time guarantee you do not destroy the rest of the spectrum. It is actually one of the biggest virtues of ARC vs. other room EQ systems

Hope this helps. And of course, feel free to experiment, as you said.

500Hz is arbitrary. Ideally you want to identify the Schroeder frequency of YOUR room and EQ below that (www.soundandvision.com/content/schroeder...#YyA0wJczODSwtKtm.97). But acoustics is complicated... while we don't know your room, we know your speakers and GoldenEar people have used the speakers with Anthem gear and recommend 500Hz. So absent a pretty good understanding of your room acoustics its a safe bet.

Why not EQ above that? Several reasons...

Boosting frequencies eats up amplifier and speaker headroom. Lets say for simplicity you have completely flat speakers but your room results in a 6dB dip at 1kHz. In order to EQ out that dip you have to feed your speaker 4x the wattage at that frequency to increase the output at 1kHz to flatten it out. And, your speaker is now actually putting out 4x the dB they're just not making it to the listening position because of room acoustics. at 4x the output you're probably introducing more distortion... AND finally this is all in theory. I have experience manually measuring and EQing subwoofer systems. Sometimes you boost and boost and boost and the null just doesn't move. So you may just be creating additional distortion with no real gain. Now multiply all of that times the fact that this was just an example and this is happening at multiple frequencies in the real world.

Second, its a common observation that EQing everything can "suck the life" out of a system. This is often perceived as a flatness, lack of dynamics etc. If you can limit what you're EQing to lower frequencies, you're limiting what range this potential negative affect is impacting.

Finally, back to the top, the point of that article I linked to eventually gets around to is a recommendation of only EQing the bass. They say this can't easily be done but in fact with a system like ARC it can be done and we should take advantage of that.

Long story short... don't mess with what you don't HAVE to but bass really needs EQed... you're doing more good than harm EQing bass.

I love this stuff so I'd be happy to try and answer any more questions.

Okay, EQ'ing over 500 Hz messes with the secret sauce! Got it!

I had been correcting up to 2000 Hz due to my frequency response curves and it was sounding a bit "clinical". I went back in yesterday and set my cut off at 500 Hz, my T1s at full range/flat, and the rest of my speakers at 80 Hz for the crossover frequencies. After calculating and uploading, the results were much more lively.

As an additional note, I went back through and checked the sound levels with my sound meter and was surprised by the results. ARC had the levels off a bit. It seemed to want to set everything at around 80 dB up front so I stayed with that and went around the room. The center was about 2 dB low, L/R mains 1-2 dB high, and the surrounds were 5 dB low. After getting everything set to 80 dB, I bumped up the LFE a bit and I was good to go. It's sounding better than ever!

Thanks for all the tips and tricks shared here on the forum!

Cheers,

T Cobe

Thank You

I did the 500hz ARC over the weekend and the results were very good.