Hi Guys. I recently demoed a pair of triton 3+’s to replace my 7’s as mains. I loved everything I heard about the 3’s and as soon as I have the cash I’m gonna make the purchase.

The dealer had them setup in his denon receiver as small, 80hz crossover with lfe cables run to both towers and a force field 5 sub, essentially creating 3 subwoofers. I know Sandy’s set up tips mention that way of setup, as well as running lfe cables as he did and labeling the towers large in the receiver. I guess my question is, what’s the difference? And what’s better?

My dealer seemed very knowledgeable. He knows my room and situation, and knows they will be fed by an emotiva xpa 3 amp in my home (for l/c/r). He recommends I set them up the way he did for increased dynamic range, and says I won’t lose any bass at all. Agree?

Ma1746 wrote: Hi Guys. I recently demoed a pair of triton 3+’s to replace my 7’s as mains. I loved everything I heard about the 3’s and as soon as I have the cash I’m gonna make the purchase.

The dealer had them setup in his denon receiver as small, 80hz crossover with lfe cables run to both towers and a force field 5 sub, essentially creating 3 subwoofers. I know Sandy’s set up tips mention that way of setup, as well as running lfe cables as he did and labeling the towers large in the receiver. I guess my question is, what’s the difference? And what’s better?

My dealer seemed very knowledgeable. He knows my room and situation, and knows they will be fed by an emotiva xpa 3 amp in my home (for l/c/r). He recommends I set them up the way he did for increased dynamic range, and says I won’t lose any bass at all. Agree?

Hi MA1746,

Your explanation of the dealer's is not clear, at least not clear to me. Did the dealer run cables to the 3+ sub inputs as well as to the Forcefield 5 sub? If he ran only speaker wires to the 3+ units, you do in fact have 3 subs at work when listening to music, but without cables to the sub inputs on the 3+ units, you will not have LFE present at the 3+ from movie soundtracks.

For music, if you set the 3+ speakers to Small in the amp, then all low frequencies below the cutoff will be sent to the LFE sub output in the amp. Thus, for full range operation of the 3+ units with only speaker connections, you need to set the 3+ to.Large or Full Range in the amp so that the entire frequency spectrum will be sent to the speakers via the speaker wire.

So, the best setup depends in part upon how you are going to employ your 3+ units. If only for music, then I recommend speaker connections only and set to Large or Full Range. If for movies and music, the you can try both Large and Small, provided that you run cables to the LFE inputs on the 3+ units. And, provided that your receiver has the capability to provide a "speakers + sub" setup capability. Even then, you may not like the low level sound without full range inputs to the 3+ units and no LFE present for music.

Hope the above helps.

Happy future listening

Art

Hi Art, thanks for the reply. Sorry for the confusion, the dealer set them up with speaker wire and lfe cables to each tower, and lfe cable to the forcefield as well. My use will be mostly home theater, with very little music. I just can’t really grasp the difference between setting the tritons as large, vs small with a crossover of 80. Seems like either way, the towers would get lfe information.

If you were primarily or exclusively using the speakers for music, I believe it would be better to send the entire signal from the amp to the speakers and let the built in crossovers handle the distribution within the speaker.

But, since you are interested in HT and not music, and therefore connecting LFE cables, I would expect that the primary effect will come from wherever the amp crossover is set. You might notice little difference in other sounds between the Large and Small settings. My thought would be pick the one that sounds best to you. With 3 subs, you should have plenty of movie bass.

In my case, I use my Triton Ones exclusively for music (mostly classical orchestral and choral), so my setup would likely be very different from yours.

Enjoy.

Art