meangene,

i was looking at your pics and see why you are not liking what you are hearing.

seems to me maybe you want your full range romping while your subs are thumping?

and the bass management won't give you what you want,correct?

The bass management should be able to give him what he wants by setting speakers to small and tweaking crossover points. As MeanGene observed in his last post, it will take some getting used to.

i understand that gonk,but, how would you feel lookin' at 8-10's and what are those ,12's or 15's?

i would want them all to pound as far as their capabilities would allow!

extreme bass!!

Yes, I would like them all to work under certain circumstances, Like when I play the Blue Man Group DVD video. Believe me having the twin 15" subs and the 4 ESS "Rock Monitors" cranking is something to hear. These speakers are about as old as most people on this forum, but I have updated all drivers and membranes in the last couple of years so they don't sound too bad. The subs need some help as I bought the wrong drivers (Volfenghag) which have to high a Q for the box that they are in. In the near future they will be replaced by Ascendant Audio Avalanche drivers. You can see a demo of them here

Take a look at the Hair Trick videos. (I don't condone hearing loss via DB)

So far I like the changes that I have made; there is more LFE when watching cable and the like. Still, time will tell.

Edited for spelling -

It boils down to finding the best way to apply traditional bass management (which exists to maintain a balanced reproduction of input signal's full frequency range - from below 20Hz all the way to and even beyond 20,000Hz) to a system with pairs of 10" drivers in the mains and surrounds along with a pair of 15" subwoofer drivers. A 40Hz crossover point (or even a 60Hz crossover, potentially) and "small" speakers may allow the 10" drivers to still shake well while bringing the 15" drivers in. For that matter, it may yield more accurate results. The ESS AMT Monitor uses a similar Heil Air Motion mid/tweeter to MeanGene's AMT 3's (which I couldn't find specs on) and two 12" drivers instead of the 6.5" and two 10" drivers in MeanGene's speakers. The -3dB point for the AMT Monitors is listed at 30Hz, which is 10Hz shy of "true" full range. For comparison, that's the same -3dB point listed for my Paradigm's (which I have crossed over at 60Hz). MeanGene's speakers may have different specs, of course, but the info on ESS's site suggests to me that running the AMT3's as small with a low crossover point (40Hz or 60Hz) could yield a very satisfactory result when paired up with those 15" subs.

For what it's worth, the two Blue Man Group discs I have (Audio and The Complex) include DVD-Audio tracks and DTS tracks, both of which contain a discrete .1 LFE track that is fed only to the sub.

Yeah, I was talking about the DVD Audio disk played in DTS. Don't know about you, but I get a lot of bass (maybe mid-bass) out of every speaker while it whirlls around the room, makes me a little dizzy.

dizzy CAN be good


it's hard to find the proper midbass,it can easily be too much or not enough.the x-over can make or break you.i,myself would choose not to have that many "woofers" in a .1 setting,but lot's of luck.

The people over at ESS were kind enough to mail me the specs for the ESS AMT3's which I have added to my web site . The quality isn't very good, but you can make out most of the info.

I have been using the speakers set to small, grudgingly, hey I'm a guy we don't do small well. Anyway, it seems to sound better than before, and the Blue Men didn't seem to have any negitive feedback on the change. Movies that had the LFE didn't change much that I can tell, but the HDTV stuff and CD's did benefit from the change.

Sounds like a good choice, MeanGene - 40Hz at -2dB would probably benefit from small with a crossover around 40Hz to 60Hz, especially when the subs at the lower end of that crossover are as substantial as yours.