Had my 950 since the first batch shipped, and I probably knew the answer to this at one time but can no longer recall.

I am reconfiguring my setup for two separated subs and a tactile transducer. Up until now, I had been running the standard all-speakers-small with all bass to the subs via sub pre-out, splitting the signal to the amp for the transducer.

I am switching to stereo subs now, which will be used and positioned more like dedicated woofers for the mains with a slightly higher XO point, so I would LIKE to route the L&R mains bass to them separately for two channel through an active XO, which means I would set L&R mains to LARGE, and sub to OFF so that all bass will be routed there in surround modes, but in stereo only left ch bass would go to the left sub, etc. My problem is then getting all LFE to echo into the transducer during movies.

So my question is, in SPEAKER CONFIG when the sub is set to off, does LFE info actually still come out the sub pre-out besides any speakers set to large, or is it in fact fully disabled?

For that matter, I don't remember if setting mains to LARGE, sub to OFF and all other speakers to SMALL routes all LFE and program material below the three XO points to the mains. It does, does it not?

BB

Setting mains to LARGE and sub to OFF will route bass from other small speakers to the mains.

This is a tough nut to crack. To run stereo subs in the way you describe (large mains and no sub in the 950, external crossover to steer audio between subs and mains), there's no easy way to get a signal for the transducer. If you turn the sub back on, though, the LFE track goes only to the transducer - which is hardly optimal. What kind of external crossover do you plan to use? Could you split the sub outputs and take the second left/right sub outputs to the transducer (summing them either before or at the transducer's amp)?

I was going to use one of the Behringer units, the gurus at HTGuide think pretty highly of the quality of their new line. These have a separate mono sub out, but I don't want it on all the time, plus if reroutes everything below its XO away from the low output, which I don't want to do as those are my subs.

So, yeah, it may not work the way I want. What I was hoping for was that setting sub to off re-routed all bass to the mains, BUT did not disable the LFE only track from still coming out the .1 pre-out, since they would assume nothing was hooked to it anyway. Sort of like switching the analog 5.1 switch to off doesn't route the bass away from that output.

Since the processing is all done digitally though, I guess that topology does not apply.

Probably what I was hoping to end up settling for was material coming into the analog ins (my SACD deck) would perform as I want since i don't use the transducer with that material. Where I won't get what I want is when I listen to DVD-based material other than movies, like concert video's, and the DVD-V surround layer of a couple of DVD-A disks I have, like the Beatles' new Love album. Since this is a pretty small amount of my listening, it would be OK.

Guess I'll live wih mono bass and rethink my XO point between the mains and the subs.

Unless you come up with a bright idea.

Thanks.

BB

What amp are you using to drive the transducer? I'm wondering if there might be a way to pull something off there by splitting the Behringer's low outputs and sending a copy of the stereo low frequency signals to the transducer's amp in parallel with the signals to the two powered subs. If that worked and the transducer's amp had a trigger, you could even use the 950's zone trigger to power it on and off and then just turn on the second zone when you want the transducer going...

Everything is running off Crown Macrotechs, which have XLR and 1/4" TRS inputs, and you can in fact use the XLR as input, and then daisy chain the signal by coming out the 1/4" jack to another amp's input, but there is not a good way to combine those 2 signals into one for the single channel the transducer is running off.

BB

Without hunting around for something that could sum signals (may exist, just don't know of a place for it right off), there's always the possibility of compromising and just using a daisy chain from one of the channels (left or right) to feed a signal to the transducer's amp channel. The LFE gets split equally between the two, so you'd get it - you'd just get half of the crossed-over bass (either the right half or the left half).

Looked through Behringer's products, and it looks like the DCX2496 does exactly what I need (and you describe). You can set XO's for two ins and output the 4 split signals, but also sum the inputs, filter off the bass and route that to another output.

Solves my problem. Spiffy unit, check it out.

Thanks for your help Gonk.

BB

I run a DCX2496 as an active crossover and sub equalizer. It will do what you need. The only common difficulty people have in integrating the unit is converting RCA to XLR, since the Behringher inputs and outputs XLR, but it looks like you've already addressed that issue. Should be a simple drop-in for you.

Well after doing a reat deal of reading about this thing, it appears that plan has an issue as well.

THis unit is pretty much sonically transparent if you feed it a signal in its intended (pro level) signal range of 8-10 volts. Unfortunately, this is 4X as high as the typical output of a consumer type preamp out (like the 950), and therefore, I will be pretty much destroying its high quality SNR and probably adding some noise into my system by running it with a simple adapter cable, and so would need to put an unbalanced to balanced steup transformer to the chain. I could then use the gain pots on my Crown amps to reduce the output to get back into the ballpark of the rest of the system. Have to look into this some more.

BB

Yep, I figured that question was next.

Here's what I do -- coming out of the DCX2496 and into my Outlaw 7100 amp, I simply pass the output signal through a voltage divider to cut 18 dB off the output signal. Cost about $10 in resistors from RatShack.

Going into the DCX2496, the signals that it sees are boosted 18 dB above all the others, using the Outlaw 950 trim controls. Piece of cake.

I read all those complaints about the DCX2496 as well, and they're greatly exaggerated. However, you can still give yourself additional headroom through simple gain structure tricks like this at virtualy no cost.

I've done extensive listening tests -- my favorite is to play a mono source, one channel through the DCX and the other without as a "control" -- and as far as I can tell the Behringer is completely transparent. Certainly good enough for price! Even at very low signal levels, I doubt you'll actually hear any artifacts due to pro vs. consumer level signal.