SACDs and Subwoofer Volume

I'm on my 4th Sony SACD. Each one has bass management BUT the volume on the subwoofer barely shows up on my sound meter. A call to Sony's Tech support blamed it on my receiver (B&K AVR307). A call to B&K, the dealer, and others - blamed it on Sony. In fact, the local Circuit City has the same problem on their display unit (I checked!)

Will the Outlaw solve my problem (bass sound level)???

I don't believe the Outlaw will do any bass management on the 5.1 inputs. So, it's either up to your SACD player, or you need to buy an analog bass management unit such as the ICBM.

I think Dennis is wondering about what the ICBM will do for him.

The ICBM is designed to re-direct bass information from the five channels (or two, for two-channel SACD) to the sub. It should help. Only case where it wouldn't do much would be if the recording itself lacked low-end.

I find it odd that the receiver could be at fault in this case, since all the 5.1 analog input does is pass the signal through the volume control and on to the amp section (or LFE output for the .1 channel). It sounds like it may be a problem with the way Sony is doing bass management in their player.

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Gonk

The receiver does bias (slightly) the 5.1 sound levels to conform to the THX levels.....If I fiddle with my subwoofer volume control...it actually doesn't help because of this bias.

Does your Sony unit actually claim to perform bass management?

Yes...all Sony's have bass management. I think the crossover is 120 Hz, however...THX is 80Hz.

My problem is the different sound levels exiting the 5.1 outputs. The SOny has a level adjusment but not enough to compensate.

Sounds sort of like a somewhat-unsuccessful bass management implementation if it's messing up things like that. I don't remember ever hearing of similar problems with the ICBM. Can the Sony player's bass management be disabled (I'm guessing "yes")?

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Gonk

Yes...Sony can be set to DIRECT (or no bass management)....what I was wondering is if there is level control in the ICBM enough to compensate about 12-15 dB ???

It bosts bass frequencies 12-15 dB? That's quite a lot... Why does it do that? Does it actually sound better with the boost?

The "Subwoofer Level" knob on the ICBM is labeled as going from "min" to "+9dB". I would think, though, that if you are having 12-15dB of trouble with sub output, there's something else amiss here, which is why I asked about disabling the Sony's bass management. I was thinking of disregarding the Sony's bass management and off-loading that task to the ICBM as a solution to the problem. Would that be a possible solution?

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Gonk

If I can put the sub up +9dB and the others minus 4dB ??? Then I'm set!!!

Don't forget that the output from the sub will depend on what has been directed to that channel when the disc was mastered. If the disc was mastered in 5.0, then there will not be any info in the .1 channel and any bass directed to the sub will be performed by the player/receiver/processor.

I'm just using Sony's built in tone generator without a CD. It produces white noise on each channel to set volume levels. There's also a built in level adjustment but it isn't enough.