Since this seems to be one of the settings with problems, I wanted to know why anyone would use this? Is it really just to double the bass?

I would have thought that most Oulaw owners would wanted a true reproduction of the source material without this kind of loudness-esque setting.

I'm not a big fan of it either but I imagine it is for allowing your mains to drop off naturally and then supplementing the low end with the sub.

I want to use this for vhs (prologic) and for music, where there is no lfe track. I haven't tried it yet, but my mains are polks (set to large) which drop off big time at around 50hz. I am assuming that with the fix, if I take anything below 60 on the mains, and then send it to my SMS-1 for further trimming, that I should be able to EQ the bass in nicely.

I tried this initially with test signals coming in through the 7.1 input, and was able to EQ it because the SMA-1 trim is a dropoff in the \ direction while the 990 drops off in the / direction. By using the EQ in the SMS1 I was able to get the two to cross at about the 75% point and then attenuate the area above that spot. I am assuming I will be able to do the same with prologic signals now that this issue has been fixed.

I don't like the Polks set to small, even though I am sure that's probably how they should be set. The sound is much fuller when I allow the full range. Letting the sub be L/R + SUB should let me "tune" in the lower bass better for the analog inputs (I hope).

Using large mains and L/R+Sub will only get you more low frequency data to the sub than small mains will if you set the crossover point higher than you otherwise would. What crossover point are you using for the mains? Would you consider trying that crossover point with the mains set to "small"?

Yes, I have to go back and test that now once I get the new firmware loaded, and my system back up and running. In practice, smalls with the proper crossover should work best; however we are dealing with a programmed digital crossover here, not analog circuitry. In the digital world, things are not black and white because we have signal processing going on which ultimately results in loss somewhere. Some of this is due to the selection of hardware, the methodology of adc and dac processing, and of course the programmers.

I seem to remember that setting the 990 to 60 actually started a long slope crossover starting at around 100 or so and moving down to 60. It was not a steep slope that I saw when EQing the signal.

Once I'm back up and running I'll go through the whole EQ process again with the new firmware to see if I come up with the same results. I can only say at this time that with the fronts set to small, a lot of the bass seemed to get lost, and it was NOT going to the sub from what I could see. It may simply have been a programming bug in the mode that I was in.

My reason

essentially the only way i can easily listen to no-sub 2-channel stereo in bypass for CD and utilize the 990 crossovers for DVD's/TV.