rayh78

Which settings should I use to setup speakers?
Bought a new Samsung 3D Led TV with a bluray player. Sort of wanted everything to match and use Samsungs anynet+ features. And know receiver is not but so great compared to a Yamaha.
But bought a Samsung c500 receiver to replace a old Yamaha non HDMI receiver.

Also have 4 Polk rm2300 satellite speakers, Polk rm2600 center channel & Polk pw350 sub.
I have 2 choices on how to setup speakers. Not sure if I understand all of this.
Will not use the HT receiver much but I have too much invested not to at least have it setup right.

1. I do have a old radio shack sound meter. So I sit in the listening position in the room with the sound meter. I set all the Polk speaker except the sub to size small.
I manually run a tone test on the receiver and adjust All speaker including center and sub so that they all read the same volume.

2. The Samsung came with a sort of microphone that you plug into the front of it and it is suppose to do all this for you, in automatic tone test mode. And reviews were pretty good that this feature worked well.

But during the Auto tone test setup, I noticed that it set the size of the front speakers and center channel to small. The rears it set to large. Concerned because the front and rears are the same model speaker. Also when it did its own auto tone test some speakers seemed louder than others and the sub was not as loud. Are they suppose to be the same?

It did sound good when I played a DVD. Should I just leave it alone?

Thanks for any suggestions.

Spiky

They don't necessarily need to be the same, but those speakers should really all be set to small. Auto setups are notorious for doing weird things, I wouldn't let it bother you. Set it manually.

JZ1276

If the sub sounded lower compared to your other speakers it is normal.

rayh78

If I do manually Do I set the sub lower maybe 1/2 the volume??

Spiky

A regular sub is going to be all over the place in what is "loud", depending on the material. Without a graphic or parametric equalizer to even out its frequency response, it's hard to say what it should be set to. And, we tend to hear bass as "quieter". So your ears are not a good measure of its loudness compared to much higher freqencies.

Setting up a sub can be confusing for other reasons. Dolby has a 10db adjustment built in, so that can throw off some receivers or test tone discs, depending on how they are recorded, whether they account for this. Usually you just set the sub to the same level per the SPL meter, but it does end up where the sub ends up 10db less than the others because the test tones are different from movie audio.

Basically, do the test tone setup, then if if doesn't sound the way you like during movies, adjust it a bit.

BTW, a decrease of 10db is generally considered to be half as loud.

Sdallnct

Hey, do I remember correctly? 3 db increase requires double the power?

Spiky

Yep.