My AV receiver has lowest crossover frequency of 80 Hz.?

Question

Sometimes I would want to try a crossover of 60Hz but do not know how to archieve this. Can someone please recomend how it could be done with current AV receiver. Better still recomend some receivers that could allow crossover frequency lower than 80Hz. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

My Sony AV Receiver from several years back allows me to set the crossover in steps from 40Hz to 160Hz, or no crossover. This is accomplished by setting the front speakers to 'large'. What I can not do is send low bass to BOTH the front speakers and a sub woofer. This is not much of a problem for me and by the time it gets to be an issue I'll have a newer receiver. The reason you see so many that have only the 80Hz setting is because 80Hz is the Dolby specification. You need a really good sub to take a crossover lower than 80Hz and if you have a really good sub, you probably have a really good receiver. If my cheapo Sony will do it, just about any good receiver will.

You might want to look up the owner's manual on the web for your receiver because it should have a setting for that.

Answer 2

If you're referring to AV receiver as your typical surround sound multi-speaker home theater amplifier, then you may be out of luck.

From what I've found from trying out a couple of old ProLogic/Dolby Digital Surround units from Kenwood and Radio Shack, they seem to all have internal crossover networks that roll off at around 60-80hz that can't be turned off or adjusted requiring hook up of either a powered or unpowered sub to play the rest of the lower frequencies.

These systems seem to cheat you on the claimed wattage which primarily drives bass frequencies anyway by not allowing you to play the entire full range of frequencies when playing stereo music CD's.

No matter what setting I tried they would not allow my full range speakers to play the hard thump part of a kick bass drum which is around 50hz. I only got an anemic soft sounding thump no matter how high I cranked up the volume.

I had to buy a separate stereo amp, a nice 1973 Sansui 2000A receiver amp bought for $10 at Salvation Army. It drives a pair of 1985 Norman Lab M82's with 10" mid/bass driver and a 1" mylar tweater. They have a natural roll off at around 40hz which means they can't play resonating booming down the road rap music frequencies very loudly.

You might look into home theatre brands searching the web that have crossover frequency adjusts. My Pioneer audio CD player bought 6 years ago from Walmart has this. I don't see why a much more expensive home system wouldn't. They may be more expensive than the ones without adjustable crossover networks.

Answer 3

You would need to get a separate subwoofer amp that has adjustable crossover.  You would not use the subwoofer output of your receiver.  Your receiver must have the preamp outputs for each channel available.  Use the main "preamp out" signals into the subwoofer amp, which will apply the crossover to the signals.  The subwoofer amp should have a line-level output for the main amp and speakers.  If  your receiver allows an external input to the main amps, that should connect to the subwoofer amp output.  If there are no external inputs, subwoofer sound will come out of the main channel speakers as well as the sub, but  this should not be a problem (unless the main speakers can't handle it).

This may seem like a lot of trouble and expense, and in fact the difference between 80Hz and 60HZ crossover is not enough to justify it.