B&W ASW600 - for music and TV ?

[RocketRonnieRad]

Hi guys,

I just got myself an ASW600 and am not impressed at all by its reproduction of bass in hi fi application....

I have an MTX sub in my van that gives tighter funkier bass than this thing...

When used with TV and films its fine but when used with my Quad 303/33 and CD player the bass is all over the place, soft and boomy.....

I'm running it off the speaker inputs as so....

Amp - Sub L & R then Sub to satellites (MA Silver S1's) from the sub. I'm using silver anniverasry QED speaker wires too.

Any ideas where I'm going wrong here or have I just bought the wrong sub ?

Cheers in advance.

Ron.

PS - Rectangular room 4m x 4.5 m with bay...

[russ.will]

Have you made any attempt to measure the in room response of the speakers and sub, both separately and together? You'll only need a £25 SPL meter and some freely available test tones to get a handle on what's going on and it could remove hours of idle speculation.

FWIW, filling a room with bass is much harder than filling the confined spaces of a van. Unless of course you room is smaller than a van, in which case move into the van and go to work in the house.

Russell

[RocketRonnieRad]

Originally Posted by russ.will

Have you made any attempt to measure the in room response of the speakers and sub, both separately and together? You'll only need a £25 SPL meter and some freely available test tones to get a handle on what's going on and it could remove hours of idle speculation.

FWIW, filling a room with bass is much harder than filling the confined spaces of a van. Unless of course you room is smaller than a van, in which case move into the van and go to work in the house.

Russell

Cheers for the reply Russell.

I guess I'll have to go get a meter....

I dont use an AV receiver or anything, its just used off the amp..no equaliser nothing....do you think I would benefit from such a device ?

[russ.will]

An SPL meter can benefit the set up of speakers of any sort simply by taking the guesswork out of the process.

By playing the test tones and recording their levels, you can plot a graph to see where the best position is. Whilst the MkI Ear is good at telling if there is a difference, it's not so accurate at telling what that difference is.

Guessing crossover the crossover point is a fine example. Crossover too high and you'll get too much bass from the combined output of sub and speakers - crossover too low and you'll end up with a dip where neither are contributing enough. Phase adjustments are even harder to guess, with multiple dips moving around all over the place for very small adjustments of the control.

IMHO, these are reasons why the walk/crawl method beloved of the stereo hifi press is such bunkum; Even if you can hear a dip, how can you tell easily and quickly what's causing it? I've expanded on the other short-comings of the method in my blog.

As regards an EQ device; It could benefit the quality of bass, but only if any issues can't be sorted by proper setup in the first place. Less is always more if you can get away with it.

Russell