The Vince Files

Now that we’re settled in our new home and mostly (99%) unpacked, we took a bit of a break to enjoy the fact that we have no neighbours on the other side of our walls.  Living in a townhouse these past several years, we’ve always had to maintain courtesy and not make excessive noise.  Also, our townhouse didn’t quite have enough room in the living room for our 44″ TV and my stereo setup.  We decided to just chill and enjoy some audio.

In our new home, we enjoy a larger living room where space is not much of a problem (at the moment).  I was able to take my beloved Paradigm speakers (a pair of Mini-Monitor V3 and a PDR-12 subwoofer) out of storage where they’ve been patiently waiting for the past 4 years.  I also ordered new banana plugs from MonoPrice to finish the ends of my 16AWG Monster Cable speaker wires.

I connected them all to my older Denon 5.1 receiver and played a few test tracks.  Something was off; it must have been the acoustics in the room.  I checked the settings on the receiver and my subwoofer and made some adjustments.  I had set the crossover frequency for the subwoofer at a really low 80Hz.  The subwoofer will play the lowest frequency and starts to attenuate response at 80Hz.  However, the fronts are still somewhat too small to play these low sounds above 80Hz.  So, the music volume tends to dip around the 90-100Hz range.  So I raised the crossover frequency on the subwoofer to as high as it would go (thereby attempting to play any sound sent to it by the receiver).  At the receiver, I set the subwoofer crossover frequency to 120Hz and now the sound sounds fuller without too much of a bump in response at around the 100Hz mark.  Thankfully, this subwoofer is very “musical” and not overly boomy or muddy.  I’m no audiophile so I can’t really explain what I mean.

Last night, we listened to select CDs from our collection: from Charlotte Church to Pavarotti to The Beatles.  They all sounded excellent and quite literally music to my ears.