5.1 and sub woofers

Factual Questions
1

There is a definate shift in the market place from the old style speaker set up and the new style speaker set up with a large sub.

Generall when you use a large sub you dont need large speakers for the rest of your set up. They are used in 5.1 sound but they tend to be more popular in general as well. Witness all the computer speakers setups with 2 speakers and a sub.

My question is - Disregaurding the 5.1 standard for a moment, was this shift a consumer oriented decision (consumers like less bulky speakers so manufacturers cater to thier wants) or is this set up actually superior to the onld style set up (3 way speakers with thier own woofers)

2

I think speakers just got better. I mean they are able to be smaller while still producing good sound. Even before the 5.1 surround came out BOSE was putting out those little bookshelf speakers which I always wanted but never could afford.

3

Bose speakers generally suck. Honest. For the money, you can buy MUCH better speakers from Paradigm, NHT, Energy, PSB, B&W, etc. Bose’s popularity is almost entirely due to their fantastic marketing and little else.

Satellite/subwoofer setups are popular because they take up so little space. And the best ones are extremely good. But the best ‘satellites’ are almost as big as the older traditional speakers you may be familiar with.

Another reason sat/sub setups are popular is because most people use their speakers these days for surround-sound video and background music. And for movie watching, a subwoofer is big improvement, because we’re not looking for pure fidelity as much as a jaw-dropping experience, and that means your speakers need the ability to give you that chest-pounding bass when explosions go off and stuff. And subwoofers excel at that.

Anyway, the main problem with sat/sub combinations is that they often lack midrange. The bass is great, the highs are great, but the middle stuff can be pretty muddy, because neither your 12"-15" subwoofer driver or your tiny tweeters are very good at reproducing those frequencies.

Again, in a 5.1 setup, you generally have a center-channel speaker that produces pretty good midrange for voice, and that’s all you really need. But if you like music, you’ll find many of these setups to be lacking.

The system I’m currently putting together is a best-of-both-worlds approach. Paradigm Reference 60’s for the mains, their large center channel speaker for the middle, dipole surrounds, and my current David 300 subwoofer will round it out. When listing to stereo music, everything gets turned off except the subwoofer and the Reference 60’s, which are phenomenal music performers.

That whole system will be around $3000. Connected to a Denon 3801 Receiver ($1200 or so), the combination will give you as good a sound as any system under 10K.

4

Well, ignoring all the surround stuff & just considering separate speakers, the major advantage is that it is more efficient power-wise. You only need to amplify the signals for the particular bandwidth that that speaker uses. This has been done by many people in home set-ups for a while, and it is often called ‘biamplification’ in a 2-way system.

In a 3-way speaker, the signal is filtered inside the speaker (the filter is known as a crossover). This is a big waste of energy, since the high frequencies going to the woofer and the low frequencies going to the tweeter may be wasted as heat in the filter(s). With separate amplifiers, you filter at a low level, before you amplify, and thus waste less power. Another savings is that tweeters are much more efficient at actually producing sound than woofers, so you can use a smaller amplifier for the tweeter and a larger one for the woofer.

The disadvantage is that the speakers will only work with that particular system, whereas the traditional style is more easily swapped to another system. As more separate amplification schemes become standard, this is less important.

As for how to get ‘better’ sound using smaller speakers, it’s a bit more complicated; the speaker design is actually different. It is true that the more unusual designs are more familiar than they used to be for designers.

5

But the upscale speakers that I would dearly love to be able to afford are still pairs of 2- or 3-ways. What you prbably have with the 5.1 setup is something optimized for surround sound with your video system, not for pure audio. The Absolute Sound crowd seems to still stick with a pair of really good, and big, speakers, in part, I’m sure, because the software is almost all in two channels. But these are the same guys who still prefer vinyl.