Speakers

Main Speakers

"The "subwoofer" is used more and more in Home Cinema installations. It frees the speakers and amplifiers from their most difficult task: reproducing bass and sub-bass. It also allows you to get away from using main speakers that are too bulky. By combining a subwoofer and five small to medium speakers, it’s possible to obtain an excellent result with minimum cluttering.

4.0 encoding systems such as Dolby Surround didn’t have real use for a subwoofer, because there was no specific channel encoded for this purpose. With a good set of main and Surround speakers, as well as an adequate centre channel speaker, the bass presence was sufficient.

On the other hand, more recent systems of encoding in 5.1 format, such as Dolby Digital or DTS, have a specific channel on which the bass frequencies are encoded. This bass channel is called Low Frequency Effect, or LFE for the initiated. It’s sure that you can always configure your amplifier so that this dedicated channel is redirected to your two main speakers, but the level of bass that your speakers and amplifier will have to deal with will be quite merciless.

In most cases, the subwoofer is a cubic speaker which shouldn’t be more than 50 cm deep. It is self-amplified, meaning it has its own amplifier. It is therefore not necessary to connect the bass box to the amplifier via speaker cables. The amplifier, in any case, doesn’t have an output for this purpose. To connect the subwoofer to the amplifier, you use the line out of the amp., and plug it to the line-in on the bass box. This connection allows the transport of the modulated bass signal, which the subwoofer amplifies all by itself.

The reason this connection is different to that of other speakers stems from the fact that the bass frequencies require a lot of energy to be reproduced correctly, and the Home Cinema amplifier already has plenty to do with the other speakers that are connected to it. If, in addition, it has to supply the energy necessary to work the bass box, the size of the power transformer required to drive it would certainly be doubled, which wouldn’t be very compatible with your shelf décor!"

Related articles

Tutorials