Is it worth upgrading?

fish99 said:
Well it's carrying the bass portion of the same sounds that come out of all the other speakers. If you've got a loud explosion coming out of the left rear, the sub carries most of that sound, and the left rear only carries the high frequencies of it, but the explosion still sounds like it's coming from the left rear, because your ears focus more on the directional cues of higher frequencies. That's why 5.1 can get away with just a single sub but it needs 5 postional woofers and 5 positional tweeters.
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that's fine IF you have 5 full range speakers and a sub playing the LFE only. when you have your speakers set to small and the bass redirected to the sub *or* played thru both, the sub will play upper bass frequencies that are very direction, which does mean the positision of that sub plays a great part in the soundstage.


trust me, i didnt spends days moving subs around the room to find the best position for them. one on the floor between the fronts, and the other directly ~6ft above it.

if you want to test it, simply play a 60hz tone from each speaker and then from the sub. Its so0 easy to pick out its unreal.
 
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Man both james and fish99 u certainly know your sound :D.

Makes me such a noob lol. Thanks for the pick of the sub and wow if that is smaller than the Z-5500 sub gonna definetly wait till i move lol.

And I will go read the HDA thread, although i did have a quick read of that but kind of lost it half way through as they started talking technical :p .

One thing if i did go for the X-Plosion could i still plug my Creative T7900s in there till i can get the bad boy Z-5500s?

And thanks again for all your help and advice.
 
60Hz shouldn't come out a sub anyway. It does on PC speakers because they often don't have anything decent in the way of midrange, but in the true sense of the word, a subwoofer is not meant to make audible frequencies.
 
Don't think you'll get used hi-fi seperates for that sort of money, not 5.1 anyway. Rough estimates here but a receiver would be 80-100, probably 100 for 4 bookshelf speakers, 20-30 for a centre, 60-80 for a sub, and probably another 60 for 4 stands, then a bit more for cabling. Also it's not really meant for confined spaces like round a PC. Sound quality wise it would blow away the 5500 though. That doesn't mean 5500 are bad though, they probably sound excellent to most people who have them.

james/
I'm not saying sub position isn't important to fine tuning your system, I'm saying it doesn't play a significant part in the positional sound field the whole 5.1 set produces. If it did, having a single sub would completely mess up the positional element. Clearly if you only have one sub, it can't contribute to the position of individual sounds, since it only occupies a single point in space.

I think 5.1 is designed this way because deep frequencies aren't picked up by the ear (which can distinguish direction) at all, they're actually picked up by vibrations of the bones of your skull and jaw, hence your brain has no way to judge where the sound came from. Of course it depends on the characteristic of the speakers in question though.
 
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