In virtually all modern AV receivers (or AVRs), you can designate each speaker in your system as "large" or "small." Surprisingly, the speaker-size setting has nothing to do with the physical dimensions of the speaker. Instead, the setting tells the AVR whether to divert low frequencies (or bass) away from that speaker and reroute them to the subwoofer.

The "large" and "small" speaker size designations are present in Yamaha, Denon, Marantz, Pioneer and many other model AVRs. There are some notable exceptions where the terms "large" and "small" are not used - and a crossover is simply specified for that channel.

The terms "large" and "small" were historically used to differentiate between a speaker channel getting a full range signal vs. a speaker channel being crossed over at 80 Hz (there was only one crossover frequency available in the infancy of digital bass management).

Now multiple crossover frequencies are available for each loudspeaker channel, allowing the user to set the crossover which best suits the bass capabilities of that loudspeaker. This has greatly reduced or even eliminated the need for any speaker channel to be run on "large" (full-range). And yet the option still exists in many AVRs and auto-set-up will still often select large - which can create performance problems outlined in the video.

In this video, SVS Director of Technology, Ed Mullen, explains what each setting means, when you should choose large or small for your loudspeakers and more details about digital bass management.

We've had a few questions about the concept of 'double bass' and what that actually means. Double bass has several names in set-up menus depending on the manufacturer - and is typically called "LFE + Main", "Extra" and "Plus". Below is a short explanation of 'regular bass' and 'double bass' and what the differences actually are:

Fronts set to Small and subwoofer mode LFE:
• A high pass filter is applied to the fronts at the crossover frequency.
• A duplicate signal is sent to the subwoofer and low passed at the crossover frequency.

Fronts set to Large and subwoofer mode LFE:
• The fronts get a full-range signal.
• The crossover for the fronts is grayed out and shows ‘full band’.
• The subwoofer gets no signal for the front channels.

Fronts set to Large and subwoofer mode LFE + Main (aka double bass):
• The fronts get a full-range signal.
• The subwoofer gets a duplicate signal for the front channels – hence the term ‘double bass’.
• In some AVRs the double bass cut-off frequency can be adjusted. In other AVRs it cannot be adjusted and is set the same frequency as the other channels set to Small.

Usually Large/full-band with double-bass enabled results in phase cancellation issues between the fronts and the subwoofer, because they do not have the same phase response over the bandwidth they are sharing.

We've also had questions about the LPF/LFE setting in some AVRs in the Bass menu. This is the low pass filter frequency for the LFE .1 channel on the soundtrack. The LPF/LFE setting has no bearing on the speaker/subwoofer crossover frequency for each channel. The LPF/LFE setting should be set to 120 Hz, which matches the historical standard for sound engineers mixing content into the LFE .1 channel.

For more info, you can visit the SVS blog here:
https://www.svsound.com/blogs/svs/sho...

SVS Speakers:
https://www.svsound.com/collections/s...

SVS Subwoofers:
https://www.svsound.com/collections/s...