Anyone use Bass Shakers? How do you configure the sub outs?

[Sayer]

There is an XMC-2 arriving Tuesday, and I haven't figured out how to best configure my powered sub, and the bass shakers.

The bass shakers have their own little dedicated amp. My current AV receiver has two sub outs that mirror each other.

[millst]

There are three independent sub outputs. For general use in your case, I don't think it makes much of a difference which you use. Either go L and R with dual mono mode or use L and C with mono mode. They will each get their own independent copy of the output.

Unfortunately, Dirac calibration sucks for bass shakers. Ideally, you wouldn't want any filters generated for the shakers. There is no option to exclude a channel. You can fake it out by temporarily redirecting the output to a subwoofer, then adjusting the curtains. Otherwise, just live with the filtering.

[ttocs]

For Dirac calibration simply disable whichever subwoofer output is being used for the shaker, run Dirac, then enable the shaker subwoofer output again. Dirac needs a working speaker/subwoofer for every output it sees. So hide it.

[millst]

I'm pretty sure that running a different channel configuration than the one the calibration was run against is not recommended and that the result is undefined (Dirac GUI even prevents you from loading project files that don't match your current setup). I wouldn't be surprised if you get could yourself in a situation where you get a bogus filter applied to a channel. I'd speculate that it will work okay if you never calibrate with that channel enabled, but just a word of warning.

[millst]

From another thread, doc1963 provided this option:

by configuring Zone 2 to "follow main zone" and then use the Zone 2 outputs to drive your shaker's amp.

That is a viable option for getting an unmodified feed so long as you don't need that Z2 for something else (you may want to apply a low pass crossover since it is full range signal).

[ttocs]

Nov 22, 2021 14:58:35 GMT -5 millst said:

I'm pretty sure that running a different channel configuration than the one the calibration was run against is not recommended and that the result is undefined (Dirac GUI even prevents you from loading project files that don't match your current setup). I wouldn't be surprised if you get could yourself in a situation where you get a bogus filter applied to a channel. I'd speculate that it will work okay if you never calibrate with that channel enabled, but just a word of warning.

I agree with above, the Zone 2 method seems like it might work.

I've enabled subwoofer channels which were not corrected by Dirac for diagnosing some things with no ill effect on calibration of any channel that Dirac calibrated. The only change that occurs after enabling an additional subwoofer channel is with the other subwoofer channels being slightly lower in level due to the sum-reduction involved with using multiple sub outputs, which is easily corrected after running Levels.

One issue that can arise is as you mentioned, Dirac will only allow a project to be opened in exactly the same channel count as it was created with.

[Sayer]

Great feedback, would never have considered the Zone 2 approach. Will look into it.

I can also do a Y cable on the center sub, but I'm hoping to up the level sent to the shakers because they are not that strong. In my current setup I turned down the sub level quite a bit, so that the level needs to be +10 in the processor, which then sends to the shakers at +10.