set speakers large or small?

If you set the front LCR high-pass at 60 Hz and the sub low-pass at 80 Hz you can expect an overlap region. It's not obvious why you wouldn't just high-pass the LCR and surrounds at 80 Hz as recommended by THX. If the processor has a large-small designation, chances are 80 Hz is the cross-over it's using.

db

Ojgalli

"Sounds below 80 Hz can be localized" is a sweeping statement of purported fact. Can you provide a reference, a refereed JASA article, for example? It's been decades since I worked in psychoacoustics, and my memory may be faulty, but IIRC we're not vary capable at localizing LF sounds.

db

Ojgalli,

Only the abstract of the JASA article seems relevant, and it suggests that the model they tested and human ability to localize LF sounds is poor, especially in other than anechoic conditions. The link didn't get me to the JASA article, so I was unable to see a breakdown of their results, but I'd guess the octave band centered at 125 Hz was by far the most localized.

I did enjoy the reference to the binaural processing model of Lloyd Jeffress. My primary interest when I was a post-doc was binaural processing, and I thought the Jeffress model of neural-spread made much more sense than the equalization-cancellation (E-C) model derived from the theory of signal detection (TSD). Jeffress was a nice guy and helpful in encouraging and critiquing my work. I did a study of the detection of sinusoids in computer generated noise waveforms in which I adjusted the phase of the sinusoid in the noise waveforms. I imagined it would be a crucial test of the theories, and the detectability did vary widely, but not as predicted by either model. By that time, I was losing interest, and never published the work even though I was encouraged by Jeffress to do so.

This research was done with earphones, so we could control the signal that was delivered to the ear, and the lowest frequency was usually 250 Hz. We did have an anechoic chamber that went pretty low, but transducers were inadequate for LF work.

db

I concur with pretty much everything Queefee wrote, but add this cautionary caveat to his Pertinent Quotes: Just because AE was a brilliant physicist does not imply he was a brilliant philosopher. There are many things I'd rather know through reading, secondary observation, or generalization rather than direct experience.

Palen, the THX rationale is based on the contention that we are not well able to localize frequencies below 80 Hz, a contention I contend that is based on psychoacoustic evidence.

db