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Newbie Mistake

J

Jericko1

Junior Member
This is my second time building an AV system and I have made an error. My TV is a Panasonic GT30 3D. I plan to use all monster M1000 and M2000 cables for wiring. My receiver is an Onkyo 809. My rears are Polk Tsi 400's. My subwoofer is a polk PSW 505.
Here is were the problem comes in, I am already have a Polk CS20 center. I was planning on using Tsi 500's for the fronts but, I ran into a deal that was too good to pass up, and bought two MartinLogan ElectroMotion ESL Hybrid Electrostatic Loudspeaker, for the fronts. Is there anything that I can do to mesh the polk center with the MartinLogan fronts. A friend said to see if I could biamp the speakers. I do not even know what that means. I am a newly when it comes to audio. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
You will probably never be able to mesh that center, bi-amping won't fix that. Either buy an electrostatic center or run a phantom center(the two front speakers create a fake or "phantom" center channel between them, not ideal).

Also second using Monoprice instead of Monster unless you already have the Monster stuff, you will save money and lose nothing on quality with Monoprice.

The matching center looks to be around $800, however the Motion line's Motion 8 and Motion C centers are $399 and $499 respectively and would probably match fairly well.
 
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Have you already set up your system and run the Audyssey room correction? Audyssey won't work wonders in this regard but it can help sometimes. If you can still easily discern significant differences as the focus moves across the sound stage (making the center really stand out with a different type of sound), I suspect the easier and more certain solution will be to sell the Polk center and get a MartinLogan center that is matched to your left and right mains.

I'm not sure that bi-amping the system will help much. It is possible, but there's no way to know until you actually try it (and trying it is not free). Here is a link to a good description of how to bi-amplify a system:

http://sound.westhost.com/bi-amp.htm

As you will see, going this route involves the purchase of some new equipment (electronic crossovers and amps). The reason this process MIGHT work is that is gives you the opportunity to mess around with the crossovers for each speaker. Selection of different crossovers is one of the reasons a speaker made by one company sounds different than a speaker made by another. When you bi-amp, you need to disable or somehow bypass the speaker's built-in crossover and use a separately purchased electronic crossover that might offer some amount of customization on your end. Can you customize the crossovers so that the speakers will sound more alike? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Who knows until you try.

Also, the crossover is only one component that differentiates speakers. In your case, you have two extremely different speaker driver technologies at work.

Oh, and alfa147x is totally correct. I would never use Monster cables unless they were given to me. They're decent enough cables but the price is outrageous. Use Monoprice.
 
Your friend knows just enough to give bad advice.

Go phantom center. Use Monoprice. Forget bi-anything.
 
As of know, I have everything but the wiring. I have not began the set up. If I add side should they be the same as the rears?
 
In 5.1 (or 4.1) the surrounds ARE the sides, only slightly to the rear. Only 6.1/7.1 has full rears.

Check the Dolby or THX sites for a setup diagram.

Actually, you could even use the center you got as a single rear...
 
Well I just want to Best Buy, and was given some good advice. I was told to just buy a second pair of polk 500's and use the MartinLogans strictly for music, in Zone 2. I was about to purchase them at Best Buy but they were back ordered, so I went home looked on Amazon and saw that there were two left for 320.00 each. I bought them and I am planning on doing that now.
 
You can attempt to match the center but it would cost more then a new center. Buy a new center, the center channel is the most important speaker in a surround sound setup.
 
Wow, if Bi-amping was just plain ridiculous advice, you somehow managed to take even worse advice. Cancel that Amazon order and just buy a matching center. If you run your nice speakers in a two channel zone 2, you can only play sources from an Analog input. No Spdif or HDMI. Not that that automatically assumes lower quality but if you're outputting from an inexpensive CD Player or on-board sound, you'll have much better DACs in your 909.
So by the time you buy a $150 sound card and the $320 you just spent on speakers you could have bought the Motion C. Timbre within brands tends to match well enough that you don't need the exact center to have a decent match.
 
Do yourself a favor and stop listening to salesmen. Cancel/return the new set of speakers. You have a very good set of front speakers now. You can probably get away just perfectly fine using a phantom center as those Martin Logans should have amazing "imaging/placement" of sound. We are talking a whole new league in terms of quality compared to what you had (as well as purchased from amazon). The advice given already about trying to get your current center to work here is correct, it just will never happen, and bi-amping certainly won't do anything at all.

Bi-amping has become some sort of marketing feature checkbox as of late on a lot of A/V items. For it to actually do something, the speaker itself needs to be designed from the ground up to be bi-amped, with internals that are actually split/separate from each amp source such that one set of drivers are powered from one amp and the other drivers are powered from the other amp, using hi-pass/low-pass filters on the input signal. This also requires means removing any external jumper/bar that connects the two sets of input connections on the back of the speakers (and if your speakers didn't come with that, you most certainly do not have real bi-ampible speakers, just the fake stuff which run the risk of damaging both your amplifiers as well as the speakers). The reason for this was to separate power to specific group or groups of drivers in a speaker that require the extra power (specifically larger drivers/woofers), and decoupling the more sensitive drivers/tweeters from the parts which require more wattage to power and thus put a heavier tax on the amplifier possibly to the point of causing the amplifier to be over-driven which will cause the power wave to turn from a sinusoidal to a square wave which will cause the most damage to tweeters and electrostatic ribbon drivers. Shifting to two amplifiers (via bi-amping), and changing the internal design of the speakers removed the problem of the power hungry drivers from causing the amplifier to "clip" or "overdrive" and destroy a very expensive pair of speakers.

Now back to your issue. You simply need to either get a matching center or not use your existing center. You may or may not have to use the Martin Logan center for your line, although that would be the recommended place to begin. The key is to find a speaker which uses the same tweeters, drivers, and crossover points between them to cover the key human vocal range (typically 200-2000Hz). The second feature would be to make sure the enclosure of the speaker (i.e. its shape) has a similar resonance across those frequencies as the left/right speakers (not as important with Audyssey, as it will attempt to correct the frequency response via frequency equalization across your speakers for your listening environment as the room will play an effect on that as well). Again, if you are going to buy something, simply buy the matching center for the speaker line. Otherwise, dig up all the data on your existing speakers in terms of drivers/tweeters used for the 200-2000Hz range and the crossover points (and types) used in your speakers and start looking for other companies which use those same crossovers, drivers, and tweeters.
 
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