I love bass.
Using my optical audio cable, I’ve been sending a full-spectrum signal to my Fluance soundbar for a few years. It had pretty amazing bass response until I tried a Foo Fighters show at full volume.
My bass in the soundbar was shot, but only on ultra low frequencies, so I realized that sending the whole spectrum to my Fluance was redundant on account of my Polk Audio subwoofer, which has a built-in active crossover that allows the sub to only reproduce certain low frequencies, I keep mine under 100hz.
So home audio crossovers are hard to come by and potentially expensive, but I found an amazing and small passive option: The Harrison Labs FMOD 100hz high-pass crossover pair at around $30 on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3Q9KtxR
Now the input on my sub is RCA and the output on my TV is a mini-stereo headphone-type jack. So once I realized the optical audio cable direct from my TV to soundbar was overwhelming the soundbar, causing peaking and clipping, sometimes resetting the soundbar, I went mini-stereo out of the TV to a stereo splitter. The stereo splitter is important because it takes a Left/Right signal and turns it into two L/R signals instead of splitting the signal to Left (mono) and Right (mono).
HUM ELIMINATOR: All these different components with cable internet make for some noise in the audio signal which I easily eliminate using an old mini-stereo hum eliminator from the early days of mobile satellite radio. The one that looks good (Actually the one I’m using in this article) on Amazon right now is: https://amzn.to/3Q8Bv41
Next step was to send a full spectrum signal to the sub and built-in crossover using RCA stereo converters. This is an inexpensive cable. Subwoofer is ready, hum-free and split.
So then I attached the RCA parts of the high pass filters to a cable that went from RCA to 3.5mm mini-stereo and a cable that brought it back to 3.5mm after the filters are in the signal chain. I used a couple Velcro cable ties to put my little “device” aka passive crossover (or high-pass filter) together so that all of the different joints wouldn’t weaken the signal or cause shorting.
TL;DR: It sounds great! We don’t always use the sub if we’re watching the news or a documentary, but the sound doesn’t suffer without the 100hz bass signal, it actually sounds better because the soundbar isn’t having to work harder and use excess power to push the sub frequencies it has built into its 5-inch sub.
Polk Audio subwoofer: https://amzn.to/48J2cDD
I make money if you click on an Amazon link, so thanks!
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