Pioneer Elite DV-47A DVD/SACD Combi Player Page 3

In setting up the player, I found that the DV-47A performs limited bass management for both DVD-Video and, somewhat surprisingly, SACD playback. You can select "small" speaker size for the surround- and center-channel outputs, which imposes a set of high-pass filters on those channels. That sends deep bass to the sixth of the player's set of multichannel analog outputs, which is labeled "Subwoofer" and also used for the LFE (low-frequency effects) channel in 5.1-channel soundtracks. (The DVD-Audio and SACD formats have six full-range channels, and it's entirely up to the record producer how many channels to use on a disc and what kind of signal to put in which channel.) Why you can't select "small" for the front left/right speakers is beyond me, since many home-theater speaker systems use satellites for all five main channels.

When it comes to DVD-Audio playback, there is neither high-pass filtering nor bass redirection. Like it or not, this is the way bass management is (mis)handled on the vast majority of DVD-Audio players now on the market. If you use satellite speakers and are concerned about the possibility of compromised bass performance, one solution is to select subwoofer "on," change all of the speaker settings to "large," and feed the player's six analog outputs to an outboard bass-management box, like Outlaw Audio's ICBM-1 ($249). The other solution is the one I adopted for our listening tests - use large speakers all around that can reproduce a reasonably full range, plus a subwoofer for whatever deep bass the producers put in the sixth channel.


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