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How Do I Set Up My Blu-ray Player When Using a Soundbar?

Al Griffin  |  Feb 8, 2016

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Q I recently purchased a Bose SoundTouch 130 soundbar and have a Samsung BDP7500 Blu-ray player connected to it. Here’s my question: There’s a setting in the Samsung player’s menu for speaker size and distance. Since I’m using a soundbar that gets calibrated using a headset in five positions, is it necessary to also adjust the Blu-ray player’s speaker size/distance settings, or should I just leave those alone? I called Bose tech support, and they had no answer for me. —Peter Palagonia/Las Vegas, NV

A Bose tech support may not have an answer, but I do. No, you do not need to touch the speaker size and distance settings in your Blu-ray player’s speaker setup menu. That adjustment is meant for situations where the Samsung BDP7500 Blu-ray player’s 7.1-channel analog audio output is connected to an AV receiver with a 7.1-channel analog audio input. By setting the size and distance for each speaker in your system when using an analog connection, you’d be enabling the Samsung player to handle low-pass filtering (the cutoff frequency at which bass information is routed to a subwoofer, e.g., 80 Hz) and delay (to compensate for differences in distance from the listening position between the main and center/surround channel speakers) instead of an external audio system.

In this case, your Bose soundbar provides only HDMI and optical/coaxial inputs for multichannel audio, so you have no option but to let it handle speaker setup. For that reason, you should leave the speaker size/distance settings in your Samsung player untouched and let the soundbar handle those tasks via its automated setup routine.

COMMENTS
JustinGN's picture
Submitted by JustinGN on February 8, 2016 - 6:22pm

This goes for just about every soundbar out there, too: make sure the player is hooked up using the best possible connection available directly to the soundbar, and ensure the highest supported audio tracks are set for output (my experience shows some Soundbars only supporting DTS/Dolby Digital over HDMI, instead of the lossless DTS-HD MA/Dolby TrueHD soundtracks; ALWAYS check your manual!). The soundbar's processing will take care of the rest, provided you set it up according to the manual that came with it.

Adjustments to speaker positions within the player itself should only be handled by you if you're in an entirely analog audio setup (few people are, nowadays); otherwise, your AVR or Soundbar will do the heavy lifting for you.

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