# Notes on Audyssey setup for a Bose Lifestyle



## waynea (Mar 7, 2014)

For better or worse, I have been helping my friend with the Bose lifestyle system again. The bass was very boomy after the first calibration and it annoyed the spouse.
I experimented with running the Audyssey cal with the bass unit turned off in all cases except when testing the subwoofer. This caused the cross-overs to be pushed up to 250 Hz for all channels as would be expected for the small Bose speakers. I wanted to redo the experiment leaving the bass unit on and then manually pushing the cross-overs up to 250 Hz before finalizing to see if there is a difference, but I ran out of time. The goal of the method was to get all of the bass flowing through the subwoofer connection so that the Audyssey Sub EQ could have the best chance of controlling the Bose bass module and it actually worked quite well.
I did this based on my assumptions that:
1) Audyssey Sub EQ only works on the subwoofer cable.
2) I can push the crossover up (but not down) before the Audyssey calibration finalizes.

This process actually made the whole system sound OK, or as good as I have ever heard from a Bose. Does anyone have any comments on this method of any other techniques that could be tried?
Thanks

Wayne


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## tonyvdb (Sep 5, 2007)

Well, like you said the bose system is a tough one to work with. The lack of a real sub and the huge hole in the frequency response between 200-500Hz im sure made it difficult for Audyssey to work on. With the lifestyle system not using a dedicated sub rather it being connected to the main channels would mean that the sub EQ would not be doing anything. 
Going up with crossovers is ok but you never want to go down after calibration as that means that there would be no filters applied to those channels in that area


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## waynea (Mar 7, 2014)

Just as a note in the version of the Bose system I am working there are inputs to the bass module both from the speakers and through an RCA "subwoofer" input so I believe it will be making use of the sub EQ. I was attempting to minimize the signal that the bass module receives on the speaker cables to get the best results out of the sub EQ. The high crossover reduces as much as possible any signals on the speaker lines that the bass module will respond to which seems to reduce interference with the sub EQ processing on the sub out from the AVR.

Of course the bass module is not really a sub and in fact I am developing the opinion that anything that rolls off above 20 Hz is not a sub. /First World Problems


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