Multichannel mixing with no sub? Options

[mtbiker]

Let's say I have floorstanding L/R speakers with huge cojones and want to ditch my sub. When I play a move and my receiver sees whatever format of multichannel input, if the sub output is turned off, the the receiver should be able to mix the sub track in with the L/R channel. However, I saw a thread somewhere quite some time ago saying that receivers and pre-pros often have bass mgmt that will not send <40Hz to the L/R front channels even if the front channels are set to "large" simply because that is the low pass cutoff for the sub. Is this a common thing? I had an Integra 9.8 until recently that would let me check a box to enable double bass...I think that was to acknowledge that I really wanted to enable the low pass for the sub and to disable the high pass for the mains.

[DVDdoug]

From what I've read the bass management is usually one-way, sending bass from the satellite channels to the sub. But, when I did an experiment with my receiver and a Dolby test-DVD, the LFE was sent to the front speakers! See this discussion.

P.S
Dolby no longer sells the test DVD, but I found some multichannel test files that you can download. (I haven't downloaded these myself, so I don't know if there's an LFE-only test signal.)

This post has been edited by DVDdoug: Sep 10 2010, 22:04