The Outlaw's Guide to the SMS-1 - Outlaw Audio

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THE OUTLAW’S GUIDE TO THE SMS-1 10 13. Turn the SMS-1’s volume up or down until the left side of the curve matches up more or less with the right side (putting both at around 80dB). Don’t mind all the peaks and valleys for now. If you have trouble with this, you may want to check on the volume setting on the subwoofer’s amp and the subwoofer channel level at the receiver. If you’re not sure where to set them, try around half-way on the sub’s amp and 0dB (no trim up or down) in the receiver. Odds are that you’ve calibrated the system before and the settings you already have will be fine for our purposes. 14. We’re assuming that your receiver does some bass management that has already been adjusted to suit your system, in which case you don’t need the SMS-1 to do any more. (In light of the SMS-1’s capabilities, we will go into detail later on optimizing your bass management.) Press the “select” button on the SMS-1 remote to go to the next screen (the cursor should still be sitting on the word “Next” at the top right of the screen; if it has moved, use the navigation keys on the remote to move it back there). The test tone will go away and you’ll see the System Settings screen. Use the navigation buttons of the SMS-1’s remote to move the cursor down to the top left-hand number: the crossover frequency for the preset “setup.” Once you’re there, press “select” and “reset” to turn off the crossover; press “select” again to accept the change. When that’s done, press “exit” and use the “select” button to save your changes. 15. Now that you are back to the default screen, press “3-2-1” on the remote. This will start the automatic EQ process. You’ll see “Self-EQ” in the bottom right-hand corner of the SMS-1’s front panel display and you’ll hear about 25 frequency sweeps. Try to keep fairly quiet during this step (no yelling at the cat or tap dancing, please) so you don’t confuse the microphone. 16. The next step… Well, actually that last step pretty much took care of everything. You’ve got your SMS-1 connected, the crossover is disabled so it doesn’t interfere with the receiver’s crossover, and the self- EQ has run. Unhook the microphone and put it, the mic cable, and the stand back in the accessory box. I’d suggest you switch to your DVD player or CD player to listen to the results, but you are supposed to be going back to work now. You can listen when you get home. 17. Are you going to finish those chips? Intermission “Your editor (me) was feeling left out, so they let me write an entry. They gave me the intermission. I’m still feeling left out. ” Thanks for the chips. Our lunch hour was a bit exciting, wasn’t it? The SMS-1 is now set up and ready to enjoy – except that we’ve only scratched the surface of what it can do. You can leave it alone, but you might want to find some time to dig a bit deeper and unlock the unit’s full potential. Some of you may even have found the will power to leave the SMS-1 in the box so you could set it up later when you had more time, in which case we’ll assume you skipped the quick start and are interested in finding out all the details. In either case, read on to see just how much tweaking, tinkering, and refining you can really do with the SMS-1, then clear a spot in your calendar and let yourself hear what the SMS-1 is capable of when it pulls out all the stops.
THE OUTLAW’S GUIDE TO THE SMS-1 Connecting the SMS-1 “One of our field researchers has a knack for untying knots. Whether this is a fortunate gift or not remains to be determined, but what we know for certain is that this knack means we tend to let him figure out how to untangle the mess of interconnects that can crop up when you find yourself face to face with the rear panel of a new component. When it was time to look at how to connect an SMS-1, there was no questioning who to give the job to. ” 11 Obviously, our quick start guide skipped a number of connections on the back. Depending on your system, some of those may be useful to you. With that in mind, we’ll walk you through all of them so you can pick and choose the ones you need. We realize that there are a number of connections to deal with back there, but as with any other component it is important to remember a simple rule: DON’T PANIC. You can sort them out easily enough and only worry about the ones that interest you. We’re going to hop around the rear panel a bit, but we’ll work through it in the order that you will probably think about when hooking the SMS-1 up. In a couple cases, we’ll take two separate runs at a particular connection to discuss some different approaches. The first stop will be getting an input signal from your receiver or processor to the SMS-1. Input For most users, the SMS-1 will be between a surround receiver or processor and a powered subwoofer. In a scenario like that, there will be a dedicated subwoofer output. That output will need to be connected to one of the “Input” ports on the right side of the rear panel. There are two “Input” ports (left and right, with the red port being the right channel), but in this case we don’t need to worry about left and right – either port will do. If your processor has balanced pre-amp outputs, you can use the balanced “LFE Input” on the left side of the rear panel. The SMS-1 is capable of using a mixture of balanced and unbalanced connections. This means that you can connect a balanced input from your processor and still use an unbalanced output to connect your subwoofer, but we recommend maintaining a consistent balanced or unbalanced signal path in most cases. The one exception would be if you have a subwoofer with a balanced input that is located a significant distance away from the SMS-1 – a case that could benefit from a balanced connection’s ability to reject noise and interference – but you have a receiver that only offers an unbalanced output. If you are a user with a less conventional system, you may not have a dedicated subwoofer output. That’s why the “Input” is a standard stereo input: your main left and right channel pre-amp outputs can be connected to the left and right inputs and passed back out to your amplifier. We’ll explain what output to use for that later, but for the moment we’re only concerned with inputs. For now, collect the left and right pre-amp outputs to the left and right inputs. Be aware, though, that this works best if you have a separate amplifier so that the SMS-1 can be in-line between the pre-amp and the amp. It will also work well if you have a receiver with pre-amp output to mains-in jumpers (which are found on a few surround receivers and are more common on stereo receivers such as Outlaw’s own RR2150) or if you have an external processor loop (typically found only on stereo receivers). If none of these three cases fit your system, you can also connect the pre-amp outputs from a standalone receiver or integrated amp to the SMS-1’s input, but you will not be able to use the SMS-1’s high-pass crossover to filter the low frequencies out of the signals sent to the main speakers. The drawback here is that the mains get the full range signal, which will make our work of equalization later a bit more challenging.
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The Outlaw's Guide to the SMS-1 - Outlaw Audio

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